A day full of activities

One of the delicious strawberries

Me and Mac (I am not fat lol, that is just the wind blowing XD )

Me and the mushroom block

Asahikawa city from a higher view

Saturday was a ton of fun. The day was full of things I did with my host mom. First, in the morning, one of my host mom's students came over with his mom. This was like a conference because my host mom is a special one on one teacher. So while my host mom talked with Ryota's (student) mom, my host mom asked me to take him to a park nearby for an hour. Ryota was in 4th grade, so it was hard talking to him because he did not understand that I could not speak Japanese very well. We had a fun time and I gave him some candy I brought from America.

My grandpa had therapy at 7:00pm, so my host mom told me that we would drive around and go site-seeing for a while. We drove to a city called Pippu, which is famous for strawberries. We went to go strawberry picking again!!!!! My host mom had stopped some residents of Pippu to ask which strawberry farm had the best selection because there were farms everywhere so it was hard to choose which one to go to. They told us that Makino had the best. So we went to Makino Farm and it had strawberries galore. What made this farm special was that it had different types of strawberries. My favorite was the Kentaro kind. :D (Funny, because Kentaro is also the name of my friend from Japan that lived in America when we were younger.) The man in care of the strawberries came up to me and started talking to me in perfect English. I was surprised and he told me that he was a retired college professor and studied English in America for six years. He told me to call him Mac. We talked about differences between America and Japan and how Japanese fruit have so much more flavor than the ones in America XD. The strawberries were delicious. I probably ate more than I did last time. After strawberries, we went to a town right nearby that was not famous for strawberries, but for mushrooms. (No, I did not see Mario there, hahah.) We went to a mushroom house and my host mom asked if I was allowed to look around. The keeper was glad to and we went into the dark and cold chambers in the back. There was aisles of mushrooms. I got to hold the blocks they had that the mushrooms grew out of. It was cool, but hillarious, I mean I was holding a block with mushrooms popping out of it. HAHAHA. After getting away from strawberry and mushroom land, we next traveled to what seemed to be watermelon land. Of course, we did not buy one because they were like 50 to 75 dollar watermelons! They were huge and looked delicious though.

After visiting those three places, we drove up a huge hill with a road on it, so I could see the entire city from the top. It was awesome. I put my hand over my eyes and looked afar. Starting from the left I looked across the city. When I looked at the right side, something caught my eye. It was my rival. AHHAAH! I laughed because that one skiing hill I went to a while ago was standing tall in the background. It reminded me of how I could see it from anywhere and it seemed close, but was actually very far away. After we had taken grandpa to his therapy, we took the bus to the downtown area of Asahikawa. We went to a restaurant there and it was Izakaya style (this is a common Japanese bar and restaurant). It was delicious, like all the food I have tried :P. There were 4 people next to us that seemed to be in their 20's. At the end of my meal one of them started talking to me. It was hard for me to understand. My host mom came over and he talked to her. He talked to her for a very long time. While they were talking the other guy told me that he loved me and he will give his life up for me while holding his beer up and shouting. LOL. So I said bye, but the guy that was talking with my host mom walked over to the exit with us. He said he wanted to learn English from me. My host mom assumed he meant for money, so she asked him how much, lol. He said he was poor, but then he asked what food I liked. My host mom replied with Meiji chocolate. So I had an offer to teach English for boxes full of Meiji chocolate and maybe dinner or lunch sometimes. His name was Hirama, and he was very nice. I haven't decided what I will do yet, but he told me to call him Monday if I am ok with it. At the time, I was super confused, it was not until later that my host mom cleared this up.

After dinner we ran to an Anman (steamed cake) shop, it was a little store that was just outside. The dessert was something like a little bread loaf or bun filled with Japanese azuki sweet beans. There were porcupine shaped ones also, filled with sweet potato. Those were very cute, lol. My host mom bought 2 of each so we each could have the azuki and sweet potato. They were soooooo good! I did not want to eat the porcupine one because it looked so perfect, but I couldn't resist. It was delicious, lol. We made it to the 11:00 bus just in time and headed for home. My host mom and I talked for a while and I thanked her for the awesome day.