Niigata

Well hello,

It has been a while, I have just been busy with bits and pieces. Last week was Golden Week here in Japan. It`s a string of public holidays and little festivals which meant no school. During my Golden Week I got the chance to go to Niigata which is on the other side of Japan! It was a great drive with many tunnels that take you underneath the lush green mountains and There was beautiful scenery! Once we had arrived in Niigata, I had the chance to see 日本海！(The Sea Of Japan). It was, dirty. Didn`t quite have the same smell or white sand that we have in Australia, instead a gravel carpark and many cement barriers and an aquarium situated about two hundred meters from the shore.

We went to the aquarium and had lunch, I ate ramen and my host family asked for a fork for me. They do this often but I always use the chopsticks and just say thankyou but I want to learn! I think they are afraid I will starve to death if I use chopsticks but I personally think I am quite talented at it now! After lunch we watched the dolphin show and it was quite amazing but I was on an animal rights protest that day and couldn`t fully enjoy the aquarium because of the fact that the poor animals were locked behind bars, well, glass...

Anyway, it was a great bonding experience and I enjoyed it a lot. We also had rice planting day and also had the chance to visit many temples during my Golden Week. Now I am back at school and for this week I am on the shoe room cleaning committee. I forget the word in Japanese, perhaps Genkai, no, anyway, this means that we clean the carpet mat. Of course we don`t use a vacuum cleaner, that would just be practical, instead we use bits of sticky tape wound around our hands and pat the carpet to remove the minute particles of dirt that have settled since the day before. As bad as I make this sound, it is actually quite fun because the teacher always wants to learn more english and was today was asking me to demonstrate the intonation within the word `Ketchup`.

I will leave you now, I don`t know what my plans are for the rest of the week, I just know that we don`t have school on Thursday which is cool. I will leave you now with a pictures rom my trip to the Sea of Japan. (That reminds me of channel nine news and tea back home!)