Nagasaki Hello, all! :D As promised, here's my biweekly blogpost - and this one's a biggie! Me and my host family took a trip to Nagasaki!! But first, we visited Huis Ten Bosch to see the massive tulip gardens and Dutch-inspired landscaping. Huis Ten Bosch is basically a huge amusement park, where we ate lots of castella cake, saw some performers and magicians, and saw some and went to a bunch of different events, too. After Huis Ten Bosch, we said goodbye to Sasebo and then headed to Nagasaki city to do more sightseeing. The first thing we checked out was Glover Garden. Glover Gardden is dedicated to a Thomas Glover, who was a Scottish merchant and shipbuilder. The architecture there was heavily inspired by the West, and it almost made me feel nostalgic looking around at the different residences-turned-museum. Nagasaki's really cool in the way that it became home to one of Japan's first ports that accepted imports...

Snow Camp Hello, all! Just came back from a major camp up north Japan in a place called Iiyama, Nagano. Needless to say, I had a BLAST in the snow that I missed out on this year (it doesn't snow in Tokyo like it does back in Chicago). And since - predictably - I took a ton of photos, I'll let the pictures kind of speak for themselves. :) There were over 600 people who attended, and we were all separated into groups. Each group stayed in its own "minshuku" or lodge and all shared rooms. Within our groups, we had all sorts of events and little adventures we went on. Such as... taking a bus to get around the lovely snow town that is Iiyama... meeting everyone else from Hippo family club at a massive lodge... later having a snow sculpture contest... sledding... snowshoeing... making/eating our own ice cream... making these cute little candles and also setting a few up in our gigantic igloo we made... lighti...