20 Oct - Architectural Museum, Japanese Lessons and Soccer

Day 1 Hachioji Soccer - By Grant

So I woke up early to read my book 100 pages left and read 40 in the morning (the book was really sad then I role played on the computer. After that Matsubara san was coming to pick us up so we went to her mother’s house just down the road. She was just about to pick us up but before we left I raced and got my soccer boots. By that time it was 1:00 so we went to a western style restaurant with some Japanese food, I had a Italian burger and the drink bar. Next we went to the place where the artist who wrote and drew Spirited Away got inspired from. There was the tram that the writer got inspired by and everything. Then my mum and I had to catch the train to Hachioji (where I was doing the soccer) while Zoe was getting a Japanese lesson.
When we got there none of my group was there. When some of them arrived they looked at me strangely, then when one particular boy arrived and he introduced himself to me and he later became my good friend. His name was Senri and he forced a lot of the other boys to introduce themselves. One of them was Shinji Ono. Once the training started we did some warm ups. One of the warm ups is a game that I play with my dad (show class maybe) it is where you try and push the opponent and make them move (only using your hands). I won all my games. After all the warm ups were over we did a small amount of ball mastery, compared to Australia. Next we played a game of 3 attacker’s vs 2 defenders and a goal keeper. The attackers have to score in one big goal where the goal keeper is. If the defenders take the ball off the attacker they have to score in 1 0f the 2 small goals in the corner. The big goal was 3 metres big and the 2 little ones were a 1 metre. After that we played 8v8 small field games and great fun.

Tonight was Zoe’s first Japanese lesson at the Ueda School, literally next door. I had volunteered the kids to be guinea pigs for one of the student teacher’s at the School but since Grant had soccer, so Zoe was off on her own. She was all excited about it and when we arrived back, she said it was great fun.