Summer Adventures

This picture is from a few weeks ago. It was our friend Caleb's birthday (he's on the far right) so we went to Bellini's expecting it to be a small hangout. SO many people came. It was really fun. My friend Audra had a couple of people from the couchsurfing network lodging with her, and it was fun talking to a people who weren't English teachers (no offense, English teachers). They were from London and were in Japan for work(physicists working on solar energy), but also traveling after their seminar in Tokyo. It was a fun night.

This is Bret, Remi and David (the one who paints all the cool pictures I have sent home). David's friend who he met at a guesthouse in...some city not on Shikoku....was visiting and he made a huge batch of amazing vegetarian curry. It was really good. We all hung out for a while (this was after swimming at the river) and everyone was speaking a lot of japanese, but it was still fun even though i was slightly out of the loop

Me at the river! Japan is the hottest, most humid place I have ever lived, and going swimming in a cool, clear river is the best remedy when I feel like I'm never going to feel cold again in my life :) Some people don't know this, but Japan's rivers are mostly dammed up and have concrete barriers to prevent flooding. Aside from being barricaded by concrete and stripped of their natural beauty, lots of them are surprisingly polluted. People have...less of an appreciation for nature in most public beaches and things(not everyone...but it's not that much of a generalization). It's odd. (When I went swimming in the Seto Island Sea a few weeks ago in Kannonji, there was garbage everywhere. It was almost too gross to swim. Like when people barbeque or whatever they sometimes just leave or throw into the ocean whatever they don't want . I saw an onion, plastic bags and a lot of bottles. Part of the problem is the whole aversion to public trash cans that Japan has, but that's another topic altogether....) So having a clear pristine river to swim in whose water is good enough to drink is really special. Also, not many people know about/care about this river because it's sort of up in the mountains where few people go so whenever I go with friends we're the only ones there!

Bret, Derry and Caleb in the river. Where Bret's standing there was a really cool rock that we used as a water slide. It lost some of it's slickness as the day wore on, but it was fun while it lasted :) Derry and Caleb are both teachers in the JET program.





The gang! Caleb, Derry, Remi and Bret. It was a really nice afternoon at the river. We did a little hiking, had a picnic and swam all day!

Remi and I on the bridge crossing the river to get to the big tree and shrine






This was at the Kamagawa river party. Kamagawa is not the river in the pictures preceding this one. It's much bigger and much more popular because it runs through the center of the town more or less. People go there to barbeque, camp and light fireworks. Fireworks are an all summer long thing here. They call them "hanabi" and wherever there's a barbeque on the beach , there'll be bottle rockets, roman candles and sparklers.

This river party was really fun though. The river is pretty slow running and broad, but has a few rapids if you hike up to the steeper parts. We had a big inflatable island thing and about ten of us carried it up to the rapids and floated down the river. It was incredibly hot and we swam all day. Despite copious amounts of sunblock i still got burned!

Our friend Pat organized the river party. He brought a generator, tents, lights, firewood, speakers and turntables and tons of chairs. He is closing his bar, Bellini's, but this party was basically like bringing Bellini's to the river. He even brought an old couch for us to sit on by the campfire. On the last day of the river party (it was THREE DAYS LONG) they burned the couch. In Japan, they incinerate all non recyclables, so I guess it's not so bad, right? Our friend Taka took a video, it's pretty funny, but maybe you had to be there. The best part is when Pat sits on the couch with one end on fire. I really hope someone got a picture of that.


This has been life in Japan for the last few days. It's not that unusual, right?