Pictures and words

Today I was sitting in the lobby of a campus building when two Japanese students walked up and started a conversation with me. At first I was suspicious: they must be trying to get me to sign up for something. And although I found out later that they were part of an international coffee night thing, they never tried to pitch it to me as I was expecting. They just wanted to meet foreign students. I enjoyed talking with them very much, as they spoke in short easy sentences but didn't baby-talk me like my host father tends to do. We went to the supermarket and got lunch together. If speech is kept simple and said at a fairly slow pace, I'm able to talk in Japanese fairly well. There was one time where a Japanese girl was asking me if I had ever taken the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) test. "TOEFL" is kind of a difficult word to pronounce for a Japanese speaker, so when the girl said it I thought she said "tofu." So we had this awkward conversation in Japanese:
Japanese girl: Have you ever taken the TOEFL?
Me: Oh yes, I ate it.
Japanese girl: ....you ate it?
Me: I...um...I have eaten it.
Japanese girl: You ate the TOEFL?
Me: Um...er...it was eaten by me?
It took a fellow exchange student to sort out the miscommunication. It was kind of embarrassing.

I have more pictures!!!
Here's one of the policemen on a pedestal I was talking about earlier. Sorry it's a bad picture- I was trying to take it without drawing attention.

My mom made okonamiyaki for dinner! It was delicious!