Update?

Well, since last time I updated, quite a bit happened.  I had a school "Culture Festival", I had my first exchange orientation, went to a moon festival in my city, went karaoke-ing again, went sailing, and went driving with my host father.  My school culture festival was unlike anything I had ever seen in America.  Every single room was decorated with a different theme and had games or a store in it.  The main halls of the school had huge balloon decorations and other random hanging things.  There was DDR (I saw some crazy good people playing) and a few school bands playing (some of them were really good for school bands) and lots of other random things that have nothing to do with culture.  The fair was for 2 days, but I had to leave halfway through the second day to go to my orientation.  The only information I had as to where it was was my host father saying "Bayside Place, Paper building, 2nd floor".  This didn't help at all.  I managed to get to Bayside Place in time for the orientation, but I couldn't find a paper building at all.  I looked for an hour and, right as I was about to give up and go home, I found a printing company...I had no idea thats what my host father meant by "paper building".  So I was an hour late for my orientation.  When I got there I saw only 1 other exchange student from my school (the other 3 were through different organizations) and 6 other people I didn't know.  After a while I learned that 1 was from Thailand, 1 from America (Ohio), 1 from Austria, and 3 from Australia.  The 3 from Australia came in January, so they already know a lot of Japanese, but the other 5 of us weren't very good.  After the orientation, we went to a moon festival.  It wasn't night, but there was still a moon festival.  We walked around and there were a ton of tiny portable stands for stores and food.  At the end of the road there was a temple and we went inside.  After that, we went to go do karaoke.  We did 2 hours and the room we were in was huge.  It was 504 yen per person (about 5 dollars), which is really good for 2 hours at night.  Sailing again was pretty much the same as last time, but this time I got to steer and we did a race within my host fathers sailing club.  Me and my host father got 2nd place out of 6, which is really good considering that it was only my second time sailing.  Then the next day (Monday was a national holiday, respect the elderly day or something) he took me driving to another prefecture (they're like states, but smaller).  When we got to our final destination, we went to some kind of spring and filled up water bottles.  Thats it...we just drove about an hour and a half to fill up water bottles.  After filling the bottles, we went to a ramen shop and ate delicious ramen and chinese dumplings.  Well, thats all the interesting stuff I've done since last time.  Hopefully find a way to upload pictures soon, bye.