Making Sushi and Dazzling 5th Graders (Or is it 6th Graders?)

Come one come all and listen to the tale of Claire, an English speaking girl who has to catch a train by herself to a strange location known as the Ooizumi-gakuen station! You will be dazzled with the history of her wit and skills at navigation!
(As if!)
Sunday was an AFS-Nerima chapter event, where Valeria and another exchange student, Huang (who is from Vietnam) were going to make sushi! Yummeh, I know. Anyhow, I had to get there myself, and my host mom printed out a sheet with my train times: I had to take the Seibu-Shinjuku train from my home station to Tokorozawa, which is big and busy. Once at Tokorozawa I had a minute to find my transfer and get on it.

I missed it.

So there is Claire, standing in this station trying to figure out the map of what trains go where. And taking an educated guess, she gets on the Ikebukuro train which seems like it'll work.

Fortunently, it does. CRISIS AVERTED!

There ended up being quite a group of us: Valeria, Huang and me, plus some AFS volunteers/ moms and some Japanese students who are going to be exchange students next year:

But look at all the yummy food we made:

I made most of those, except the one where the lettuce is exploding. That's not mine. They were YUMMEH, and I know I can make them again if I get the right ingrediants, and make some sticky rice. (So Mom, Dad, Pete you're in luck!) And yes, some of that is meat and cheese.

Then we made this fruit-cocktail dessert thing with shirotama, literally "white balls", which is some rice-type thing? It's chewy and doesn't really have much flavor, but when you eat it with the fruit it's pretty good.

Then Valeria, Huang and I had to give brief presentations on our home countries. But guess who forgot her flashdrive with the presentation on it?
I'll give you some time.
.....

If you guessed Claire, you were right! So I ended up using a whiteboard and making some inaccurate drawings of the US and famous Chicago landmarks and just generally babbling on. It worked all right!

Then today, the 24th, my school had some standardized tests, so I didn't have school. Instead, I went with another exchange student in the highschool and three exchange students from the University section of Musashino Joshi to give country presentations to Elementary School 4th years, which I THINK translates into 5th grade here (they were 10) but I'm not 100% sure).

Being rather horrible with names, I don't remember them. But, going from left to right they're from the Philippines, Korea and China.

We each went to different classrooms and gave presentations. I brought a poster, pictures, some American money and a book in English. The talking went all right, but the pictures, money and book really impressed them. So it all ended well. Afterwards we played this game where you toss sticks in the air and move pieces around a board (my team won) and ate lunch together. It was a BLAST!

Peace everyone, Claire out!