Ok when I said I would update again tomorrow it was an awful lie. A week has pasted and I still haven’t got the rest of last weekend up. The formatting is a little wacky for some reason.

The next morning, Dec and I woke up early and headed for the train station and caught all the right trains, on time and everything. Thank you Dave for working that stuff out. We arrived in Nagano City with time to spare which was excellent. We then proceeded to wait at the fountain for people in the north of the prefecture to drop off their used clothes. The response was great. Tom drove my car up from Shiojiri and met us there. As we waited for him to arrive, the people who were dropping stuff off waited around with me and chatted. There was a troop of boy scouts there too. I was a guide when I was young and it was cool to see a big group of them there all decked out in their uniforms. Most of the JETs there are leaving Japan next month so they were all sharing their thoughts on how that is going to be. One guy, Hartley, was talking about his last day at his visit elementary school. He has a question period at the end of each lesson and this being his final time to go there, the kids were invited to ask him questions about the future. One little girl stood up and said “Hartley, I’ll never forget you.” This tear jerking moment was brought to an end by the home room teacher who said “That’s not a question.” As Hartley was reliving this crushing moment for us all, a man came out of the station and asked what we were doing with all of the clothes. We said we were collecting them for poor people. He told us that he was poor and lived in the station. He wanted to know if he could have a pair of pants. We looked through the stuff to find some pants that would fit him and he was on his way. A little while later a second man came and told us the same thing. We found him some pants and a towel. We decided that we would try and do something similar in the fall in Tokyo where there are a great deal of homeless people. These guys that we met that day were very clean and well kept. We would never have believed that they were homeless except for the fact that they carried all their stuff with them. A community group was giving away free miso soup as part of an anti drug campaign that day so we all had a bowl of miso together and then we were on our way. When Tom arrived we loaded up the car and headed for Starbucks. I was extremely tired and a little hung over by this point and didn’t feel like socializing all that much. But I knew we were meeting our homestay family and I hardly ever see the northern people so I stuck it out. Once Chiyoko met up with us and her current homestay Kathy, we headed out to Chikuma area to see a historic samurai house. The descendents of the samurai now maintain the house and its collection. Their family has lived there for over three hundred years. They still have all of the household effects preserved perfectly. We looked through the documents room which I thought was cool. They had floor plans for all the big castles in Japan. They also had a list of everyone in the town. They had to maintain a record that stated there were no Christians living there. Every family had to give their stamp. The house collection was amazing. They also had a large collection of stuff on Germany and the Olympics because they had visiting athletes stay with them during the Nagano winter Olympics and the Special Olympics who they still keep in touch with. The woman laid out a delicious cold plate of desserts and fruit for us and we had some tea. It was really nice. I needed to go to sleep in pretty much the worst way by that point though. So we finished catting and then repacked the car so we could all fit. Tom, Dec and I headed back down to Shiojiri. I tried to nap off and on in the car. I got home and Gisela was already there making a salad. I went to the station with Dec so I could look for my bike that got stolen. I didn’t find it but I was sure it would return to me eventually. Then we went for dinner around 10 and I recapped the rafting part of the weekend for Tom and Gisela at the Royal Host. I slept like a log that night.