022

Because I’m in the Calligraphy Club at school I’m currently on a 3-day camp at a hotel in some.. place. I don’t actually know exactly where we are, but it’s surrounded by all these really small, sharply steep mountains. Like, I’ve never seen land forms like that before.

Anyway, I originally didn’t want to come on this camp. Firstly, I’m just not that into Calligraphy. I’ve been tossing up whether I should quit or not for some while now. Secondly, it costs about $130, which I didn’t really want to cough up. So of course, when I say that I “can’t afford” it, the teacher goes and calls my Rotary club without telling me, and asks them to pay for it. Geez. So here I am, in my hotel room.

Basically, we (a whole bunch of students from a few High Schools around here) are expected to spend all day and night doing Calligraphy. Just copies of the same thing, over and over and over. We have this big room that’s just been covered with paper and ink and calligraphy stuff. It looks pretty awesome.

Unfortunately I’m not fantastic at calligraphy, and it bores me very quickly. One of the girls from my school stayed in that room until 5am. Even when I got up at 3am (so I could go and bathe in the onsen without other people being in there too.. there’s no private showers), there were still a few students running around. I could never ever imagine Aussie kids giving up their sleeping time to paint scribbly characters lol.

So tomorrow morning we go home, and I doubt I’ll still understand the point of this camp. I'm pretty sure it's for an exhibition or something. I don’t know whether I’m glad to have come though, yet. And I’m feeling claustrophobic and restless – it’s raining outside, and I haven’t even been outside for about 31 hours now. I’m glad we’re going home tomorrow or I may well go mad.

(A small update. That night I stayed in the room doing Calligraphy until 2am, was woken at 5am to clean the room, then woken again at 7:30am for breakfast. So now I've had barely any sleep the past two nights and I feel so crap. Bleh.)

021

Today I got soaked riding my bike home from the station. I went to Sapporo to meet a friend so we could go to watch some fireworks, but my mobile phone ran out of battery, and we never found each-other haha. So I spent the evening at Sapporo Station, having a little bit of a shop and sitting outside Starbucks to write. It was raining, but not heavily, although as my train pulled into Eniwa Station at 9pm, I stepped outside to a fairly steady rainfall. I got my bike and realised that there was no point in riding fast to try and escape the rain, so I rode slowly and enjoyed it! :P It was about 19 degrees Celsius, so it wasn’t bad or anything, just… wet haha. I got home and my poor host-sister nearly had a heart attack. “すごい雨!”

So that’s about it. I have been so slack in my blog updates, I know. I have them written, it’s just the photos that take up all my time and patience. So if there is a lack of photos, you now know why. You can view any photos I have on my Facebook though. If you’re not my friend, add me!

Today also marks the beginning of Summer Holidays, thank god. Bring it on!! My host family are taking me to the ocean (about a 40 minute drive away, up near Otaru). I haven’t been to the ocean, let alone gone swimming for the whole time I’ve been here, which is actually 6 months today. That’s the longest period of time IN MY LIFE that I haven’t gone swimming or gone to the beach, living in a coastal town and all. It doesn’t feel like that long, but I’ve surprised myself at how excited I am to go to the beach, even if it’s going to be nothing like Australia’s beaches.

Anyway, I’m just rambling now, so until next time!!

020

DOT POINT TIME/the last 3 weeks in short summary!

• Went to Dylan's 18th Birthday BBQ at his host families house. It was fun, but extremely hot, and basically it was just a nice afternoon. Somehow though, his host-mum thinks I am pro-as at Japanese, and apparently keeps talking about me.. haha :) yay, loved.

• I helped out at the Sapporo Beer Festival, because the Rotary Club had a yaki-soba/yaki-tori tent. It was massively hot so I bludged most of the time... I wasn't missed, there was like 50 other people helping. The festival was average, but they had a really good cover band of The Beatles. I was disappointed that no-one recognised the songs though.

• That same day I was meeting my friend Drew to go to Sapporo. It began raining massively - like seriously heavy, so heavy that it shut down the train lines. Luckily I got to Shin-Sapporo before they were shut down, so from there we were able to catch the subway. I didn't know train lines could get shut down just from rain lol. Anyway we ate dinner at this Indian place which was awesome, the owners spoke Indian, English AND Japanese. Awesome. And we managed to find the ferris wheel on the roof of one of the nearby buildings, and then luckily the train lines re-opened again by the time we went home.

• I moved house on the 7th of July, to my real third host family. I'm going to miss the Saitou family, especially the two dogs... but Saitou-san said I can come back any time, he even told me to keep the house key and to let myself in whether they were home or not. :) So now I'm in the Kuno house, back in Eniwa. My second last family! There's the mum, dad, elder brother, younger brother, and little sister. It's a relaxed and busy family, and has been really easy to move into.

• On the 10th we had the Farewell Dinner for the American, Canadian and Finnish exchange students, as well as the Japanese students who are leaving for their exchange this and next month. It was really fun to have everyone together again, I just wish we could've met up a few more times. After the dinner (everyone did speeches and presentations and tears were shed and photos were taken), just us inbounders/outbounders walked downtown Sapporo and did Karaoke, all like 13 of us haha. It was good fun, and we did Purikura before it was time to go home.

• My aforementioned friend, Drew, left to go home to Australia. So I'm sad... everyone is leaving now. I will be alone D:

• On the 11th, Tiffany returned to America. I woke at 5:30am to get to the airport on time to wave her off. Again, tears were shed and photos were taken. After I went back home, Haruka and I went to the Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo. I hated the enclosures, they are too small and unnatural for my liking... Australia has awesome zoos, I've realised. Oh, we rode the rollercoaster. That was fun haha. We also stumbled upon a festival being held in central Sapporo that neither of us had any idea about, so that was cool. Rachael, the Canadian girl, had some fun... She dressed in a hired Panda suit and entertained onlookers in Odori :P Unfortunately I had to be home early... but that was also fun.

• The 14th and 15th was my School Festival. It was actually a really big let-down, for me. I didn't enjoy it at all. The class dances were alright - I memorised the whole dance and didn't muck up (at least not too much). But the 15th, with all the class stalls and things, I was alone...... :( I have no friends, really, so I just sort of wandered around aimlessly, feeling sorry for myself, until I saw some girls from my class and asked if I could just walk with them. They turned out to be good fun, we went in the haunted house. It was even better because I'm the foreigner, so at the end they all got on the floor and bowed to me and apologised for scaring me (although it was more hilarious than scary, but well done).

• On the 20th, we farewelled Lindsey, the second American to go home. That was an early start too. I was allowed to have the day off school for that, and the previous day had been public holiday, AND the next day was Rotary, so I was pretty happy. :D

• And on Thursday, we farewelled Rachael back to Canada. Emmi, her host dad, Dylan and I sat up the top of the terminal eating icecream as we watched her plane taxi off down the runway. It's sad that everyone is leaving. Emmi leaves next week. And then we get new exchange students next month.

So that's it! Update is done! Yes! Hurruh! I hope you read it all! No photos though. Photos are too difficult to upload on here now. Sorry :(