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For the first four days of last week (Monday-Thursday) and today (Monday of the next week), I volunteered at a chess camp. The first four days were very chaotic. We were at the Bel-Red Bilingual Academy, and camp was full of people who either barely knew how to play, didn't know how to play, or had a basic knowledge of how some of the pieces moved. Most of them spoke English, but there were a few that could barely speak English, and it rapidly became my job to assist them. It was hard, but they improved a lot over the course of the camp. The thing that annoyed me the most was how noisy and chaotic they were - imagine a bunch of five-year-olds stuck in a room for two to three hours learning to do something they don't really have that much interest in. Today was much better - the players were all decent, and all spoke English. As most of them were around ten years old, it was a lot more peaceful. However, there was still quite a bit of ruckus. It was a lot easier to teach than

For the last week or so, we were in Japan. We started out in Tokyo. The weather here was nice, and the food was excellent, but I think overall, it was under our expectations. There weren't many attractions and things to do, and the ones that we went to were small compared to similar ones in other places. For example, there was a temple that we went to - we were done in twenty minutes, and had planned a whole morning there. I think the highlight of my time in Tokyo was the cooking lessons. We learned a lot about Japanese culture there, speaking with a native. The classes were small, and we learned how to make great food as well. After that, we went to Osaka. The heat in Osaka was insane - it was almost always above 90 during the day. This made walking around not very fun - especially hiking a mountain for half the day. We were all soaked with sweat by the time it was over. We didn't even get to the top. The food here wasn't bad either, but not as good as Tokyo (in Tokyo, t