Day 34 (Osaka) : I enrolled in a middle school?

Today was the hiking trip that I've been blogging about on and off for the last few days. Apparently our language school and every single middle school in Kansai had the same idea to hike around this park. When they said hiking, I thought we would be going up some kind of mountain but it turned out to be a 5.0km track around Nishiori Park. The majority of the hiking was done from the train station to the park though a residential area. That didn't stop people from taking pictures of the different homes and pets that we passed on the way their. I thought it was kind of freaky. I mean, if a stream of people walked through your neighborhood and started taking pictures of your house it would be strange right?

We spent the whole day surrounded by little children in their school uniforms. All in all, it was pretty lame but taking pictures with my class mates was pretty fun. I realized that my camera really needs the strap to be effective though. I either had to carry it around in my hand the whole time or miss out on all the good picture taking opportunities. The whole experience reinforced my policy of not letting other people take pictures for me. These guys would hand seven or eight cameras to one person to take the same picture over and over again. The whole time the camera are dangling around like a bundle of fuzzy dice clacking together and making all kinds of bad sounds for cameras to be making.

I managed to get a sun burn so I'm going to soak it for a bit before I turn in for the night. Here are some of the pictures that I've been able to track down so far. Once I get the e-mail addresses of some of my other classmates there should be a few hundred more.