A day in the life of a ninja

Today I was a ninja. I am serious. The three interns got to go to a bunch of ninja places. We went to a ninja house with all kinds of cool secrets, a weapons demonstration, and a place to test our ninja skills. Because we went to all of the places, we got an added bonus of being given ninja clothes to wear. I am in the middle.
If there is one thing that people stare at more than a white person, it is a white person in ninja clothes. It was kind of fun having people wanting pictures and so forth. I was really glad that it was cloudy today or it would have been unbearably hot. It was still a little warm, but it was totally worth it.

Here is a bit about the places we visited:

Ninja house: included hidden doors, secret peek-holes, places to store weapons, and lots of actual weapons and tools for you to look at.

The weapons demonstration was also way cool. I took a video, but I think it is too big to put up on my blog with my slow internet connection. At the end of the show they let audience members try throwing shuriken (throwing stars). Since we were gaijin in ninja clothes, they treated us like VIPs and took us to a private throwing range so that we didn't have people watching us. It took a few tries to get used to the shuriken, but in the end I almost hit the middle of the target.

These are not the ones we personally threw.

We stopped to get drinks, and Taylor made an impromptu CM. Nice.


Here is a picture of a ninja chilling on a street corner.

Our final stop let us do different activities to see how well we would do as ninjas. I actually scored pretty high. First we did kind of a timed matching game. Then we threw caltrops at a target and got points based on which chute they rolled down afterward - this game was mostly luck. The third game was throwing shuriken at targets. I was really happy to be able to play with shuriken some more. I got the highest score of the group. Then we played a computer game - think Wii Katana practice. Basically we practiced hitting targets with a sword (yes, we had a sword to hold). Our final game was retrieving a scroll using a fishing hook. You got points depending on the contents of the scroll. My favorite part was the shuriken. It was really fun, and I was actually good at it. I wish I could have played with them some more...

At lot of today was riding in the car, so I slept a lot today. We also had a few smaller things that we did, like going to look at Japanese pottery and eating Korean food for dinner. I had samgeopsal - can't write it in Korean, but basically you take these huge slabs of bacon, dip them in a salty liquid, put red pepper/miso sauce on top, wrap them in lettuce, and shove the whole thing in your mouth. Delicious!

Some cool pottery