Hosting an Exchange Student

My wife has this friend; she's a single mother with a big house and not a lot of income. This woman has been hosting exchange students for years, her house is sort of like a youth hostel at times. She has been pushing my wife to consider hosting a student and finally we agreed to give it a try. About a month ago I had a brief meeting with people from the agency that places students. They asked me questions about what our family likes to do, what hours we keep and how often we cook. Then they walked around taking photos of our house, I'm horrified to think that a picture of my bathroom is out there in cyberspace, but they wanted one. Shortly after that, they contacted us about a group of Japanese students needing an 18-day stay. The short duration stay appealed to us so we signed on to host one student. We're required to provide our student with an assortment of breakfast foods, a hot dinner, our guest room and a set of keys; in exchange we get something like $300 a week.

I was kind of relieved to find out we would be hosting a male student, because we only have one bathroom  here. Our student is a 20 year college kid named Saiya; he's friendly, soft spoken and thankfully, very independent. He's participating in a language immersion program at UMass Boston of all places. He's pretty busy with classes, field trips and social outings. I'm a little dismayed to see that they basically do everything as a big pack of Japanese kids speaking Japanese to each other, but they are having fun. He keeps bringing home girls from the program, which is fine. His method is to take them from UMB to the H&M at Downtown Crossing, Japanese girls apparently love that store. I've been trying to hip him to other shopping opportunities like Newbury St. or even the Copley Mall.

He has joined us for a couple of outings, once we went out for pizza and beer (they served him) and once we took him to a friend's backyard cookout. Culturally things have been fine, except for one minor incident where a friend of mine kept bowing to him with mock sincerity (thanks Richie!). I drove him out to UMass last week, along the way I kept apologizing for my city, explaining that not all of looks like Dorchester and not everyone is a crazy aggressive driver. He didn't seem to mind, I wonder if American TV shows and movies have prepared him for this? He always cleans his plate at dinner so I guess that's going alright as well. We have about one week left with him and based on things so far I think we'll do it again. We can always use the money and it's given our predictable home life a sitcom style plot twist.