Hello again!
Today met the host-family, whom I will live with this coming week, for the first time. The family consist of a girl my age named Hatsu, her mom Kazuko, her little brother Haru and her two baby sister named Hoshi and Jin. Hoshi and Jin are twins and they are adorable!
I arrived to Kyoto via train, Kazuko and the twins picked me up att the station and we took a walk through the city to their house. Hatsu and Haru had stayed at home to cook lunch and prepare my room. I will sleep in a smaller room witch is usually used as a study, it is not very big, but it seems nice, and the bed is super comfortable.
For lunch we had miso-soup with rice and edamame beans, everything was super great! I really love to eat edamame beans at home as well, but these were something special, and SO much better than the ones you can get in sweden.
After lunch I unpacked my things and Hatsu gave me a house tour, the house is really pretty. It’s quite a modern house but with some traditional japaneese elements. The family have tried to keep at least some of the interior as traditional as possible, because they think it is important to remember and care for their culture.
The house consists of a small TV-room, a more traditional living-/dinig room, three bedrooms, a playroom and a study. And of course a kitchen and bathroom.
In the TV-room there is a sofa, a big TV and a dark, wooden coffetable, on the table there i a bonsai cut to the shape of a heart, the walls are beige/brown and there is a red carpet on the floor.
In the diningroom the floor is coverd with tatami, japaneese rice-straw mats and the walls are a beige, green-ich colour. The outer wall is coverd with windows and a big glass slidingdoor leading to a terrace. In front of that wall, there is a set of shoji, traditional, movable sliding doors for insigth protection and to create a nice atmosphere, shoji can also be used to further insulate houses and to divide rooms. The wall opposite to the outer wall is also made of shoji.
In the middle of the room there is a low dining table with six red cushions around i to sit on. One of the short sides of the rooms is actually an entrance to a little storage-unit where they store, inter alia, extra cushions, cleaning equipment and highchairs for Hoshi and Jin.
On the other side of the room there is a tokonoma, a must-have in a traditional japanese house, a tokonoma is like an altar or an alcove used to decorate the room. Usually there is some sort of scroll hanging on the wall and beneath that there is either a collection of flowers, a bonsai or some other ornament.
The whole room is very minimalistic and traditional, and it is probably my favorite part of house apart from the garden and the terrace.
Speaking of the garden, if you go through the slidingdoor in the diningroom you come out to the terrace and garden, the terrace is made of dark wood, it has a beautiful, semi transperant roof, and a bench with a big cushion to sit on.
The garden is a perfect mix of carefully arranged and strict, but also loose and natural. In the middle area of the garen they have arranged bushes and big stone tiles, irregular in size and shape and in the exact center there is a fountain. On the opposite side from the terrace there is a pathway leading to a litte, tiny pond. The area around the path and the pond is very spiritual, it is full of trees, bushes and flower that are quite overgrown and wild and there is beautiful golden ornaments here and there in the trees. Surrounding the garden there is a fance and along the fence, there is also a lot of bushes and trees planted randomly and allowed to grow free. This gives the garden a very calm feeling, it is not to stirct but it also has some structure.
The house has two floors and when you go up the stairs you come up to a corridor, on one side of the corridor there are three rooms, those are the bedrooms and on the other side there are two rooms, one of them is a playroom for the twins and the other one is the study, witch is now used as my bedroom. The wall on the further end of the corridor is coverd with a big window and infront of the window there is a little table with another bonsai.
After the house tour Hatsu and I went to a shopping center nearby and bought some icecream, we then walked to a park and just chatted a while. It was really fun to acually meet her in real life after all those letters and emails and I feel like we really clicked.
After about one and half hour the rest of the family came to meet up with us in the park and we took a nice walk to a market. The market was really big and they sold all sorts of stuff, but we were only there to buy some food so I never saw the whole thing. I was really suprised by the amount of stuff they sold, there were fish and vegetables for sale that I had never even heard of before, and everybody else seemed to know exactly what they were supposed to get, witch I don’t thik I would ever be able to do. Overall it was a really cool experience, but I don’t thik would like to buy my food like that every day.
Once we got home we made dinner together, we made sushi and green tea, to the sushi we had pickled ginger and soy sauce. It all tased super good and I had a great time getting to know the family, apparently Haru really likes to cut and care for bonais and thats why you can find at least one bonsai in almost every room of the house. I also learned some intresting stuff about japanese culture and the languedge during the dinner.
After dinner we watched some TV before Haru and the twins had to go to bed, Hatsu and I stayed awake for a little longer playing shogi, that is a boardgame, almost like the japanese version of shess. It was quite hard understanding the rules and strategies of the game the first few rounds, but once I learned it was really fun.
Thank you for reading this blogpost! I hope you found it interesting. I will probably not blog alot during my stay here, because I really want to spend all the time that I’ve got to get to know the family. But I will certainly blog about the tanabata-festival in a few days, so stay tuned.
Goodbye for now and see you later!
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