I'm Totally Going to Be a Black Belt Before Long

This week my host father put down a new mat in our karate studio basement where he used to teach karate lessons (have I mentioned that he used to be a karate instructor? I think he is going to start up again). We celebrated by him teaching me and my host siblings some moves, we busted out the boxing gloves and everything. Cavad even came down wearing the most adorable little karate suit. After our lesson, my father started showing off by doing some crazy kick moves into the punching bags (and I was able to catch him in a photo mid-jump...thank you very much, it took skill on my part too to capture that!). I think spin-kick-jumps will be the next lesson though, I wasn't really ready for intensity of that yet believe it or not... (and yes, I know most of you who know how incredibly uncoordinated I am are having difficulty even imagining me trying karate in the first place, but I'll tell you, I was kicking some major butt).

Our Halloween celebrations continued into this week when my friend Mike and I got our host families together to carve up the pumpkins he bought. But let me just tell you that pumpkins here are not like US pumpkins. They are crazy shapes...and Mike intentioinally picked some weird ones. Of course the one he gave me to start cutting had this long neck that I had to cut through to get to the seeds and it took me FOREVER. And then, even though Mike and I were supposed to be sharing the pumpkin, only my hand fit down the narrow neck of it to grab the seeds, so I seeded the whole thing and then Mike got most of the fun of carving it...thanks a lot Mike haha. But even though I bruised my hand getting the seeds out (yeah I really did bruise from it, I guess I'm super delicate here in AZ I don't know), carving these pumpkins was one of the best things I have done since I've been here. My two sisters came with me over to Mike's house to do the carving and then we carried their pumpkin home to show the rest of the family. I have never seen my host mother's face light up like it did when she saw this jack-o-lantern. She kept telling me how she had never seen anything like it and my host sister kept blowing the pumpkin kisses and stroking it, it was hilarious. They kept it on the kitchen table for like two days and just kept lighting it all the time (and then blowing the candle out so it would last longer of course) and now it is sitting outside the house where I think it will stay until it is totally rotted out haha.