Sasebo

Here we are at the Huis Ten Bosch train station.

The Huis Ten Bosch hotel.

Yesterday I took the train to Sasebo with the other exchange students Nawael and Chelsea. Chelsea and I got on the train at around 10 in the morning and then Nawael got on 30 minutes later from her town that she currently lives in. On the way to Sasebo it was nice to be able to chat with them about our exchanges and stuff that we were experiencing or having a hard time with so far. About an hour later we then arrived in a town called Haiki where our friend Yuka from ROTEX picked us up to go teach us a traditional Japanese fan dance. We are supposed to be performing this dance on the 20th of December at the Rotary Christmas party/orientation. There was another girl there too learning the dance with us. She is going to be an exchange student next year. We practiced the dance for about 40 minutes. It was fairly easy because the movements in the dance repeated over and over again. It was a good thing that it did not take very long to learn because we were all so hungry. We took the bus to the mall in the town I think we were still in Haiki. Both Haiki and Sasebo are smaller towns than Nagasaki. We ate at a restaurant which had many options for everyone. I ate an omelet with shrimp and spinach in it. After lunch we were able to shop around for a bit and then we walked to catch a shuttle to the onsen in Sasebo. The onsen a Japanese hot spring. We all took a nice long hot bath. There was both an outside one and an inside one. I preferred the outside one because we could see the view of Huis Ten Bosch which is a residential style resort modeled after a Dutch town. We could mostly only see the hotel of Huis Ten Bosch but the hotel building is amazing! I asked my host father today if we could go and he said yes! I can't wait to see more of Huis Ten Bosch. We also enjoyed the dry sauna and the steam room. However after a while it got too hot and my head started to hurt. By the time we were finished though it was almost time to catch our train back home. After the train arrived back at the station my host mother was there to pick me up and we went out to eat at this restaurant called Afternoon Tea. It was a cute little restaurant and in a way it kind of reminded me of a restaurant in New York City, which was nice. I ordered the pasta set so I received pasta and a roll. The set also came with a piece of cake of your choice and tea of your choice. They had so many options. I chose chamomile apple tea with a small piece of banana bread. It was nice to sit there and enjoy my dessert and tea while listening to Christmas music. It seems as though these days any place with Christmas music I find myself feeling more at home and finding comfort in it. This week I was at Starbucks twice and it was so nice to sit there drinking chamomile tea and listening to the christmas music!