Eating soba at the temple

So, there's this old artist who works with metal and lives down the street from us and last weekend he was all like, "Hey! Let's go eat soba out of Japanese pottery at a temple"....so off we went.
First, after driving up a mountain, we went into the main building where we met this family that live up there and make the pottery... They were selling things but I didn't buy anything :(

All of this stuff is called "Bizen-Yaki" and is a clay made out of a course dirt, apparently.


Suddenly, my 10 year old host brother called me over to see THIS:

........ Yeah, we had a pretty good laugh too.

Afterwards they served us all soba noodles and we sat and looked out at the town below, which pretty much just consisted of wheat fields and a few houses, but it was really beautiful all the same.

Next, we went to go look at the kilns that the temple owners make pottery in... There were two really large ovens and the two little kids who lived there just ran all over the place.

Wood

It was a pretty awesome day.

My new friends

....Today I had the weirdest day it my entire life. So anyways, there's this 30 something year old man working at the neighborhood super market (who told me to call him "Bun-chan"...pronounced Boon chan) and apparently my 20 year old host sister and him are friends so they were all like, "Hey! Let's bring Carolyn somewhere!" Sooo this guy, and his other friend who is also in his 30s came and picked us up at 12. We then all drove 30 minutes to a restaurant where we ate burgers and ice cream. Everyone kept looking at me creepily. When I finally tuned into the conversation they were comparing the age differences between me and the one of the guys and wondering if I would agree to marry a Japanese guy over an American guy....weirded out on my part. After the guy instead yelled out in English "MY DREAM.... BECOME YOUR OLDER BROTHER!!!!!" After, we went to 7-11 for like, 20 minutes, then we went to a huge mall called "you-me town" where we walked around for a while. It ends up that Bun-chan's friend is a teacher at a "juku" or cram school. Throughout the day he kept coming up with random names of my friends from school because he teaches them at juku. At the mall, Bun chan tried out the claw machine and got me this cute little bear. I replied by saying "Thank you, onii-chan (older brother) Everyone was like OH MY GOD SAY IT AGAIN IT'S SOOO CUTE! then we all got purikura (For those of you who don't know it's superrrrr poplar...I can't remember if I explained it but it's like a photo booth except the pictures are sticky on the back and the machine it has some wireless thing on it so that you can hold your phone up and it wirelessly transmits the photos onto your phone. Pretty much it's soooo popular that it's like an initiation ceremony when you are becoming friends or boyfriend and girlfriend and it's inevitably the first place you and your new acquaintance are going to go). It turned out sooo funny because the computer edits the pictures to make skin whiter, eyes bigger, and eyelashes longer. Bun-chan turned out looking like a transvestite. Anyways, the long and the short of it is that now I have pictures of me and some random, 30 year old men stuck all over my notebook, one of which is my friends' study school teacher....random much?

Annual Kashima Gatalympics

Ok, so this actually happened a few weeks ago but I have been sooo busy that I haven't posted anything. Every year my city, Kashima, holds a day full of mud sports. Since Kashima is right on the bay of the "Ariake Sea" there are huge stretches of mud flats all along the shore. We were too late to sign up, which sucked. Me and the 3 other exchange students from Kashima all went, but only stayed 10 minutes since it started raining like crazy almost immediately. There were a lot of foreigners there visiting and participating.

Instead, we all ended up hanging out at this super boring mall that was really nothing more than a grocery shop/target like store. However, as we were walking through the LITTLE KIDS' TOY SECTION...we found these :D Fireworks!
Yes, those are toddler toys at the bottom of the last picture..
...They sold a lot of strange things, now that I think back....

Then we all went to eat ramen....The end
I'll post more later...