The last few nights we’ve been staying in a cottage surrounded by nature in Aso. Today Mum’s friend that she hadn’t seen for 25 years picked us up from the cottage. Her name was Chikage.
Chikage and her husband Shinichiro took us to a viewing point where we could see the dip that the volcano had made when it erupted thousands of years ago. From where we parked we had walk up a hill to get to the top viewing point. 
Before we walked up the hill we saw a monkey performance. The monkey could jump very high and far.
When we got to the top of the hill the sight was amazing. There was a man flying a remote controlled glider. It looked awesome. By the time we got to the bottom we were all very hot so we found a vending machine. From the vending machine I had melon soda [melon is very popular in Japan]. Next we drove for about 10 minutes to a very yummy restaurant. For lunch at the restaurant I had vegetable curry and rice. Chikage and Mum also had vegetable curry and rice.
W
hen we had finished lunch we drove for half an hour to near a volcano. We were meant to be able to go up and look in the volcano’s crater but there were too many gases coming out of the crater so it wasn’t safe.
After that we drove to a spring where you could drink the water. It tasted delicious. Once we had all filled our bottles with the fresh water we drove 1 hour to Chikage’s house in Kumamoto.
We met her son Kazuma who is 12. Later on Chikage’s daughter Tamaki, who is 16, came home and we went to dinner. Tamaki spoke really good English. The table that we sat at for dinner was low so we sat on the ground. The table was sitting in a dip so we could put our legs under it even though we were on the ground. We all shared lots of dishes and one of the dishes was a sashimi plate. On the sashimi plate there were lots of different types of fish. But the one that stood out to me most was a whole fish that had its inside pulled out. When it came to us its tail was still twitching. When we left I saw a tank with live fish in it. I think the tank was where our twitching fish came from.
When we got back to Chikage’s house we did some fireworks on sticks that we could hold [they were like sparklers]. It was fun.
We got back to our hotel quite late.
