We had a barbecue

On Saturday I didn't really do that much besides homework and going grocery shopping with my host mom for the barbeque that we had today (Sunday). So today for the barbeque, we went out into the strip of yard on one side of the house and set up charcoal grills and cooked up all manner of things, including chicken and onion shish kebabs, pork, fish, peppers, mushrooms, corn on the cob, and intestines from something I think. A bunch of people came too: Nick and Mackenzie with at least some of their host families, Daisuke, his coworker, and a Korean exchange student, and a couple other people that I'm not sure how we knew. We chatted and ate for quite a while, someone always piling more stuff onto the grill and everyone just grabbing what they wanted for the most part. By the end I was quite tired and ended up falling asleep on the couch afterward.

Since that wasn't really much news, here are a few things that I forgot in previous entries. Concerning TV, news channels often have physical copies of newspapers that they zoom in on and have particular articles underlined. They also have physical posters with what I assume are headlines on them with paper covering up certain items which they pull away and reveal as they get to them. Also, AKB48, a sort of Japanese band made up of several groups of dancing, singing, girls, is apparently all the rage right now and is mentioned on every other TV show and by every other person you meet. I hadn't heard of them before coming here but they're pretty much everywhere... though I think I've yet to hear them actually sing. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they're all about or what they do. Also, totally unrelated to that, when bowling on Friday, Yosuke-san told us that when you get a spare or strike you do this hand thing and say "sweet", but it was hard to tell if people actually did it or if he was just joking as he often does. Either way, we had a lot of "sweet" turns even though Holland usually felt too awkward to actually do the hand signal.