BBQ Day

Hello there again.  One day off and it's like I don't even know where to start...

Here's a quick word on what the chaperones did on our days(ish) off.  We had some amazing food, met some great people and bought some fantabulous items.  Alex has been having meetings with people, so Kim, Jennifer and I have been doing some shopping and we even had a bike ride around our hotel neighborhood.  There are seven Buddha statues around our hotel, so we had to ride around and find them to take pictures.  It was a lot of fun

After the bike ride, we all went to the Elderly Olympics.  This is basically just like the regular Olympics in that it happens every four years in a different (Japanese) city.  It just happened to be in Nanao this year!  We watched the 60+ soccer tournament.  These old dudes could move!  They were running to and fro like cockroaches in New York.   It was amazing and inspiring.  I better start training now if I want to be in that kind of shape at 60.

Then we finally saw the kids again.  I almost forgot what they looked like it had been so long.  Seriously.  We had an awesome BBQ put on by the JCs.  There were two BBQs going, one with meat and one without thank you very much.  All the host families trickled in bringing our students with them and once we were all together we started to eat.  Noodles, hot dogs, beef, tofu, soda, donuts and not in that order.  It was great.
  

After the last bowl was chopsticked clean, the games started.  The kids played hide-and-seek, but it didn't work so well because I'm not sure that everyone was staying put once they hid, so True and Megan had a tough time finding everyone.  So then they decided to do a variation of hide-and-seek where one person hides and everyone looks for them, whereupon finding them, each person hides with them until everyone is hiding together.  I believe that it was called Sardines or something like that.  Anyway, Jason was way too good at hiding and nobody found him.  At all.  We had almost given up on ever seeing him again, when he rounded a corner smiling like a Sears family portrait.  So we tried again...This time True and Riko went to hide and apparently it all worked out because everyone finally found them.

By this time it was dark, so the students started to pose for pictures for the end of the night.  Here are a few from the party.  I hope that your students took more because it was a really awesome time.  Enjoy...