And then they were eight

Just a quick update and an introduction to my team.
One of our team members, who came with this program last year, was only able to stay for one month this year. Sunday she left for the states while we were at sports festa (i'll get to that).
So, this is my team + the local mid-term (2-3 years) staff (who we affectionately refer to as mid-termers).
The first one on the left in the front row is Becky (now back in Colorado), then me, Johanna, and Gabi. Back row: Kathryn, Gabe, Cody, Aileen (mid-termer), Kevin, Mandy (mid-termer), Thomas, and in front of him Elbert (mid-termer).

I also wanted to include a picture of a bunch of student's that we crammed into a small space after about have the people who came to this BEST event had already left. ok, so it doesn't look that impersive in the picture, but trust me we were smashed in there.


Sports Festa aka Sports camp is held at a camp near Mt. Fuji (about 1.5 hour drive). It is attended mainly by the Shizuoka BEST Club, but Utsunomia brought a team (including 1 SIJ student who we met at orientation when we all arrived in Tokyo) and a few from another location. It is 2.5 days straight of sports. Everyone is divided into teams by two students who coordinated the whole event. The teams were fairly balanced in ability. They put one foreigner on each team and made sure that there were enough English speaking knowledge to get us through all the events. I had two girls on my team, who together were knowledgeable enough to explain the rules to games and translate anything else i needed to know. For two solid days we played basketball, volleyball, dodge-bee (basically dodge ball and frizbee put together), soccer, kick base (similar to kick ball), ultimate frizbee, a race like a three-leg race except the whole team (10-11 people) together in a big line, and a few others that i can't remember the names of.
This is a picture of some of the girls there and Elbert. Only the one in the solid blue shirt was on my team.
All in all it was fun, exhausting, but fun. The best part was just being a part of something they enjoy so much. My team came out 4th, by the way. Actually, we tied for 4th with another team, at which point, and clearly the automatic response, rock-paper-scissors was performed by the two captains, and by shear talent we were declared 4th place (out of 11 teams, not bad). The same thing happened for first place- can you image settling 1st place with rock-paper-scissors?! that's how they decide a lot of things, but the results don't cause any fussing, it's just used to decide and that's that. I guess it just surprised me because American kids complain "that's not fair!" I'll try and get a picture of my team and put it on here.