Long time no see

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Kamakura was amazing!!(6/26/ 2010) It actually made me feel like I was in Japan finally. We took a train from Yokosuka to Kamakura. Then to get to the road that we wanted we took the subway to that road. The road leads us first to a shrine which was really cool; it had a couple of levels to it. We also stopped in a couple of little shops that were around that area. One was a music box museum which was really sweet. Then we walked to the big Buddha. This was where we were going to meet up with all the other Camp Adventure staff that was on mainland Japan. We took a photo of everyone there. We got their quite a bit earlier than everyone else so we got time to look around the area. The Buddha was really huge! Since there was a lot of people we were really load which was kind of embarrassing being it is not polite in Japan to be loud, it’s a very quite country. After the Buddha we walked all the way up to the Bamboo temple which was called the Hokokuji Temple. I bet this was a 3 mile walk there, but we made it. The walk was nice because we went into random shops along the way. The temple was really neat. The nicest thing was all the bamboo around the temple. It was pretty amazing. For food on this trip I packed a lunch of the amazing Peanut butter and Jelly! Also on the trip we tried a candied apple which just had an apple with a red candy shell, and also a rice cake which Kamakura is known for. We took the very crowded bus back to the train station.
On Sunday (6/27/2010) we lounged around for most of the day. I did laundry which was a challenge in its self because there is only 4 washers and dryers for 60 people on our floor, not to add that the dryers take for every to dry a load of clothes. So I ended up having to take my clothes down to 3rd floor to dry them! We also did our programming for Safety Day and Fun Friday for swim lessons. We have these days the last Thursday and Friday for the two week swim session. We also went to the commissary and the NEX. At the end of the day we decided that we would go to two movies! This was in my opinion a very good idea especially because it was free! We went to Just Wright, and The Losers; both of the movies were really good which I was surprised by.
Monday (6/28/10) was the start of the second week of lessons for session 2. Lessons went well, crazy but well. I started to have a helper for my Preschool 1 class because I could not do any skills with them because I needed to be one on one which a child, but couldn’t because I had to watch (babysit) the other 4. My level 1 children were hard to teach because they are very negative about doing skills in the water. I would be a very rich person if I got a quarter for every time they whined or said I can’t! But you always learn from those experiences and find away to work around it, my solution came the next day! We had our weekly meeting for Yokosuka Aquatics that night. It took forever! I don’t think that people understand the concept of people being quite during a meeting. But it was all information that was needed, so maybe next time we will get through it faster.
Tuesday (6/29/10) was most likely the worst day of the week! My kids were horrible in the fact that they would not listen, they were crazy and very very negative!!! One of my level 1 kids would not jump in the water. They would not try new skills. My resolution to the problem did work though. My resolution was that they no longer could say “ I can’t” and if they did say it we would have to do 5 bobs which they hate! Eventually they realized that I was serious and stopped saying it. They even started to say I can do this!! So that was one positive to the day. Really the only bad part of the day was lessons. Nothing bad happened while guarding. We had our first in-service on Tuesday which was interesting because it ran over into our guarding time which made some caous. Tonight was our going out to eat night which we decided to go to the beef bowl. It was a little restaurant that you sat up at a bar to eat, but you ordered your food from a kind of like vending machine which you paid there as well. Then you sat at the bar and waited for them to make your food. They had a little screen that told them what was ordered. The food itself was really good. I just had a big bowl which had rice and beef strips in it. There was also a soup that came with it which was not the best. We decided that we wanted to try a new dessert so we went to the famous McDonalds and got a yogurt and strawberry McFlurry. It was not half bad, a lot smaller that the ones in the states which was not a bad thing either. So my day which started out not so good got better.
Wednesday (6/30/10) was pretty much the same, but was not as bad as the day before. We had lessons and then we guarded. At the end of the day we had home work night which we got pizza. The pizza was not very good, not enough sauce on it. The home work night was a fail thought because we had to do a aquatics song fest which took up all the time for it. A songfest is when we get together and sing all the aquatics songs to make sure we know all of them. This took a long time and we also had to talk about what was going to go on during Thursday and Friday (fun day and Safety day)

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