GOLLY GOSH

OOPS, guys
All you people at home must have been all "Man Jeremy sure is leading a boring and uneventful life this week, what with all the non-posting and all. Possibly he is ashamed that he isn't eating a turkey this month or listening to Christmas tunes. Possibly." The truth is though that I am actually just real lazy. I had a pretty rad and filled-up weekend last week, and I've been stalling every time to post about it because of all the typing on this computer.

Also I like to put photos up with these posts and the USB connection on this thing is SUPES slow. Like right now I'm transferring some photos from my big camera and it's taking twenty minutes where it would take probably less than a minute on my own computer. It's a bummer but at least I have a computer to use.

But anyway let's deal with the most recent issue; Thanksgiving. Japan doesn't really know of Thanksgiving, or turkey (or real bacon, or real hamburgers, or maple syrup, or...) but that isn't such a biggie for me because I'm not that huge of a turkey fan; I enjoy it on a sandwich every once in a while, but Thanksgiving has always been about stuffing for me.

However, I believe that my meals this weekend have pretty much made up for it. First, on Thursday night (which would have been T-gives morning) I went out with my host parents to celebrate my host mom's birthday. We went to some local fancy steak house and it was DELISH. Japanese steak, as far as I can tell, is cut up into smaller parts (meh) and cooked with a ton of butter and garlic (YESSSSSSS) and also has several dipping sauces, because they're big into that here. Then the next day I went to a hot spring with the host family which was nice and relaxing, and we had some Osaka thing for dinner called "Favorite fried" or someting. For reals, "Favorite Fried". Fried what? DUNNO. Then today I hung out with my pre-host family and we went out for Korean Barbeque. Of course they tried getting me the spiciest dish in the house but I WAS TOO MANLY FOR IT.

But enough of food. That was a large paragraph. Or at least it looks kinda big in this posting form thing. ANYWAY, let's talk about this trip. It started last week Thursday; I boarded a train towards Sasebo, a nearby city. I met some of the other rotary exchange students there and our Rotarian chaparone. We got off at the "Haustenbos" stop, which I figured was just Japan being weird with names. Turns out that's how they interpret the Dutch name "Hous Ten Bosch". Go fig. Hous Ten Bosch was pretty cool; it's essentially an amusement park to showcase uh, well, I dunno. I think someone mentioned something about the environment, and another person something about Europe, but nothing was really expanded upon. The park/city thing place was split up by little canals that you could take boat rides though, which was fun, and the whole place lit up like a Christmas tree at night, which looked pretty nice.

The next morning we had breakfast, checked out early and headed off to our second destination, Kudamoto Castle (Kudamono? Kudamodo? I FORGET). A lot of it was still under re-construction, but it was still nice to see. The fortifications were pretty huge, and it was MUCH larger than the other castle, Shimabara Castle (the grounds were probably thirty times bigger). I met a tourist from Shanghai there and I tried introducing myself in Chinese. I guess I must be really out of practice though, because she decided to talk to me in English instead. FAIL.

After the castle we made our way to Aso Yama, or Mt. Aso. On the way though, we stopped at a farm that was in the mountain range surrounding Mt. Aso. Apparently Aso is a volcano, and created a ring of mountains around itself when it started spitting lava out and all that. The farm had a bunch of animals including pigs, cows, dogs, goats and all that. I got the chance to milk one of the cows and uh, I...uh...I did not enjoy it. It just felt weird. The dogs were great though and we sat around and petted them for a while. The pigs were sleeping most of the time, and when they finally got up, they just grunted a lot.

We left the farm after having lunch there and made our way up to the volcanic crater of Aso Yama. It was freezing cold. Not only that, it was really damn windy up there too. On top of that, it was foggy. Pretty much perfect conditions, eh?

At the end of the day, we made our way to the hotel. This was the comfiest hotel. Each room was a double with a built-in sound system, flat-screen TV and a big bath. The rooms themselves felt like cabins, and all had a back porch that looked out onto the mountainside. Not only that, but the hotel had a hot spring of its own. We spent a lot of time in that hot spring. The best part was, it had an outdoor section as well as an indoor one, so we were able to go out at night and stargaze while soaking in the bath.

The next day, we got up early again and set out to some suspension bridge set up over a big ravine. I'd give more details if I could, but seriously, that's pretty much what it was. The Japanese decided to build the bridge over the ravine in hopes that it would draw crowds of tourists who wished to see it. They were right. Tons and tons of people come to see this completely useless bridge. There was a traffic jam from all the cars trying to get in when we first got there, and when we left, the line of cars trying to get into the parking log stretched on for longer than a mile. It would be hours before those people would finally get into the lot, just so they could cross a shaky bridge, take a picture, turn around and go back to the car.

We then went to some town with a small wooden bridge. Don't know what the deal was there.

Afterwards we headed over to Kijima, an amusement park nearby. It probably would have been more fun for me if all the stuff wasn't so damn small. On pretty much every ride I got thrown around and got my legs all banged up. It also would have been a MILLION times more fun if the giant hampster ball they had advertised wasn't put away for the day we went. That being said, it was fun. We got some sort of special pass so we were able to go on all the rides we wanted.

And that was pretty much the end of the fun times. After the park we went to Saga to stay at another hotel. The next day all we did was go to the Rotary District meeting and we watched some weird presentation on childbirth and ancestry or something. No idea why they showed us that. At the very end there was a HUGE buffet though, which made up for the boring and weirdness of the whole thing.

And uh, I guess that is the whole trip. These posts are kind of big. Like the last one was pretty dang big as well. I guess I'll try and make these things a little smaller from now on. Maybe then I'll actually update regularly as well.