"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
- Mark Twain
I’ve kept busy the past couple weekends, doing one sort of party or another. Not to say that the weekday stuff isn’t great, too. It’s hard to believe, but we’re more than half-way through this semester! Starting pretty soon, I’m going to have to start worrying about finals and presentations. Well, I’ll go over some of the highlights of the past weeks.
On Sunday and Monday, I went out to the nearby town of Fujisaki to participate in some cultural activities intended for foreigners. I first heard about the offerings the week before, Hwang and Paku, both Korean students, came into the International Center at school to ask if I had signed up. I hadn’t, so they gave me the run down. There were a variety of events throughout the week - a welcome party, kimono, visiting local schools, a kite flying festival and making mochi, which are a kind of doughy rice cake. I was able to make the first two.
I’ve been having another great week in Japan. This past Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended hanami on three separate occasions at Hirosaki park. Situated in the northeastern portion of Hirosaki, the park is home to about 2600 cherry trees, which all have spectacularly blossomed. I’ve been told that over the course of “Golden Week” (which happens next week), about 2 million people will pass through Hirosaki park. I will now do as many other gaijin already have and cover my blog here with photos of pink trees.
This past week has been one of adjustment - it’s been a long while since I last went to classes at a college level. Like I mentioned in my last post, I last went to classes last fall semester at UMaine, about four months ago. Now I’ve gotten my schedule all worked out and I feel like it won’t take long for me to get back into the swing of things. I’ll talk a bit about my classes, and then about the weekend, which was exceptionally fun - there was a welcome party for the new foreign students and then rafting with the club I just joined, the adventure club, or tanken-bu.
I met Lim upstairs at his room exactly at nine o’clock, just as we planned. He was already cooking some rice in his rice cooker, the steam warming the room. He mentioned that he was watching a “dorama” on his computer, but when I went to see what it was I found it not to be a drama at all, but rather a comedy. He was watching the American version of “The Office.” I was pretty surprised. I told him how popular the show is in America and how my brother Will is a big fan.
Joe In Japan by Joe Kester is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. –
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