Bowling!

During Giselle's visit, we tried to do as many fun things as possible. Seeing how Nishiwaki is incredible tiny, there aren't many choices, but we did find a few fun things to do. One of these great activities was bowling!

As you can see in this photo, Japan uses the 24 hour clock. And it makes matters more confusing, when a time goes into the next day, they keep counting the hours. So 25 o'clock would be 1am, and 26 would be 2. I think.

The next cool thing about bowling in Japan is the bowling shoes. They came out of a vending machine. They also got returned to the vending machine. Still, it was pretty neat. Also, if you take the wrong size of shoe, you can give them to the guy behind the counter who will replace them with a bigger size for you. Which is incredible necessary when you're from Canada and don't know what your show size is in Japanese sizes.

We had a brief moment of worry when we thought that Kris' feet might be too big for Japanese shoes. Turns out, they had his size, but if anyone with a shoe size bigger than a size 11 wants to bowl, its best to bring your own shoes with you. I think he said that his size was the biggest they had, which was a size 28cm. Yeah, they measure shoe sizes based on the actual size of your foot. What a crazy concept. I was a 24.5. Hopefully that means I can find other shoes that will fit me without too much difficulty.

Besides coming out of a vending machine, these shoes were nothing like their Canadian cousins. They were comfy, and scent free. They also had velcro on them instead of laces which made them much easier to deal with.

Brief language lesson: Japan has four ways of spelling things. Hiragana is a syllabic alphabet that is used for native Japanese words; like すし (sushi). Katakana is another syllabic alphabet used for foreign words; like my name コレン. They also use Chinese characters, and the roman alphabet, when it works.

Now, usually, all computers can handle these writting styles. Which is good for me cause it means I can use the computers at school to make up my English handouts. Yet, for some reason, the computers at this bowling lane, could only handle katakana. Which was easy enough for me and Giselle, since we know our names in katakana, but was a little more difficult for Kris since he is still learning. Luckily, he made up a special batch of business cards before he left Canada with his name in katakana. He just had to pull one out and copy the characters. These cards came in useful once again when I forgot how to write my last name when I was filling out a form for a karaoke place. But more on that later.

You know in Canada how the screen has little animations for when you do good? These ones do to. But they also have sound effects, which get really annoying when you're continuously doing bad. I captured this sound when Giselle threw, yet another, gutter ball. It's pretty silly.

And that was our adventure bowling. Since the games aren't too expensive, we'll probably be back again. And maybe next time Giselle will get a few strikes. :p