#paigemilarinjapan2014: May 9 2014 -- Schools

At the school.

Today we went to Oda Junior High school. This school was about an hour away by train. It was very small part of town. More like the country it was so much fun I loved it! This town was very much like what you would see in a movie. When going to the school we pretty much walked straight up the mountain. It had its own separate area away from everything else. The poor kids get a work out walking to school 7 days a week! (Yes they go to school everyday.) As we arrived at the top of the mountain towards the school all the children were outside training for what they call sports day. Sports day is a very exciting time for these children because they get to show their parents some of their own talents that they have. These are like running, dancing, cheering, soccer, baseball etc. But as we arrived all the children started to wave at us and got extremely excited. We went inside the school which means we had to take off her shoes. Japan is really weird like that. They like to keep everything clean so a large variety of places don't allow shoes.

So they have ones for us to borrow. They introduced who they were to us and told us that we would be meeting with three classes today and they were very pleased that we came and cannot wait to see what we had in store for them. When I told the first class who I was I told them that I had 13 people in my family and they all gasped and giggled! Because having a family that big is crazy! the best part was after they looked at their teacher to make sure that they understood correctly. As time went on after all the introductions they taught us how to build origami. I never realize how hard and intricate origami was until I actually tried to build something like they do out of paper. And these kids do it like it's their job!! They can build everything and anything!

The second class we went to were older kids. They knew a lot more English and so it was easier to communicate with them. They did the same thing when I told them how many people were in my family. This time instead of building origami, they taught us how to write Japanese characters. I was at a table with this one girl and she was incredibly good at her penmanship. She had to demonstrate to the class because she was so good and then when she taught us how to write things she did it like perfectly. And it was with a freaking paintbrush!! ridiculous.

After that we went and had lunch with them. Lunch here is very interesting. The kids take the lunch back to the home room and serve it to each other. The lunch we ate was some kind of soup with rice, some fish and milk. It was actually really tasty and all the kids ate everything nothing was wasted. I was very full and I barely finished. So it was a large amount of food. The last group of kids were the youngest, so there english struggled but they were very cute. We played dodge ball with them and they absolutely loved it.

Then we went to the ocean where we saw jelly fishes and a dolphin!!