A Totally Awesome Thursday!

With all of the school visits over for the week, we concentrated our visits on Thursday to sites around Kakuda City. We started our day in the Community City learning the ancient art of origami with an origami master. There are only 30 certified origami masters in the country of Japan and we were lucky enough to work with one today. She and the members of her club helped us make origami cranes, horses, mouths, and then she gave us gifts of origami she and her club members had made. We decided that Jess, Anthony, Renee, and Lindsay were in the Quest origami class while the rest of us struggled to follow our helpers. Thank goodness Jeff was at my table. His engineering skills came in quite handy when I fell behind. Although I didn't keep up with the folding, I could get the horses to flip quite well!

When we were finished with our origami lesson, we had lunch at a traditional Japanese-style restaurant where we sat on tatami mats on the floor. Our meals, though, ranged from Japanese fare to french fries for those who were less adventuresome!

After lunch, we toured a Japanese beef farm. It was very interesting to see how efficient Japanese farms are. He had very little acreage, but was growing rice and had several heads of cattle. He grilled for us his specialized beef (wagyu) which we all agreed was out of this world! All it needed was some pepper and salt and it just melted in our mouths! Billy was especially fascinated with the farm and kept comparing it to sheep farming. I think it was one of his favorite activities of the week!

Our last visit of the day was to a rocket engine factory that is working on space technology for JAXA (Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency). We learned about their research and then made our own bottle rockets that we launched outside. We all had great fun trying to figure out just the right balance of water and compressed air to make the rockets fly. Several of them ended up in the road several hundred yards away with bent noses and wings, but it was certainly a blast!

To end our day, we said our formal good-byes at the Farewell Dinner. What a wonderful way for all of us to thank our families and the city for all that they have done for us during our visit. Many of the students have decided that either want to stay here or return to Kakuda soon. We did our best to let them know how much we've loved their city and people, but it was hard to express in words exactly how we feel. It is truly a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Tomorrow we are supposed to visit the ocean and take a cruise. We are all hoping that the rain that started falling during the Farewell Dinner will stop so that we can enjoy our cruise without being wet! Wish us luck!