Kumamoto

DAY TUESDAY: KUMAMOTO!
This day started out exciting. Joy woke up to two large SWACKS. Becca slept through them. Before 6:00 in the morning, I had killed a cockroach. Yes, I am pretty amazing, thank you. Anyway. We took the sight seeing train early in the morning (7:56? lol not really that early, but was had to leave our apartment at seven, and there was some frantic packing going on) The irony: we took a scenic train but spent most of the ride crocheting. Somewhat frantically. The three of us have been making a lap-blanket for our host mom, but hadn't finished it yet. So we spent a few hours all three crocheting granny squares and crocheting them to the ever-growing blanket. It took a while, but we got them all done. Now we just gotta tie in the ends!
Kumamoto held several things we wanted to do, the first being Kumamoto castle. We again bought an all-day bus pass, dropped off luggage at Becca and Joy's hotel, and making our way over to the castle. It was a pretty cool site! It had been re-done inside to be museum like, much like osaka castle, but... I kind of though Osaka Castle was boring. Kumamoto, the museum was interesting! And a lot more foreigner-friendly, I think. Most of the displays at least had a title of what it was in English. They also had a few really interesting videos, about the history of Kumamoto, the way the castle was constructed, etc. It was all in Japanese, but Joy translated a little, I understood a little, and a lot of it you didn't really NEED to understand the words to get what they were doing. It was really fun! We had a great time, took lots of pictures. A lot of the staff spoke to us in English, and it was SO CUTE because they were trying so hard! One lady told us that they had all been practicing English. Haha. It was super cute. We talked to a Samurai going up the castle stairs. He was a very nice young man. Becca and I pretended to be ninjas sneaking into the castle gate. It was pretty much ninja fail because I was falling down most of the time.
We had a lot more we wanted to go see, but were were all surprisingly exhausted. So we went back to the hotel, checked in, and wrote post cards to our students! In no time at all, it was time for me to take my lonesome trip back to Yokahama! We all went to the station together. Waited for my train. Took lots of pictures. And then, we waved goodbye to each other through the window and my train left Kumamoto and headed into the darkening evening....!

TO BE CONTINUED!