Mindy's second e-mail

hey meghan and family --

i hope you are doing well?@its very late right now, midnight, but i know you are just getting up. such a busy day today!! i am having an amazing time, i love everything about japan. the food is 100x times better then american. we sang karaoke all night tonight and the rotarians and i threw spit balls at each other. rotarians are so much fun!!! i love them all so much, they are like my dads. today a rotarian took me to the doctor to get my medication okayed. doctor was so nice and said to come work for him when i became a doctor in america. i went to japanese shrine today, it was beautiful!! tomorrow i am going to ohnsen, the bath house, where you do not wear clothes! ahhh!! rotarians will come, but not be with us. thank god! that would be weird. tomorrow we are having a bbq for mariana (mexico exchange student) to meet her host family. then we will have a party to celebrate our last night with the district committee. japanese love to get drunk and we love it, too, because they are very fun when they are intoxicated. my english is getting so bad because only 2 girls know english, so we speak very broken english. i am learning spanish, japanese and french all at one time! japanese is hard, but i am learning. my host family does not speak english, so i will have to pick up the language very fast. meghan -- i went to the photo booth, eh? the one where we take japanese photos of us and decorate them. one of the coolest things ever!! all the girls screamed like 20 times, i wish i had time to explain how they worked. the time is going by too fast already, i do not miss home because i do not have time to miss home. rotarians keep us very busy. everyday we study japanese, but it is not hard. we just laugh. rotarians do not speak good english, but they are rich so we do many things. rotarians are so funny, i just love it here!! i wish i could send photos to you because there are so many. japan is ummm...different, but the city looks normal, too. i thought maybe it would look so different, but it does not. the kindness and attitude of japanese people is very different from america. there are no homeless people on the streets or litter, everything is clean. the toilets are amazing!! i can not wait to show you this clip of all the girls in the bathroom, i just fall down laughing everytime i see it.@you know how water is sprayed up from toilet to clean your bottom? well we wanted to get that on the video camera and so we did not have someone sit on the toilet, but just pressed the button to spray the water. well the water shot up from the toilet and hit us in the face and then sprayed into the next stall! we all screamed, we scream a lot here and we are always singing. i do not know why, we are just excited and happy.

rotarians love how luke wants to be a cop, i showed them pictures and uma yashita would not stop laughing!! he said luke is welcome in japan anytime, they would love him. tonight at resturant we had a griddle in the middle of our table and they give you food and you cook it yourself. it is so weird!! but very good.

write back, love you all!!

melinda