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Japan Day 8

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

Home­s­tay Day 2
We slept fairly late and then R & M made us brunch. A mas­sive salad with toma­toes and onion, eggs, sausage, fatty ham pat­ties and fresh fruit. After we lazily ate break­fast, they took us to a nearby beach. M-san warned us first that the water was very dirty but we had no bet­ter ideas on where we would have liked to go, so it was off to the beach. The whole area was filthy; actu­ally, it was the first time I’d seen so much lit­ter lay­ing on the ground. And water level was really low, so there was some­thing like a 100 yards of mud between the nor­mal beach and the water line. Still, there was a strong breeze com­ing off the water and the smell of the sea was much like I remem­ber from vis­it­ing the ocean back when I lived in North Car­olina. So it was very pleas­ant. Then as we were leav­ing, R-san bought us some Japan­ese style ice-cream. Basi­cally it like a slushie, shaved ice topped with fla­vored syrup but they also added in some cream. It was deli­cious!

Then we went back to their place, exchanged e-mail addresses and got our bags so we could head back to the hotel. While we were there, I gave them a sketch that I’d done of their fam­ily as my bear char­ac­ters. They seemed to like it a lot, which made me glad because D didn’t have any omiyage for them and mine¹ seemed rather small com­pared to what I saw the other stu­dents take with them. As we were leav­ing to go back to the hotel; we got to see part of their apart­ment complex’s fes­ti­val. The chil­dren of the apart­ments were car­ry­ing around a mobile tem­ple while chant­ing some­thing that sounded like wah-choi. Then we went back to the hotel and waited around for some­body to show up. AWelkin came down and got us into our rooms and then we relaxed.

¹ A small jar of apri­cot pre­serves and a larger one of apple but­ter, both from the Amanas.

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