Volleyball in Japan - Saturday, August 2 Morning Games

 

 This is where we usually start our days.  We gather here to discuss our plans for the day and some times have breakfast.  It's nice and cool in here and the owner always kept the candy jar full for us. 

Hotel Edoite Conference Room

Top Gun girls, on our way to the train station.

 This is our daily path to the train station.  From our hotel, it's a 3-minute walk.  I am the caboose so you'll see a lot of photos with the girls facing away from the camera.  Susan is usually in the front.

Going down Morishta Station

 Our hotel is in the Morishta District.  We go up and down these stairs every day.  The subways are all very clean.  No garbage cans and no homeless people.  And we didn't see any street artists begging for money either.

Here we are in front of the ticket machine.  Coach Susan is our official ticket purchaser.  You can say she's the expert now, personally trained by Coach Yoko.  We would be lost without her.

Getting ready to play with 4 middle school teams.  We did a lot of walking and climbing stairs in the hot humid weather to get to this gym. They're already warmed up!  There's no AC in this newly built gym.  There's no chilled water fountain either.  It was really uncomfortable to play in here.  We played round robin for about 4 hours. 

Coach Yoko was our 6th player.

This game was against Nakamura Jr. High team. 

Photo with teams from all four schools:
Nakamura JHS
Hamakawa JHS
Hoyonomori Gakuen
Shinagawa Gakuen
Top Gun

Top Gun brought key chains and Ghirardelli chocolates for the players.

Also gave each team a USA Volleyball cowbell. 

After all the games, we had a 20 minute lunch break in this classroom.  Thank goodness it had AC.  We were able to regain our sanity here.  We were ready to melt away.   

They had a blast teaching each other English and Japanese.  They were loud and laughing like crazy.