We went to the shopping street in Suita, where we were each assigned to a specific shop. A group of five World Campus – Japan participants (including myself) were supposed to be teaching English, but ended up getting a private karate class from our student instead! At the end of the class, we decided to thank our student/sensei by performing some Rakugo for her, which we learned about for the very first time yesterday. I did not want to perform then, because I’m not good at improvising, but today I felt confident enough to try. And I actually sorta liked it, too!
Later in the day, we went to Kansai University to interact with the students. First, we got to play with the juggling club’s materials. My favorite was the diabolo: spinning it was easy and fun. I also tried really hard to catch it after throwing it up in the air, but I just couldn’t do it! Later, we talked about the differences between our countries, for example, what type of food we eat or how we celebrate Valentine’s Day. Our group’s question was: “what do you study at your university?” It turned out we all did something with languages, either English, Japanese, Korean or computer programming (we think it counts).
When the day’s program was over, we made plans with some Japanese students to hang out at the arcade the day after. We might also see them again at the Arigato Event. Somehow, World Campus makes it easy to make foreign friends, even when we have little time together!
Francine Geurts, The Netherlands
