Hanging With My Best Friend
January 6, 2007
Today I hung out with my Japanese best friend, Shiho Waku. We have actually been friends since the first day of school. I also know it isn't the fake "I'm going to be your friends because your the cool gaijin" crap. In fact when she was assigned to show me around the school and help me out, she kind of acted annoyed. But soon enough after getting to know each other better, we became fast friends. Unfortunately we could never hang out because of her Basketball obligations and my million club activities. But she just quit basketball, and I'm taking many more days off from now on. In September we were lucky to have a free day where we went out for parfaits and Purikuras. We pretty much laughed the whole time. The thing about hanging out with your friends here in Japan, is that it's really special. You can't just call a friend at 5 to see movie as 6, like we sually do in America. Mostly because free time is so hard to come by with studying, sports, family, and all of that stuff. So when you do get the chance to hang out, it's really awesome. So today we met up at my favorite restaurant in all of Kochi, Hakobe Okonomiacki. It was crazy because I haven't seen her for 3 weeks! She gave me a big hug and we walked into make our lunch. We quickly caught up as she told me about her boring winter break. She spent the whole time working at the post office to save money to come visit me in America, summer of 2008. I felt bad telling her that I had a pretty awesome winter break. For lunch I ordered an Octopus Okonomiacki, while she got Nato, which is the faulest stuff on Earth. We continued talking and talking. And after lunch we went and got more Purikura, followed by ice cream. Then we got on our bikes and biked all the way to my house. I showed my current host house and then we went into my room, where I showed her all of my pictures of family, friends, and all that stuff. Every other word from her mouth was "kawaii!" (cute) Then we went photo crazy with my camera and took over 50 pictures! Most I had to delete, but some as you can see some turned out pretty cute. After my camera battery died, we went for a long walk around Kochi City. Just like I do at home, just walk and talk around with friends. And we talked and talked. Back at my house, I blasted my new Jpop music and we danced laughing and singing around my room until it got really dark. Then Shiho had to go, which was sad, even though I get to see her at school on tuesday. The thing is we didn't run out of things to talk about all day. My Japanese is terrible, her English is terrible. but we didn't let a language barrier stand in the way of having an amazing time just hanging out. I think above all, that how you can tell who your real friends are when your an exchange student. The ones who don't care that first graders have more communication skills than I do. Because they like you for who you are. I have some great friends, and I'm not even halfway thru with my exchange but I know leaving them is going to be incredibly hard.
