Showa Town Famous things |
Tatami room at hostfamily house |
By Ben Speckien and Rachel Schultz
We went to mister donuts for breakfast and went back to the train station and got our big luggage from the lockers. Then we went and met our first host families again in Showa. Ben and I went to the grocery store with our families and went back to my host families and had a big lunch of sushi, curry shrimp, udon, and fruit. Ben's host family took him to a Mongolian charity concert. It was very cool. My host family took me to Disneyland. It was fun, there were a lot of people there though. My favorite part was the electrical parade.
The following day, Sunday, my host family took Ben and me to Nikko. We visited the national park. There was a lot to see there. after the park we went to a restaurant on the riverside. We saw Tony and Meghan with their host families there. They had very good food there, we had mushroom tempura, some fish called ayu, soba, and some more fish, and some chicken. They smoked the food on a grill outside. They also had a lot of little live wells filled with live fish and snakes, and had the chickens running around outside. After lunch, we went to a hot spring. It was very relaxing.
Then we went to the sayonara party. Meghan and I got to try on kimonos, and Ben got to try on a Yukata (Japanese summer style kimono). We also got to watch a karate demonstration and we got to try breaking boards with our hands, and Brian Crawford broke his board with his head, while Meghan did it in her kimono.
We also got to see a professional shamisen (the three-stringed traditional Japanese instrument) player. It was very neat, especially since he did it for free. It was even Nagai sensei's first time watching. The instrument cost about $15000, and he's been playing it for 20 years.
Ben's host family took him to a restaurant afterwards, he had fish, and he said it was very good. Then he went home and went to bed.
When I got back to my host family's house, we had pizza from pizza hut. They have a lot of interesting ingredients that they put on their pizzas, like corned beef, and stuffed crust pizza with wieners in it. After dinner, their son and his 2 friends and I played Uno. The four of us went to the local CD store and got a CD of their favorite band, "Chemistry". We also bought some hanabi (fireworks) and went to the park and lit them off. It was really fun, except we had to run from the park because the grand finale was really loud. Once back at their house, we played a couple rounds of Harry Potter Uno.