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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.)