Testing, Orientation and the welcome party!

Lots of photos on this one:

Malika is part of our "on the ground" support team, and can offer help in many forms. IUHPFL truly is taking care of your children!

Students started today taking their Preliminary test (almost 2 hours long!), and then went through an orientation in English (lucky dogs!) on safety, insurance, health and how to cope with stress and culture shock.

The athletic fields at Osaka High School

Students ate their bentos in the classroom together. Thanks to moms everywhere, but in this case, to the home stay mothers who made boxed lunches for their exchange student! -- Definitely need to upload photos of the students' lunches sometime!

After lunch, we celebrated one birthday （誕生日おめでとう！）, shared some of my favorite Japanese snacks (pino and zeri) and then set out to make some SMART (Strategic, Measured, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) goals that we will look at tomorrow morning to solidify as we march on to tackling Japanese.

Without much more to say, we had a welcome party tonight with all the host families, and the students together made a pledge and commitment to speak only Japanese until the end of the study abroad experience.

Apologies if I missed your child or friend here. :-( Enjoy!