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Japan: Day 1

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Well, we're here! Here's our "Proof of Life" group photo to prove it: We had a few plane delays and almost didn't get on our 2nd leg, but we managed to make it just before they shut the doors.  Upon arrival at the Haneda Airport (Tokyo), we waited in a passport/immigration line that might have put Disneyland lines to shame. Thankfully, it moved swiftly, so there wasn't much standing around. After bumbling our way through the customs paperwork to find our Tour Director, Michiyo Sato (up to this point there might have been a few students (they will remain nameless) who almost left their luggage behind if Ms. Ruch hadn't been vigilant on their behalf...), we loaded onto our bus. Before doing so, however, there was quite the buzz about the squat toilets in the girls airport bathroom (none of the students were ready to use one yet, but I'll do some coaxing and hopefully they'll warm up to it so they get th...
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Day 5: Zippin to Schweiz

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Is it really obvious Mrs. Williams didn't help me with this post's title? 😂 I will start with a fun fact and trivia question to set up the next day of our trip: "Schweiz" is the Swiss German term for "Switzerland." For trivia, what are the four official languages of Switzerland (here's a hint: none of them is English!)?* Today was a travel/transition day as we made our way into Switzerland from France. And how did we make that transition?  The bullet train!  Bojan says this train cuts down a six hour bus or car ride into a roughly three hour train ride. The only downside to this exciting way of getting around for us car-loving Americans is our train left at 7:25am, which meant in order to give ourselves decent cushion as a big group, everyone had to be packed and ready to load onto the bus by 5:30am. Phew! Not surprisingly, everyone delivered (a few students MIGHT have blown through the meet-up time and kept sleeping if a thoughtful chaperone hadn't...
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Japan: Day 7

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" Ohayō Gozaimasu!"  ("Good Morning!"). Blogger didn't save one of my drafts properly and it deleted my first version of a good portion of this post, so it might be a bit more terse due to the time I lost having to rewrite this. 😳 Apologies! We finished up in Kyoto by visiting one of our last Shinto shrines, Fushimi Inari Taisha. This shrine is unique because it has thousands of torii gates (they look like arches to us). See below for an example of a torii gate (if you ever see one, you'll know you're at a Shinto shrine and not a Buddhist temple)!  Also, as you see in the pictures above, the place was crawling with Japanese students. Apparently June is their "field trip" month so we saw many kiddos of all ages throughout the day. They were so delighted every time we said "Hi!" and invited them to practice English on us. They got all shy and excited when we would gush over th...
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