August 5th

Today is our first full day with our host families.

It started with us gathering at a park to get onto a bus ride that would take us up the mountain to an outdoor museum. High altitude is not a problem for all of the delegates. Considering that we live in a city that's a mile high above sea level and whenever we go up to the Rocky Mountains we pass the tree line. Motion sickness, however, was a problem. We're fitting as many people as possible into a bus, which then travels up winding roads for an hour. We did have a chaperone get motion sickness when we made it up.

The museum is an outdoor museum with 400+ sculptures. That means walking up and down hills to see the sculptures. It was sunny and hot, but it was cooler than in downtown Ueda. So that was a relief.

Once we had done that, we went back down the mountain to city hall to meet the mayor. When we went up the stairs to the main office, everyone was clapping, and it was another unexpected surprise. There weren't a lot of us who were comfortable with the attention. We then met the mayor, he was a nice friendly guy. Jared even took a selfie with him. He gave us gifts, and we gave him gifts, and then we went back downstairs. There was a super fancy vending machine when we got downstairs. There were many delegates who needed coffee, so we stopped there. You bought your drink, which ranged from coffee and Latte's to hot chocolate and coke, and the machine would then make it and when it was done a door would pop open and the drink would come down. It was really cool.

After that we went down to the river to get ready for the fireworks. We had a very nice reserved spot in front of the river so we could really see the fireworks. Up close and personal. We had to look almost directly up in order to see them, and looking directly up ended up with some ash in some people's eyes. We were that close to the fireworks. Not only was there grains of ash, but giant flakes of some burnt substance also rained down on us. The firework show was about an hour and a half. From what I heard it was a competition between companies. So we'd have three-ish minutes of fireworks, and then a break in between. The fireworks ranged from launching two fireworks, waiting until they exploded, and then launching another, to fireworks with a lot of light, color, sound, and just a lot of fireworks, to fireworks that were in time with the music. These fireworks put the fireworks we see during the fourth of July to shame. We probably lost some appreciation to american fireworks because of this.

My host family's oldest daughter was at a summer seminar in Tokyo yesterday and today, so we picked her up after the fireworks. She's sixteen, so the two of us bonded very quickly. We talked about anime, Vocaloid (we know a lot of the same songs), school, and social media.

Tomorrow and the day after are our host family days. So that means we aren't going to see the other delegates for the next two days.