Feature Story: Summer Japan Trip

It was early July during our summer vacation; our group of 11 students, our teacher and a supervisor went through a 12-hour plane trip and had to spend over half an hour at the airport showing our passports, getting our luggage, going to the bathroom using very strange and fun technological toilets and hand driers, and getting our first group pictures taken before we finally got outside. When we finally went outside, the air was warm and the skies were mostly clear and beautiful, and after getting on a bus and having to endure a 2-hour ride, we were about to begin our first day of our 2-week long trip in Japan. We started off by staying at the Olympic Village in a pretty small and not so crazy part of Tokyo, but it was still a nice, calm and slightly bustling place with small, traditional japanese restaurants in these small streetways that served things from ACTUAL ramen to curry. We spent about 4 days in Tokyo, from exploring the most vibrant and peacful temples and shrines in the most natural places in Tokyo to shopping in the big, busling shopping districts like Akihabara with many shops that were several stories high and so many of those stores were filled with so many technological cell phones and music players, video games from very old the newest releases, and anime DVD's, figurines and accessories. "All the food places in Japan were the real cultural things that I truly enjoyed" said Nate, one of the students in the group. Apparently, the temples and shrines didn't exactly seem all that interesting to him during the trip, but I personally loved each and every one of them. After our stay at Tokyo, we had to take a couple trips by bullet train that took us about 2 hours to reach our next main destination. Though the trip felt pretty long, even though we were going very fast, the views were just amazing despite the pretty dark, cloudy weather, full of giant hills, old fashion Japanese houses and rice fields, and some of us in the group were playing Mario Party on our DS's (I ended up winning, even though I don't own the game). By the time the rain started pouring down, we had made it to Toyama, and our first destination there was at a high school nearby. When we made it to the enterance of the school, there were so many students cheering and welcoming us as we walked in, and by the enterance, a few students put on a fun little dance show for us. We walked up to the Flowering Room, and we were welcomed by a colorful chalkboard that said "Welcome Eastview High School!" and had each of our names on the board and who our host family was going to be. When we introduced ourselves to our host families and after a small speech, we went back home with our families and during the full week, we were a part of a school stay. My host family gave me a nice warm welcome when I entered their home, and while the family was being nce to me and were trying to have fun with me, the one problem about them is that they hardly knew any English, and my Japanese skills were a bit too basic to understand nearly anything they said. Despite that, we got along very well and suprisingly, they were the host family I wanted to be with since they were the family of an Japanese exchange student my family hosted 2 years ago, and speaking of the exchange student, he managed to get out of college for a couple days in the middle of the week to stay with his family and see me after we haven't seen each other in what felt like ages. "My host family was easy to get along with since my family mostly knew English from my host sister who went to Canada for a school stay" said Chad, another student in the group "It was easy to communicate with them" Yeah yeah, lucky him. For the school stay school stay, we had to wear a white polo, black dress pants (black skirts for girls) black socks and black dress shoes to make it as close as we could normally get to wearing a school uniform. We each stayed at different homerooms during the stay, and the classroom I was in was class 1-1, a first year class that was located up a level and looked like it was hidden since it was in a corner area, and it seemed out of order since if you start on the other side, it starts at 1-2, and then my class was apparently next to room 1-6; how does that work? The students in my classroom were pretty nice to me maybe since I was kind and friendly as well and I didn't look like a steryotypical big, scary American a couple of my group members looked like to them, even though they're very nice and fun guys. Fortunatley for me, my classmates were pretty good at speaking English, my homeroom teacher taught English and I had a couple classmates that were a part of their own school stay program. Me and the other group members didn't stay for too many of the classes we were in; instead, we did a lot of fun, japanese cultural activities from caligraphy, flower arranging and watching (and trying) Japanese style archery from the archery club at school. During the times we were in class, all we had to do was just sit and watched them teach. While I did try listening to see if I could undertand the teachers, I had no luck at all figuring out what they were saying (or even what kind of math they were teaching). However, one class I actually got to participate in with my classmates was gym where we were outside on perfectly clear weather. We did a little warming up and then we got to practice a little softball in groups of 4. The group I was with were the students that were a part of their own homestay program (I believe I was the only American in the group), and as the only American in the group, I actually did good at batting, pitching that made it easy to hit, even though they weren't too good at hitting it, and instructing them on how to bat and do catching. The first person was pretty good and was king of envious of how well I was doing; the second person was decent and was trying to have fun with the whole thing; and the last person was fun, but it looked like he never played any form of baseball in his life, he was even scared of me batting and lightly pitching. I considered that that was probably the best gym class I ever had, and I wish we could of played a whole game of softball as a class. The school even had a cafeteria where you had to buy a ticket for a certain food item in order to get it, and this was actually made, not like the American school CRAP we have. There was even a miniature convinient store right by the cafeteria that's in the school where you can buy snacks or soda that can go with your lunch, so I had Curry and rice and a tall can of Coke for my lunch every day at the school: BEST...SCHOOL LUNCH...EVER!!! (Suck it, American school crap!) Outside of the school, I made sure I spent plenty of quality time with my host family with family dinners and seeing a touring village on my day off from school. On our last day at the school, our classes threw each of us a little goodbye party in each of our classes, took tons of pictures of us, and they even gave us a small board they all signed in Japanese saying how nice it was to have us before we left the school. The next day, we left on a bullet train taking us to our last destination, Kyoto. The main thing we did there was explore a TON of temles and shrines and other cultural places like the rock garden which was so calm and soothing that everyone there, even my group members, took a nap as the cicadas chirpped and the breeze slightly cooled us in the nice summer weather. Also like Tokyo, we did a ton of shopping at a few more multi-leveled department stores and we had food that was a little less traditional in an underground shopping district, but we did eat some more traditional Japanese food while we there there, don't worry. "One thing I always had to get every day was a giant bottle of Aquarius" said another student in the group, Ian "That is the best drink in the world!" We even went into a Karaoke place over 10-stories high that had multiple rooms on each floor that had one giant karaoke machine with millions of songs (and of course there were a ton of American songs in English) and the room was small enough for just our pretty big group. We didn't care about how bad we could sing, we just enjoyed singing all those fun songs for hours, and we all could of been there for many more hours. During the nights, we would party at each other's rooms and oftentimes had weird conversations, but those conversations kind of got out of hand pretty quickly with the obscurity and how loud the others were. On our last day, we went to the airport and then we had to go through a 13-hour plane ride home. I miss Japan, I really want to go back to it soon, and I hope that Japan can safely recover with everyone helping them out in any way.