Today, we finally made it to the hotel where we’re doing our kids work. I’ve struggled to find wifi today, and have only just gotten one of my many devices connected via a tether to the one device I have that will actually connect to the Internet here.

There’ll be no photos on this blog due to the aforementioned problems, if I can get more charge in my phone there’ll be many photos tomorrow.

We left Sapporo after tidying our apartment this morning, after making even more decorations under the strict guidance of Amy. We travelled with a missionary couple who filled us in with their missionary story on the way, they’d a very varied life, though had mostly been in Japan since the 80s.

Upon arriving at the hotel we discover it was very well placed beside a river and pretty idyllic. seriously wish I had photos for this bit… We also discovered the very traditional Japanese room we’d be staying in, complete with no beds, only futon style mats.

And a super famicom, aka, the Super Nintendo.

🙂

Hopefully I don’t waste too much time on that…

We decorated our halls, like you can see here… Wait no. Maybe tomorrow…

It’s so warm here that we’ve turned the air-conditioning up as cold as it will go, and don’t really want to leave the room.

We attended the first conference session and introduced ourselves to the missionaries who’s kids we’d be looking after, then taking the kids for half an hour (supposed to be 15 minutes…) and played some random kids games with them. We acquired a new team member, Sarah Grace who has become the girl of the inseperatable names, as most of the team cannot just say Sarah and have to use her full name, due to an email miscommunication a while back. It’s getting awkward.

We had a massive dinner, words cannot express the choice on offer, and pictures aren’t available so use your imagination and picture lots of fried things, rices, noodles and cakes.

We then had another 2 hour session with the kids, playing yet more games, breaking my voice again, and making Robbie and Philip take the kids for piggy back rides. Running. (There’s Karen’s voice again…) Drew took out Monkey and told a story that ended with him getting eaten. It was pretty grim. I’m wondering how he’s gonna come back tomorrow after being eaten by a lion…

The kids are great, appear to be pretty smart, and it’s great to see each other working hard on what we’d been planning for months. Some of the kids cannot sit still or be quiet for more than a few minutes, but that’s normal… Right?

A key problem I’ve seen is some of the kids that don’t speak English are struggling. They look pretty bored and struggle to participate in games. We only have one interpreter and she can’t work with all the kids at the same time, so it could become a bigger problem.

I dunno where the girls are, but the other guys are enjoying some quality time together. Some quality naked time. Yup. They’re up on the roof, in one of the hotel baths with many other men being naked and wet.

Apparently it’s an awesome experience.

Tomorrow sees the start of our program proper. Hoping for some good fun with the kids and no awkward questions about how monkey survived today.

Time to sleep on the floor!

Dave – Hoping you used your imagination for everything but the bit about the guys being naked.