Day 30: Lucky Pierrot (again) and Speech Presentations

Breakfast:

A cute kyaraben my host mom made for my host brother:

Clover:

Onigiri #22:

We did our speech presentations today. Everyone did such a great job! B組 (B-gumi = B class) and A組 did our speeches together. JD and I were the MC and Timekeeper, respectively, for the first half, and then three people from A組 were did that part for the second half. We would basically introduce the next speaker, keep track of/make sure they knew the time, then comment on their speech, thank the speaker, ask if there were questions, and end the Q+A when time was up.

My speech on Japanese Cute Culture:

I got nervous and messed up a few times, but speaking was my biggest weakness at the beginning of this program and I think that I've been improving a lot. I see a LOT more room for improvement and glaring mistakes, but overall I think that this would have been a challenge even in English, and that I'm happy with how my speech went and proud of my improvement over the past few weeks. This would have been impossible for me to do a month ago.

Also, for some reason after practicing for a while I started saying "かわいい物の文法" (cute-thing grammar) instead of "かわいい物の文化" (cute-thing culture) and I have no idea why. I think I only messed that up once near the beginning though because I was really watching for it. I've also always had some trouble with accidentally saying "kowai" (scary) instead of "kawaii" (cute) and had hoped that this speech would help with that, but it kind of just made the speech slightly more difficult than it had to be.

(Also, the Pikachu on the board says "Today is the speech. Let's do our best! (i.e. Good luck!)"

Afterwards, I went to Lucky Pierrot with Kieren and Colton to celebrate! I think this is the Chinese chicken burger:

I had another one of those soda drinks and found out that they're actually energy drinks. They're tasty, but I'm probably not going to have another one. Energy drinks/high amounts of caffeine and me don't always mix super well. I just get way too bouncy and talkative.

After that, we went exploring for a bit in the warehouse district and found a shop with this big bear and big Totoro:

For some reason Totoro had catfish whiskers.

I think this is a six-leaf clover, but it was sort of hard to tell. One of the leaves had this cool defect where it started off normal, had a bare section, then became a sealed cone. I have no idea how this happened but it was neat.

Also, a tiny puffy five-leaf clover and a big puffy four-leaf clover:

I got some snacks at the 7-11 today while I was waiting for my host parents. This one was called wheat chocolate and I thought they were going to be chocolate covered wheat kernels, but they turned out to be kind of like chocolate covered rice krispies (but made of wheat instead of rice). They were really good, but kind of an awkward size and hard to get from the bag to my mouth without having to think about it.

These one was corn chocolate and, again, I thought it was going to be chocolate covered corn kernels, but they turned out to be more like giant chocolate covered Corn Nuts. I liked the wheat chocolate better than these ones, but these were still good and didn't have the awkward size thing going on.

Behind city hall I found more clovers. I think I found nineteen clovers total, and somewhere around five of them were five leaf clovers:

Dinner: