Ooh gotcha. Thanks so much for the help.
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Well, I rushed through this one chapter to finish in time.
I suppose I got the gist of it: Two adults (cow-boy hat guy and driver gal) and a few kids are cut of from the rest of the convoy on their way back to camp. It’s night and rainy and all. They decide to go that that mountain hostel, after telling their parents
My main issue here is that I had trouble following who’s who and who is talking. Guess I’ll need to take another look at the character presentation. Hopefully that won’t stop me from reading week two.
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clarifying one point
I believe it’s described as a 洋館, western style house. They don’t know what it is, but theorized that it might be a hotel.
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note: spoiler tags contain week 2 spoilers.
洋館
I’m American and not fully sure what a hostel is,but it does imply guests stay there and the Count did superficially say that his house didn’t have guests, he just had a lot of “friends” that he invited over (sure, sure, sure, nothing suspicious here).
I don’t know about the average 洋館 wrt guests and whatnot, but as to what the buildings look like, this is what comes up on Google image search:
I’d probably describe them as mansions or estates in English.
Outside of ハヤト and セーラーウサギ the kids are still pretty interchangeable (I’m not sure I can even name them all…)
At the end of the chapter when the kids were talking amongst themselves it was a bit harder to tell who was who (but I honestly don’t think it mattered that much). But one of the things that helps me when I start to get lost in dialogue is to remember that to Japanese readers, the way people speak is frequently going to tell them who is talking. So if children are talking to adults they’re probably going to use です/ます (I didn’t go back and check if that’s true in this book but I’d think so). And it’s also useful to notice sentence endings to see how girls/women talk compared to boys/men. You’re usually not gonna get something as telling as だってばよ, but getting more sensitive to speech patterns is something that has helped my reading and it gives more information about the social relationships between characters (and people irl if you’re ever in that situation).
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There aren’t any particularly bad future spoilers in here, but just as a note for anybody continuing this conversation: We’re in the week 1 thread here (first half of chapter 1), so no future week content unless clearly marked please.
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Sorry, didn’t even notice (I thought we were in the week 2 thread 
) Added a note above my spoiler tag.
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I think your 洋館 comment also has week 2 spoilers, just fyi. In week 1 they haven’t approached the building or met anyone new.
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Ok I think I’ve covered all of the spoilers (even the ones in the drop down).
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