This is the golden pavilion in kyoto, it is very old and beautiful. The japanese people believe that everything needs to be balanced, so they built it next to water so the reflection could be mirrored to the observer.

In this picture I am taking part in the local town's matsuri, (That means festival to you Americans) One thing we did was drink ramune, which is a soda but there is a little glass ball inside a compartment that will stop the drink from flowing if you try to drink it to fast, so I lost.
One bizarre story that happened was one night my "uncle" showed up and said he was going to take me fishing (in Japanese of course) so later that day, after doing karaoke for 7, that's right 7 hours we went down to the ocean and started to fish for squid and it got late and I was wondering when we would go home, but the uncle just said we would sleep here. I had not known this was the plan, so I pulled out my handkerchief and that was my pillow on the itchy concrete wharf next to the ocean.
There were a lot of rock gardens, they looked cool but just seemed like a lot of effort to rake rocks everyday. 
This is the family I stayed with for two weeks, from left to right: yohei, likes baseball, risa, my sister who took me to school, tall blonde American Jefferson, Uncle fisherman, dad, watches bad Japanese soap operas, Nao, plays handball very funny, and finally mom who works as a nurse and drives her kids everywhere.

I had a blast!!!