I hate titling these things.

Another week gone... Dude, this whole thing is going by insanely and altogether too fast. I have about 97 days left in Kumamoto and I'm absolutely certain that I will 100% not be ready to go home come February 3rd. I didn't realize what this experience would actually be like until now; it's been 100x better than anything I imagined. Sometime after I began applying to AFS, I started reading this one person's blog about their adventure in Japan. Everything they did sounded so cool; they lived in a big city, did exciting things everday (it seemed) and I remember wanting my experience to be similar. WHY DID I EVER WISH THAT? Anyone reading this that wants to come to Japan on a homestay should never hope that their experience is anything like anyone else's. This is YOUR experience, and yours only. It's unique, and beautiful and wonderful and only you can say you've experienced exactly what you have. Anyone even considering doing something like this should by all means do it. Do it while you can. It's something that you can't even realize how much it'll change you as a person, and I mean that in a totally positive way. 

Okay, now that I'm done giving my study abroad advertising... on to the post!

This week there wasn't too much worth mentioning. I have 部活 (bukatsu - club/sports activities) everyday after school and it has convinced me that I'm never going home because it'll kill me before I do. These people are たいへん (taihen - hard workers).

On Friday I didn't go to school. Yes, rebel right here. I'm totally about to start randomly skipping class. Yeah, that totally sounds like me... And what was I doing on my rebel-day-off? Volunteering to help some Thai foreign high schoolers around Kumamoto-shi. Quite the bad ass, if I do say so myself. There were two others from my school (a friend of mine and a first-year boy who I didn't know) and a few from two other schools. All of the high school volunteers were put into a group, but the groups didn't stay separate for very long, and eventually everyone just joined groups and went as one. We started the tour at 熊本城 and after showing the foreigners around a bit, we all piled into a bus that took us to 熊本大学. 

We ate lunch in the school cafeteria (which had absolutely anything you would want to eat), and were then shown to a really nice, carpeted room that had a bunch of tables with 書道 utensils at each chair. A professor from the university spent a good hour and a half teaching us all techniques on how to draw pandas, flowers, bamboo, a shrimp and an eggplant. After we were adequate at it (and I say adequate because no one got anywhere near to where anyone else in his class would've been), we were all given a fan that we could decorate however we wanted. Since I absolutely sucked at everything he taught us besides the bamboo, I decided I would just do a bunch of that...

Yay for bamboo! I never had time to do the other side, so I'm considering sneaking it into my weekly 書道 class at school to finish it. With my amazing smuggling skills, that should be no problem. (That was meant to be very sarcastic)

After that, everyone went out to a commons area-type room to be put to shame by the teacher and his students. Seriously, the man painted a giant Kumamoto castle with rolling mountains in the background like it was no big deal.

The thing that made everything hilarious, however, were the GIANT brushed attached to poles that he used to paint with. Quite amusing and fascinating at the same time. It was really cool to see the whole thing come together though; at first I couldn't really see where he was going with the whole thing and then BAM, all of a sudden there was a castle and mountains. There was a giant bucket of water that this one girl would dip a giant brush into and use to wet the entire paper as the people painting progressed. The water gave the ink the water-color-y, abstract-y look that you might be able to tell from the picture. Then, all of the students were asked to write their name and draw a few flowers at the bottom. It turned out to be a pretty nice collaboration. :)

That was the basic gist of my day on Friday. Volunteering went until 5ish and by the time it was over I was pretty exhausted. 

THEN on Saturday morning, I headed over to another university to watch my classmates participate in an English debate against a few other Kumamoto schools. If any of you guys ever read this and can understand it, YOU DID SO AWESOME AND I'M SO PROUD OF YOU ALL. I honestly have no idea how they debated in English. That's like me trying to debate in Japanese... Even though we didn't win anything, I was beyond impressed and entertained by the whole thing. There were various debates, and the whole event ended up going from 9 am to 4 pm. Props to y'all, I could never have done it. 

And now we arrive to today. Today, my dear friends (and some strangers), my wonderful, wonderful, WONDERFUL host family took me to 阿蘇山 (Aso san - Aso mountain) to go to a spa there. Honestly, though, I would've been perfectly fine just going for a drive in the mountains. I've decided that driving in the mountains with my iPod is one of my favorite things to do in Japan. 

And after today, I can say that I've been to the clouds and back. Legitimately in the clouds. Because that's how high we were.

 At one point, we stopped the car to look into this crater and as I took more and more pictures I got more and more frustrated that the pictures didn't look as breath taking as the real thing.

 That, in the bottom right-hand corner is a road, just to give a little perspective. The fog hanging around is cloud.

There was almost no blue around us because all we saw was cloud. Crazy stuff!

We stopped at this really quaint, adorable restaurant for lunch, and I ended up ordering a hamburger and a slice of apple pie. Allow me:

The hamburger plate was GINORMOUS. Just as a side note, I've noticed that a lot of times, a hamburger in Japan means only the actual hamburger; no bun. I'm totally fine with that, I just though it was worth mentioning. The hamburger plate was rice with a hamburger patty on top, and an egg topping it all off. Yeah, can't even see the rice in the picture, but it's there. 

So after becoming fat, we were off to the spa! The spa we went to was located in this huge mini-town full of souvenir shops.

The spa was very... interesting. Don't get me wrong, I definitely liked it, but it was different from what I imagined. Basically, they give you a shirt and a pair of pants that you wear (no underwear -- and yes, they clean everything after each use). After you've changed you head into this giant room with a whole bunch of mini hut-like structures all around the room. There's an area to sleep/rest, to drink some water or tea, and a spot to sit around. The huts all had wooden doors that opened into a room that was very warm, and scented with some kind of herb. My host siblings didn't really like the smells, but I actually found it very relaxing. Inside the huts, there are pillows lined up around the edge where you lay down and just relax. Definitely not what I expected, but enjoyable nonetheless. There was one Icy Cold Room that, as the name suggests, was really cold and was really nice after sitting in a hot room for a few minutes. We spent a good hour and a half in the spa, and when we finished, we went back to some of the little shops to look around and see what there was. 

We got home at around 6:30 and here I am now a few hours later. All in all, a pretty great weekend. AND I just found out on Saturday that the ice arena here opened today so HURRAH I'M GOING FIGURE SKATING NEXT WEEKEND. Which is also kind of terrifying since I haven't skated since August... We'll see how that goes and I'll definitely be giving an update on that. :)

FKLJDKLSKMDDVKJGNK kbaiii.

-Ellie