4 DAYS! On finals and Aquariums.

Hey guys, so happy to be back writing again. It has been a busy week with finals! I had 4 of them between Thursday/Friday with the two hardest being (of course) on Friday.

Before I get to the tests though, I want to ensure everyone I have not been idle! My wonderful host family came to visit me on Wednesday and took me out to eat sushi, and then to the famous Umitomago Aquarium. Umitomago is a combination of 2 Japanese words meaning "Sea Egg" which is the theme of the aquarium.

I know many  of you are hoping for pictures, and I did take a few with my awful softbank prepaid flip phone, but since my Android Smartphone decided to kill itself I wasn't able to take any quality pictures, and for that, I am eternally sorry! :(

While taking these pictures on my cheap phone I named each sea creature I photographed. Looking back I really should have taken photos of the dolphins because they were awesome.

Sir Albert the First

Maureen, Terror of the Deep

Las Locas, The feared Mercenary Army of the Aquarium

Mufasa of the Ocean

 So that pretty much wraps up the trip to the aquarium. It was quite a lot of fun, and for those of you still in Beppu, I highly recommend it.

The best part of my host family coming to visit me was about to occur. So, as we are leaving the aquarium my host sister asks me to direct them via directions, back to my University up in the mountains.

Now....those of you from the States that REALLY know me, know that I am extremely directionally challenged when it comes to navigating in a car. So, add the fact that I had to try and translate my already bad directions in JAPANESE. Yeah, you can begin to see how things might go awry.

And go awry they did, almost immediately upon getting back into the city of Beppu. The easiest and fastest way to get to my University from Beppu is to stick to the main road next to the beach all the way until you get to a major intersection about 10 Km later. Then you take a left and follow that road up the mountain until you're there. Sounds simple enough in English. Well my host mom turned about 8 Km too soon and it got worse from there.

Luckily the son of my older host sister decided to take advantage of google maps. Unfortunately in Japan google doesn't have turn by turn directions, so he had to navigate using the map alone. We ended up driving into a very secluded section of houses with ancient roads and no space to maneuver the minivan we were in. Not to mention one side of the road had about a 50 foot drop down a small cliff. Well we somehow got the minivan out of that neighborhood and onto more navigable streets. We then accidentally took the scenic route up into the mountains.

That means that roads were extremely narrow with many very sharp turns near hundred + foot drops. It was a harrowing experience, but 45 minutes later we finally reached the intersection of the large road that normal people take up the mountain. Everyone (8 people) in the car cheered loudly and we were so excited to have made it out of the mountain labyrinth we had been in!

After saying my goodbyes I headed back to my room to study for my finals.

All in all it was a pretty stressful week, but now that it is over, I am finally done with school for the rest of the summer! All 1 month of it -_-.

Tomorrow I will be attending a summer festival with some friends, so I should have more stories to share. Hope you enjoyed this one. I still plan on posting a few more interviews once the people I have sent the questions too get back to me.



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