Homestay - Continued

I just found this on my blogger account. I never published it. Weird. No wonder you were getting impatient. I apologize to yo all.

Main characters:
Me: The daughter from Iceland
Mama: The mother of the house, Mrs. Sato
Papa: The father of the house, Mr. Sato
Chipi: The dog of the house

Last time, I told you about stuff. This time, I'll tell you about other stuff that I haven't told all of you about yet. Last time, we left off where I was leaving APU to go stay with the Sato family. I have to apologze for the fact that in my last post, I misspelled the name Sato. It is Sato, and not Satou.
Mama picked me up from AP House and took me to the place that would be my home until the next year. It was a very nice looking white two story house with a beautiful garden outside. Pink flowers were blooming on the trees, and Chipi, the dog, jumped up and down with happiness when he saw us coming.
Inside the house was just as cold as outside, but they provided me with the best slippers ever! The looks of them are not what I am used to, as they are bright pink and fluffy, and the front is shaped like a big peach with a smiling face. But those were the best slippers I have ever had! My feet were never cold.
New Year in Japan is the most important holiday of them all, and in many ways it is similar to Christmas in Europe. Preparations are similar, the days before New Year's Eve, the whole family is extremely busy cleaning the house and cooking for the next few days, when most shops will be closed. Because the Satos were expecting me, they had already cleaned everything, and I did not have to take part in that.
Usually, it is the mother who does the cooking, sometimes with the help of the daughter. The cooking takes about three days, mama told me, both because she is cooking three days worth of food for the whole family, but also because some of the food takes time to prepare. Mama made me promise not to say, but, we didn't cook at all. We bought the New Year's food at the supermarket, because mama had hurt her fingers somehow, and couldn't handle so much cooking. So my New-Year's was very quiet.
Japanese people have strange customs, especially the older generation. I got to sleep in every day while I was with the Satos, and we always ate breakfast at 8 o'clock in the morning.
That kindof resulted in me being very sleepy on New Year's Eve and going to bed at ten o'clock, ahem. *cough*

I got to do some really cool cultural things while I was there. We went shopping for flowers, and then mama put me down at the kitchen table and told me to do ikebana! Ikebana is the art of flower arrangement, if you have never heard the word before. I was very nervous, because I know nothing at all about ikebana, but she just told me to cut each flower to different lengths, and put them so that they would face the front, and arrange them somehow that I thought was pretty. So I tried. I had 3 pine branches, 3 yellow roses, 3 branches with green leaves and red berries, which is something special for New Year, and some more things (3 of them) that I can't really remember. Then we put the flowers on the shinto shrine in the tatami room.
Shinto is the so-called original Japanese religion where there is, simply put, a god in everything, for everything. I don't remember if I have mentioned tatami mats before. You just google it. It's a very Japanese style of floor.
The living room was kindof warm. The Satos had a gas-fire-stove-heater thingy to warm up the room, and then they sat under the most coolest of tables. It's called kotatsu if I remember it correctly, and it is a low table with a thick blanket hanging from all sides so that you can pull it over your lap to keep you warm, and, here comes the best part, underneath it is a heater so that under the table and the blanket, you can have it as warm as you like! Aaaaaaahhhhh, it's so good! But the rest of the room is still kindof cold. That one heater in 0ne corner of the room just doesn't do it.
When I walked the hallway up to my room, I could see my breath.
I watched TV a lot. I got to see all the snow they had in Nagasaki! Wow! Well... wow because it hardly snows here in Beppu :P