LATE LATE LATE

I HAVE TO FINISH THIS STUPID POST. I HAVE HOMEWORK BUT THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT.
I feel like finally in March junior year has started to catch up to me. I had my first physics-related mental breakdown (and I'll spare you the details so you can retain your slim idea of my sanity), and last night I didn't write a blog post. I'm actually surprised I made it all the way to March before any of this, and I'm assuming a lot of it is related to the Japanese students, which takes up a lot of my time in March. Spring break has actually crept up on me for once, which is odd as I am usually counting down the days weeks before a break. However, since the Chiben kids leave the Sunday before spring break, I'm thinking more about the program and how I don't want them to leave rather than just spring break. HOWEVER. This does not mean I am not insanely excited for spring break, it just isn't at the top of my mind at the moment.

So let's discuss my weekend, shall we?

This was the weekend of driving fail. On Saturday morning I drove to orchestra festival. The driving part was fine, orchestra was not, and I'm going to leave it at that and move on. After orchestra, I went home for a few hours before leaving with my student to go to a Thanksgiving party for the students. I guess the idea is to introduce them to the idea of Thanksgiving by having a dinner... in March. The kid who was hosting the party lived out in the really remote and INSANELY rich area of the county. I'm not kidding, we were passing freaking mansions that had fields with horses in them. Basically, google maps failed me. It told me to turn down road x, and from there to make a left on road y. Ergo, I was driving down road x, looking for road y, only to come to an eventual dead end. Confused, I turned back and looked again for road y, now on the right side. Once again, it was not there. I then called Kelsey, who was apparently also a bit lost and told me that she had just spoken to Jennifer who was having a similar problem as me. The road did not exist. (Note: we will not discuss the fact that we were talking on the phone while driving. This was a special circumstance.) I continued driving around the general area until Kelsey called me again, saying she found road y, but it was off of some other random road of which I had never heard. However, thanks to some luck/directional skills, I managed to find this road and found the house fine. When I looked at a more accurate map later, this is what I discovered: random road and road x were parallel and road y, according to google maps, connected the two. However, in real life road y did not go all the way to road x, which explains for the non-existence of the road. I arrived at the party 45 minutes late, but I was not the latest by far.  HOLY CRAP these people were rich. The party was in the basement, so I didn't see the house but just from their unfinished basement I could tell they were dripping with money. Come on, who has TWO staircases leading to their basement? Seriously. They had space for a video game area, a pool table, an air hockey table, and two long tables that sat fifty people. The mother had mentioned in an email that they were hosting three additional Japanese students from a different program, along with their Chiben student, and apparently they also had four kids, so we were wondering how that whole thing worked. It was pretty clear once I saw the house. I'm assuming some of you can guess what high school's name was on the clothing of all the children... (Note #2: Am I being paranoid about not revealing my location? This is feeling excessive.) These other Japanese students seemed oddly out of place among everyone else, which I noticed when Kelsey tried awkwardly to talk to one girl. Oh well, that's how it just works sometimes. Cough. Eventually, Otani Sensei called all the Japanese kids together and explained in Japanese the story of Thanksgiving. The whole thing seemed so ridiculous because the "story of Thanksgiving" is so convoluted and we seem to be changing it every fifty years, so translating the most basic version of that into Japanese seems to be achieving little. After this we went through the different foods by having Kelsey create a sample plate (which no one ended up wanting...) and finally we all got food. It really was very good, even from someone who couldn't eat half of it because it had meat. They had these Thanksgiving-themed rubber ducks at each plate, which I'm assuming was the only Thanksgiving decoration they could find in the stores in March. We had fun making sculptures out of these once we'd finished eating. They also placed bowls of ice-breakers on the table, which were hilarious to translate and answer in Japanese. I'm always so impressed by the English skills of most of the students. Seriously, I could never say in Japanese what they can say in English. Most of them. Cough. After we got bored of this, we went outside and played soccer before leaving to go play lasertag.

Now we will move on to driving fail #2.
After my disastrous attempt at finding the house initially, I decided I didn't trust my google map instructions and I would follow Kelsey in her car with her GPS. This went fine until I got stuck at a red light and lost her. At this point, I pulled out my directions and read that I had to turn left onto some road. I continued going along looking for this road when I saw a car that looked something like hers sitting in the left turn lane at a light. At first, I wasn't sure if I should get behind this car or not, because what if I ended up following some random car for miles? However, I then noticed a car next to me filled with other Chiben students and hosts, so I knew this had to be correct. I was a bit concerned that google maps was again going to lead me to failure, as this road was not the one noted on my directions. However, upon further inspection I noticed the next instruction was to continue on some other road (I don't know if this is the case in other areas, but here roads change names often in order to confuse people as much as possible). This second road name was the one on the sign, and when I looked to my right I saw the road I had been looking for. And then I consulted my directions again. It said to go on the first road for several feet. Umm... no?
It doesn't end there. THEN I was following Kelsey again, as I still didn't trust my directions until she suddenly went through this neighborhood. I followed her, not sure where she was going, until she pulled into a random shopping plaza and I parked next to her. Apparently her GPS had told her that the laser tag place was right there, which it was not, so I consulted my directions and found that they told me to go a bit further. Now she was following me as I attempted to navigate these last few streets in the slowly decreasing light.

I'm really bored with this story. It's not nearly as funny anymore and I seriously need to post this. I'm sorry for wasting your time.