Today I recieved news of my host-everything. A Vlog will shortly be up.

I will be living in Habikino-shi, Osaka-fu. And I will go to Osaka Ten’noji High School in Tennoji-ku, Osaka-shi.

For those of you not steady in the suffixes, that means I will be living in the city of Habikino in the prefecture of Osaka (120,000 people) – a suburb to Osaka I guess – but will be attending to a school in the Tennoji ward of Osaka City.

Osaka City is the second largest city in Japan by daytime, when its population is 3,7 million people. For comparison, in the country of Norway, where I live, there is about 4,7 million people in total. So yeah.
By Nighttime, Osaka is down to 2,6 million. I guess the 1,1 million difference are people like I’ll be, who live just outside Osaka and go there for school or work.

I’m a little bit disappointed that I didn’t get to go to Kyoto as AFS told me earlier (see the last post), but hey.. Osaka-ben is worth it.

Osaka-ben is the dialect commonly associated with Osaka. It’s from what I’ve understood, very different from the Tokyo-japanese that we all learn in our books. One more challenge for me, but also one more reward to claim when the year finishes.

My host “family” is a host “grandmother” of 69 years. She’s not married, from what I can see, and she lives alone – no kids or anything. I think that’s just great, even though I’ll miss having pets and siblings as I have here at home. My host obaa-san is named Y. Kasai. Kasai is a very typical Japanese name, like the Norwegian “Hansen” and “Olsen”. (I don’t know of english equalients, sorry.)

Now I have to tell this to my real mother.. hmm..