August 9th

Nine days in Japan. Three days left.

Today we took the bus to monkey hot springs, where we saw many many monkeys just hanging around and sitting on the pathways. There were so many, and so many babies. A few of us ran out of space, and I may or may not have a ten minute montage of monkeys.

After that we ate lunch and went to a famous shrine in Nagano. I got many good luck charms, one for happy, good health, and something along the lines of good grades. I also got a year of the snake trinket. When we prayed at the shrine, you're supposed to throw in a coin. A five-yen coin is best. Since go-en is lucky and five yen. I threw it....and missed. It went behind the container and I couldn't get it back.

I then finally ate some ramen in Japan for dinner. By this point I've had onigiri three times, yakisoba twice, sofa once, udon once, the sporadic salad and rice, pasta, pancakes, mochi on a stick with miso and sugar, fish join a stick caked in salt, a plethora of Japanese snacks, so much tea, melon soda twice, ice cream and miso soup. (I probably forgot something). I'm really starting to crave a hamburger. We're all feeling it though. A delegate was deciding between ramen and fried chicken, other delegates are already discussing what they're going to beat when they get back to America, etc.

We're beginning to face the harsh blow of reality too. We leave Ueda on Thursday (it's Tuesday), we have the goodbye ceremony tomorrow, we spend twenty-four hours in Tokyo, and then we're off. Which makes us sad because we'll probably never see each other again after that, since we go to different schools, and we all really bonded together. I like to put it as one big family (or fam).