Shiori speaking

Today I asked Shiori-chan, my high school English student if she would write about her experience hosting a foreign student in her home last month. I had a chance to meet the student too and Shiori-chan's mother took us out to dinner and then we played with the "purikura". Shiori-chan will explain...

Hi. This is Shiori. You might remember me because I once wrote about gold calligraphy on Tanya's blog. Recently an exchange student from Australia came to stay at my house. Her name was Chayelle and she was one grade below me in school. Even though she stayed only 10 days with us, we did all sorts of things together.

One of the first days she was here, I took her to my calligraphy class. We wrote the character tsuki (it means moon) and tora (it means tiger). Chayelle did very well and I was surprised. I tried to write the same characters but mine weren't so good. And I'm the Japanese! Maybe the reason is because I usually write smaller characters...

Another thing we did was to go shopping. Whenever we went to a store, Chayelle wanted to take pictures in a vending machine. It is a lot of fun and we could decorate our pictures ourselves with drawings and words. In Japanese, the vending machines are called purikura. We took many different kinds of pictures. Almost 70 sheets!

While Chayelle was staying with us I had a bit of culture shock. For one thing, my family usually eats a lot of vegetables and fish but Chayelle said that she hated fish! That was a problem! Besides that, we also often make salads, but Chayelle didn't eat any! What she did eat was a lot of meat, chocolate pretzels, little jellies, sweet rice balls and rice balls. We were worried about her diet but she was happy because she said she lost weight while she was in Japan.

Before I met Chayelle I thought all foreigners were very friendly and chatty, but Chayelle was rather shy and quite considerate of other people's feelings and the situations around her. The last two or three days that Chayelle was in Japan, we became very close and very silly together. Chayelle taught me tongue twisters in English and took many crazy photos of herself. I had a very good time with her and I think we became very good friends!