Today is the day we have tickets for the Nano-Mugen Festival presented by the Japanese band Asian Kung-Fu Generation. It's also my birthday, but only if you go by Japan time. We got up early and headed to Yokohama Arena for the day long festival.

Last night at about 8:30 or 9PM we started to climb Mt. Fuji. It was considerably colder there, so we changed into jackets and shorts for probably the first time in Japan for a lot of us. We started from Mt. Fuji's 5th station, the highest up you can drive. From there it was still 5 hours of hiking up a mountain to reach the peak.

In the morning we woke up and the teachers were there to see us off when we left Nishikawa Heights, hope we see them again. We took the bus from KIT to Kanazawa Station, activated our rail passes (free Japanese Rail trains anywhere in the country for 2 weeks) , and then went to Tokyo station. Instead of going straight to Yokohama like I planed for, Trevor talked me and Xander into going to Mt. Fuji with everyone else. So from Tokyo station we called our hostel in Yokohama to cancel that day.

Today we had the closing ceremony for the KIT IJST program. The president of the university, who also came to our Rube Goldberg machine contest, spoke at the ceremony, and also gave out awards for the machines, posters and speeches. It was apparently 97 degrees in Kanazawa today according to the weather report, so wearing suits was a bit tough, but we had a lot of fun taking pictures afterwards.

Today we had to present our Rube Goldberg machines. Our machine was decently complex:

After today, there will only be 2 full days left for me at KIT, but two weeks of traveling yet to come. With that in mind, today we put the finishing touches on our Rube Goldberg machine project, and tested it a bit. We only had one successful run through today, mainly because we also had to finish our posters and write our speeches for the presentation tomorrow. My partner mostly wrote both, which saved a lot of time then, but the speech was pretty long and difficult, so after class I practiced a lot.