Friday morning, we headed off to meet Hannah and Ellie in Yokohama, a port city near Rie's home in Kanagawa Prefecture. That is where Rie's daughter, Kaoru goes to school. It takes about 30 minutes by train. Usually, Kaoru leaves for school around 7:00am, but she forgot to do her homework the night before and really needed to finish it before a certain class, so she stayed home that morning to write it. So we went on the train with her about 10:00 to Yokohama. In this picture, Kaoru looks like she's on her phone doing Snapchat or Instagram, but she's actually finishing up writing her essay. After she wrote it on her phone, she recopied it by hand onto the essay paper she needed to hand in. She finished that up on the train on the way to school.
Since she's a high school senior, Kaoru has a lot of work to do every day to get ready for the BIG TEST she needs to take to get into college, the jyuken. She goes to school all day, then she goes to another after-school program and studies there until 9:45. She gets home every M-F about 10:30pm after riding the train home. And although she doesn't go to school on Saturday or Sunday, she goes to this after-school program on those days too, until late in the evening. American kids I know are busy with school and other activities too, but this is a bit extreme I think. I wonder if American kids would be able to keep up this kind of schedule for an entire school year? And she is so energetic every morning, even though she goes to bed so late every night. When she gets home at 10:30, she eats dinner, has a bath and does homework, watches TV, talks to her mom, and then goes to bed around 12:30-1:00am. I don't know how she does it!
When we arrived in Yokohama, we went to Chinatown right away. Every place we saw had delicious food, and it was lunch time, so decided to pick a place to eat. Hannah saw a YouTube video where these people went on a food tour of China or Hong Kong (I can't remember!) and they were eating these soup dumplings called shorompo. When you bite into them, a broth is inside and will kind of spill out. They are kind of messy to eat but really good!
We found a place that had those along with some other great food and we ate a huge Chinese feast! Ellie is eating a mango pudding thing in the picture above.
We also saw the Foreigner's Cemetery, where foreigners were buried from around the mid-1800's, and included people like the founder of the YMCA in Japan, and the founder of Kaoru's school, which was the first school for girls in Japan, founded by an American 200 years or so ago. Since Japanese people are cremated before they are buried, their cemeteries are very different-looking. Plus they are also typically Buddhist-style. So although it looks pretty normal to us, this cemetery is somewhat of a landmark. I will try to get a picture of a Japanese-style cemetery to compare this with.
It is shugaku-ryoko (school trip) season in Japan, so school kids from around the country visit different places. Yokohama is a popular spot, so I got a picture of a school group here. There were just tons of kids in school uniforms everywhere. These kids just had uniform hats, so maybe they are elementary students?
These little girls were just getting out of school in Yokohama. Rie said they are from a very exclusive private school. Ellie and Hannah liked their hats!!
