Trip to Parque Espana, the Spanish Village

I had a nice time today. After last night, I had such a good rest to start today. I was so happy and relaxed you couldn’t believe it. We had to all get up by 7am, but I woke up a little earlier, around 6:30am to be more exact. I woke up even before the alarm went off and just chilled in my room for a little bit. I took my time to get ready and wanted to get out of the room early enough to go downstairs to mail a postcard to myself and to my family. I don’t have many people’s addresses so I couldn’t send any more than that.

We all had breakfast in the room that we had dinner last night. It was your traditional western style mixed with Japanese breakfast. It was pretty good for hotel food, but last night’s dinner was pretty good too and then after breakfast the students got all packed up and ready to leave. There wasn’t that much time from the end of breakfast to the time we all had to be on the bus so everyone was rushing for a little bit. We took the bus to the Spain Village, even though it was next door, and I mean less than 300 meters away. We took the bus because we wanted all the students to carry their stuff onto the bus and leave it there. I think the bus took us further away from where we were before which is really weird, but it took us to a place where we could get our class pictures taken. I took a picture with 11th grade Yuri, pretty much the same as last year’s picture, but there are a few new students in the class. The background was the park’s entrance, which isn’t too flattering, but it is a nice picture. There are some other people in the background too, but there’s nothing we could really do about that. Then we got ready to go into the theme park.

I rode on the Pyrenees one first. It was pretty good. The whole day I only went on 3 rides, but that was enough for me. Once you go on the fastest ride there first, the rest don’t seem to measure up. It’s nothing like Magic Mountain, and it’s more like Knott’s Berry Farm way back in the day when they only had a few rides at the park. After the ride, Mr. Suzuki and Ms. Katsuyama and I just rested for a little bit. It was pretty hot during the midday and I thought that it was unusual since the forecast said that it would be raining today. We chilled right out in front after taking some pictures and getting some video taken for the yearbook. We then talked to some students before we needed to leave to get some lunch. I thought that lunch would start at noon time, since that’s when normal people eat lunch, but we actually had it at 11am.

In the late morning we had lunch. It was a nice Ise lobster with steak combo. It reminded me of the lunch I had in Okinawa from the style of them cooking the steak and lobster. It was damn delicious. I still think that the one from Okinawa was better, but I don’t want to take anything away from how good this meal was too. It was nice and fancy and they dressed us up in bibs and everything so that we wouldn’t get all messy eating. How thoughtful of them, but it really was delicious because you can see it all getting cooked right in front of you. The smell was awesome and my mouth was just salivating just watching the chef prepare it. It was enough food too, and not too much. I thought that was good since the VP told me that I had to go on more rides since I only went on one by the time we had lunch.

We went on a ride very soon after lunch. Mr. Suzuki and I went with a group of girls in the 11th grade Fuji class. It was the Gran Montserrat ride. It was pretty good and it wasn’t enough to get me sick, although I felt a bit ill before the ride. I think that most of these girls are clued in that I know a little Japanese. I think that they think I know Japanese very well. But I think their English is better than my Japanese. They’ve been suspicious for a long time and since I’m going on all these trips with them and all the teachers only speak Japanese, I think that they believe that I speak Japanese. It’s a bit of a dangerous situation.

Then there was a parade in the middle of the day. It didn’t last very long and it wasn’t really spectacular or anything, but the people there were actually from Spain. So I was able to speak a little Spanish with them. That was pretty cool. I took many pictures, they didn’t turn out well, but I did take them. After that since it was so hot, I chilled out a little bit.

The last ride that I went on after the parade really sucked. It was horrible because there was a lot of stopping and starting and it wasn’t very stimulating because we had to wait a little while for it to start. The operator was waiting for more people to join, since the theme park was really empty. So a lot of time was wasted just sitting there and then it was a herky-jerky ride and your head would get tossed around like a ping pong ball. It reminded me a lot of Disneyland’s Space Mountain, but not as exciting and not as good.

I had a bad headache after that and that lasted for most of the way home and then some. It was nice to get some sleep on the train, even though it was a bit awkward because I was sitting next to one of my students and she’s on the tennis team. I’m glad that we were able to talk for at least a little while. I wanted to talk to her more so that she could speak more English, but my headache just wasn’t going to go away, so I just had to take it and get some rest. I didn’t get to talk much since she took a nap too. Actually a majority of the students took a nap on the train back to Tokyo. We took two trains so some went to sleep and got up to go back to sleep again. I think at this point everyone was a bit exhausted.

After the trips, most of the teachers met up at Tokyo station and then there was dinner. We had dinner at the building next to Tokyo station actually closer to Yurakucho station; it’s a place near MTka’s workplace. It was very nice and of course we ended up eating a lot. I had a very good position because of where I was sitting. I wasn’t sitting at a table with all the important people and sat next to the newer and younger teachers. So I really enjoyed my dinner there. The food was good and the conversations were good too. I had fun and a lot to eat, and then I was glad to be at home after such a long day. I mean I had to take the train for over an hour to get to my home station and then walk home and it started to rain a little. That wasn’t very fun, but when I got home and showered, I was glad that it was over and finished. I had fun, but just my body couldn’t take it anymore. I think it might have been because I was really relaxed yesterday.