Tuesday, October 21, 2008
This morning we visited the board of education in Unzen. Our first meeting was a question/answer session with the superintendant of schools in Unzen. Our next meeting was a question/answer session with 3 parents of the school district. I asked about student extracurricular activities. I learned that most students in the Nagasaki Prefecture take Judo lessons outside of school. They might also take soccer, tennis, ballet, and calligraphy lessons.
After our morning meetings, the superintendant of schools took us site seeing to various places in their district. The Unzen school district has many schools, at it is composed of many islands. Some of the islands have only ten children on them, yet they come complete with a teacher and a principal! Can you imagine?
We visited the residence of a famous Samurai. It used to have a castle, but the castle was gone. It was surrounded by a moat, and there were many beautiful buildings, and a garden. The grounds were surrounded by a stone fence. The stones could be used to hurl at attackers if the residence was invaded. There were also rows of bamboo planted around the exterior, and the bamboo could easily be cut into arrows upon attack. Pretty cool.
The locals here call the volcano and hot water springs ‘hell’. Probably because of the smoke and boiling water that oozes up from the ground in many places. The city of Unzen is fairly new because it was covered in volcanic ash and was mostly destroyed in the mid-nineties. We were able to go up Narita Pass as close as we could get to the volcanic mountain that still spurts smoke. It was amazing seeing a new mountain forming. We then went to the sulphur springs – there was water BOILING on the ground, as a lava bed was close to the surface of the earth. There are many shrines here, as the Japanese consider this a sacred place.
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