JSLL #27 - Urashima Tarou - Twenty-eighth sentence

 With the 28th sentence, we've reached the final paragraph of the Urashima Tarou story.

ところが、海辺に着くと、あたりの様子はすっかり変わっていました。

ところが、うみべにつくと、あたりのようすはすっかりかわっていました。

Tokoro ga, umibe ni tsuku to, atari no yousu ha sukkari kawatteimashita.

We already saw previously that ところが means "However, still, even so."

海辺 was in our very first sentence and means "coast."

The verb 着くis new. It means "to arrive at, to reach." The kanji 着 is N4 and occurs in 60 common words, with varying meanings. For example, the verb 着る (きる, kiru) means "to wear," which also results in the word 着物 (きもの, kimono, literally "a thing you wear"), which means either "kimono" or "clothes."

Combined with the と particle, this first part reads as, "However, when they reached the coast,..."

The second half of the sentence starts with あたり, which we already know means "about, around, thereabouts." It modifies 様子 ("state (of affairs), situation, circumstances" or "appearance, look(s), air, manner, demeanor, behavior") to form the topic of the main clause. So it's something like "the circumstances/appearance of their surroundings."

Next is the adverb すっかり, which means "completely, totally, thoroughly." This adverb kind of resembles another adverb we saw some posts ago, ゆっくり, "slowly, without haste":

• Both adverbs are written in kana
• Both adverbs have a っ as their second character and a り as their last characters.

There are about 50 common words with the *っ*り pattern, and 39 of them are adverbs.

Finally, there's the verb form 変わっていました, the polite past tense of 変わる, an intransitive verb that means "to change, to be transformed, to be altered, to vary." The tense has the ～ている format, which indicates either something in progress ("was changing") or something that has completed ("had changed.") The second option makes much more sense here.

The kanji here is 変, an N3 kanji, which occurs in 40 common words, almost all of which refer to change in one way or another.

The whole sentence, translated fairly non-literally, thus reads:

However, when they reached the shore, (they discovered that) their surroundings had completely changed in appearance.