California Day 2

 As expected, I woke up today completely free of jetlag. This made everything much more enjoyable as I wasn't dealing with a constant headache. Today was jampacked with a wide variety of orientation style activities. The day began with radio exercises, a practice common in Japan especially among company workers. The exercises were basically a series of movements to get blood flowing and to stretch out muscles. From then on the day was a combination of meals, meetings about our exchange, and language lessons. Language lessons were done with people in our skill groups while meetings about the exchange and meals were done with our Kumi.

Kumi are groups we were placed into at the beginning of the weekend. There are six Kumi, each represented by a color. Each Kumi also has a flag to represent themselves. That is except my Kumi. My Kumi, Blue, has a cape (making us the best). Within our Kumi we pass possession of the cape around to whoever wants it. The picture below shows me wearing the cape when I received it at dinnertime. We've grown within these first two days to become good friends within our Kumi. As such, in the few times we weren't already with our Kumi we typically ended up together anyways.

Many of the things discussed in the meetings have me feeling very confident about my exchange. I'm more excited to be there than ever before.