Doug's Blog Day

Yesterday was very interesting. For the first time in my life I attended a home economics class. It was vaguely reminiscent of what I thought an American home economics class would be except that everything was in Japanese and we were actually having fun. We made muffins and extremely strong ice tea that was incredibly satisfying. The muffins were delicious, which was very surprising since we didn’t follow the recipe and we had no clue what was really going on. Some of us stayed after and watched the practice for the Koyo-sai. It was quite impressive to see all of the kids dancing under their own discipline. While they were practicing some of us went to the tennis courts and watched them practice “soft” tennis, which is played with a soft , pink rubber ball instead of the normal neon yellow tennis ball. A person could absolutely smash the ball and still easily return it across the other side. By the end of the day we had spent nearly 12 hours at school, which seems to be fairly common for them to do. After this we took a trip to the country and visited my host father’s mother that had such a strong accent that it was hard for even her grand-daughter to understand.