Spending Time with Host Family

I am now with my first host family in Sano, Japan.
The day began with lunch at the hotel. We planned on meeting at 11am, thinking we were supposed to meet for lunch and the initial meeting at 11:30. Unfortunately we were wrong. The Rotarians arrived before 11, luckily I was ready and was downstairs shortly before 11. Whew.
Lunch was good, except for the unwanted surprise. We had to do our presentation - in Japanese! We had just received our translations when we were told we had to get up and give our speech in front of the entire group. Not to mention, the translation I had was of my old LONG speech. I stumbled through it horribly - even with Roger standing over my shoulder. On a good note, my saviour, Brody Sloan, just came through with the translation of my shorter version and I will practice, practice, practice for the next few days until I can say it in my sleep.
After lunch I visited my host family's office. Shibasan is an estate lawyer and has his own firm. I was able to meet all the wonderful people who work there and sat down with one young man (23 & speaks very good English!) until one of the workers took me out to buy stamps. That was fun - it was in an old building and the couple that live/work there were very friendly. After we returned to the office, Aki and I went to the shopping mall. It was a typical shopping mall with two stories and attached to it a giant grocery store/department store. It was funny checking out all the food - you can tell just how much more Americans eat based on the size of food in the story. The largest milk size sold was a quart and don't get me started about the size of the ice cream cartons!
After shopping, we returned home. I am staying in a lovely room with dark wood floors (now covered with my giant luggage). I practiced my japanese for about 30 minutes than we were off again to the Sano East club welcome party. Dinner, Rotary meeting and Karoke. I sang two songs including a duet of "My Heart Will Go On" with one of the members. I couldn't stop laughing. I'll post pictures when I get a chance.