Rough Draft: Summer Japan Trip Feature Story

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 technological toilets and hand driers, and getting our first group pictures taken. When we finally got outside, the air was warm and the skies were mostly clear and beautiful, and after getting on a bus, we were about to begin our first day in our 2-week long Japan trip. We started off staying at the Olympic Village in Tokyo, not in a very big and busy part of it, but it was still a nice and slightly bustling place with small and traditional japanese restaurants in these small streetways that served things from ramen fried meat. We spent about 4 days in Tokyo, from exploring the most vibrant temples and shrines in the most natural places in Tokyo to the big, busling shopping districts with like Akihabara with many shops that were several stories high and so amny of those stores were filled with so many technological cell phones and music players, video games of very old and new releases, and anime DVD's, figurines and accessories. After our stay at Tokyo, we had to take a couple trips by bullet train that took us about 2 hours to reach our destination. Though the trip felt pretty long even though we were going very fast, the views were just amazing despite the cloudy weather, full of giant hills and rice fields. By the time the rain started pouring down, we had made it to Toyama, and our first destination there was a high school. When we made it to the enterance, 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. For the school stay school stay, we had to wear a white polo, black dress pants (black skirts for girls) 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. The students in my classroom were pretty nice to me maybe since I was kind as well and I didn't look like a steryotypical big, scary American a couple of my group members looked like even though they were very nice and fun the whole time. Fortunatley for me, my classmates were pretty good at 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 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. However, one class I actually got to participate in 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 think 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. I considered that that was probably the best gym class I ever had. The school even had a cafeteria where I had to buy a ticket for a certain food in order to get it, and this was actually made, not like the American school crap we have. 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 school, our classes threw a little goodbye party in each of our classes and took tons of pictures of 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. We even went into a 10-story Karaoke place 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. 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 they 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.