Tag Archives: festival

Natural disasters and fireworks; what a perfect host family day!

Host family day is always a fun day! As my host family had already noticed that I was quite tired after a week of many exciting activities, they told me that we wouldn’t start the day until closer to 9, so it was ok for me to sleep past the usual time of 7, which I found very satisfying. Breakfast was served in the traditional Japanese way of delicious, and once the full family of four (counting myself) were ready for adventure, we departed for the local museum of natural disasters!

At the museum I gloriously failed a quiz on how to react during an earthquake, and managed to bleed some nosebleed during a fire evacuation drill, which really impressed the group of Japanese people I was getting a tour with. In addition, I got to experience an earthquake simulation of how a scale 6 earthquake would have been, which was fairly terrifying. We also went into a rain chamber to get a feel for how it is to stand in 30 m/s winds and 30mm/h rain, which doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider that the winds of a typhoon are twice that strength, it puts things into perspective.

Once we finally finished at the museum, we moved on to the Buddhist temple Shibamata Taishakuten in Tokyo, which is surrounded by very touristy shops. The temple itself had a very nice garden behind the main building, which was only overshadowed by the amazing wood carvings surrounding the temple. The last part of the day was dedicated purely to watching the awesome Japanese fireworks display, which was a really good finish for the day! Relaxing and interesting all the way to the end, and I could not have asked for anything better.

Simen Solum (Norway)

Host family day with Pokémon

“Enjoy your day off with your Host Family”, they tell us the day before, and so I did. Both me and my host mom agreed on that sleeping in on this day was a good idea, so the day started slow. After we all had eaten breakfast and gotten ready for the day, we left the house to pick up a friend and her family. It had become quite clear to my host family before that I really liked Pokémon, so our destination was the Yokohama Pokémon Center.

The ride was quite long and with 4 young children in a car, this could have been very tiresome, but luckily there were DVDs to watch, and so we watched a Doraemon movie on the way to Yokohama. I might not have understood everything they said, but I did understand that the evil guy that came from a century later than Doraemon did not win the fight in the prehistoric times. There was also a unicorn.

Having arrived at Yokohama, it was quite clear I wasn’t the only Pokémon lover among us, whose family had noticed, because in the Pokémon Center we encountered Irina and Sam and their host families. After thoroughly browsing the Pokémon Shop and other shops and trying my best at (and winning) a small game they offered, we went to get some lunch, to check out some more small games and a Pokémon pop-up store. After we were all satisfied with having played the games, doing Gacha-Gacha’s and having bought the things we wanted (a Pikachu shirt in my case), we went home tired but satisfied.

But the day didn’t end there, because that evening a local shopping street organized a festival and we were all invited to come, in yukata’s (the summer, festival edition of a kimono) if possible. And so, a lot of us showed up, some in normal clothes, some in yukata, and even someone wearing a Jinbei. When we arrived there, we got a surprise. We were apparently volunteers to work at the festival booths, but nobody had told us in advance, so this caused some stress for some of us. But after all the shifts ended, and when the bon dancing started we were too busy dancing and saying goodbye to worry about it anymore. This Saturday was the last day of session 2, the Sunday was departure day and since some people left early, this was the last goodbye for now.

Thank you everyone for this fun festival and amazing session!

Sabine Boom (The Netherlands)

Bittersweet goodbyes: The last activity day in Session one

Group photo with the helping staff of the stamp rally at Eruru
Group photo with the helping staff of the stamp rally at Eruru

Today we first started with a stamp rally event in an arcade mall.

We were divided into 8 groups and each group was assigned to a flower shop, a sports shop, a tea shop, a cafe, a Swedish restaurant, a Japanese snack store, a deli store and a clothes store.

We had students from National Institute of Technology, Ariake college (有明高専) to help us and we could chat with them during the stamp rally. When children and their parents came to the store they greeted us using “hello” and “my name is —-” in our own languages such as Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish and so on and if they were able to say the greeting words then we gave our stamp on their rally sheet. I was a cameraman during the event but I could see all the kids and parents seemed having fun with talking with us although they were nervous to say the words from the beginning and atmosphere in the all the shops were very welcomed!

It was the first time to have this event in WCI but it all went smoothly and about 120 people including kids and their parents registered to join the activity, which means we put our stamps about 120 times, but it was worth to it! The purpose of this activity was to bring kids to the arcade street and let them know what kind of shops there are. Even though we didn’t think we helped with the sales of the various shops it was a nice opportunity to get the people know the stores and hopefully this opportunity brings about an another one and that those who visited us would come back to stores to buy stuff in the future.

After lunch, we went to Omuta shrine where daija (dragon float) was exhibited. People living around this area join Daijayama festival since they are young so it’s very familiar festival and although the festival is in middle of July they start making daija and practicing ohayashi which is a traditional festival music sounded by drums and flutes from May.

After visiting the shrine, we came back to Eruru and had our session wrap up.

Everyone shared how they broke out of their comfort zone and one of their best experiences during the session. Let me share some experiences from people; trying to eat natto as much as possible even though they didn’t like it, using Japanese style bathrooms, practicing dancing and performing it on the Arigato events! It wasn’t all unconditional fun, sometimes it was difficult to accept other cultures or things, but if possible everyone tried to have new experiences and adapt changes.

It was only 3 weeks but we spent most of the time together and through every activity we got closer and all the time we spent together became memorable.

Thanks, everyone, for making this a great time.

To everyone
One, two.. GOOD JOB!!

Shoko Mizuno (Japan)