Week 2

Sorry for the recent lag in updating, due to me being either busy or suffering from writer's block. Anyway, I'll TRY to make this a long post, but the problem is that nothing much happened in the second week of the program.

On Friday, we had some sort of party in the school hall, which consisted of introductions and games, such as human knot. Also, if I understood correctly, there was a comparison game where the Japanese students were asked to compare stuff between Japan and Singapore, and see which is bigger. For instance "Do you think that McDonalds hamburgers in Singapore are bigger than the ones in Japan?"

Following that, we had a session with a British teacher, which was a very welcome relief. We discussed various things, most notably Singlish, as well as sharing our experience.

That afternoon we also had CIP, which involved cutting grass down by the river. That was surprisingly fun compared to the usual CIP (except busking along Orchard road with my sax). Other than that, it was a normal school day.

On the day after, which was a Saturday, Ikuto and I played PS2, the usual Dynasty Warriors 3, of course. Then, in the afternoon, we cycled around the city with his friend. We also visited the Hamamatsu museum of science. Hamamatsu being a music center in Japan, there was a large exhibit on sound. There were also many other interesting exhibits, and although they were in Jap, the concepts were easy enough to understand.

After that, we cycled down to ACT City and bought McDonalds, which was slightly more expensive than over here. I also discovered that Singaporean McChickens are in fact bigger than Japanese ones. We ate outdoors while watching a local school band play. They sounded around the same standard as the RIMB. We took a "slightly" less conventional road home. I also realised that Japanese have very different views on road safety, and it's apparently the norm to cross a 6-lane road without traffic lights, crossings or anything, and cars WILL stop if they see someone waiting to cross.

The next day, we took a car ride up to some place call Acti or something. It was around a 2 hour drive, but the scenery was brilliant, especially up the mountains. We went to one of the mountains for lunch, where there was a stall selling soba (Japanese noodles) and barbequed salted fish. Then, we played minigolf for about an hour, before returning home.

The following days were uneventful, regular schooldays. On Wednesday though, we had a nice calligraphy session, as well as a talk on how Japanese characters evolved. Most people, yearning for Singaporean food, wrote the Chinese names of many Singaporean delicacies, such as chicken rice, chilli crab.... the usual. On that same day, we also witnessed a very interesting fight between a student and a teacher. I mean a real fight, and it may have turned serious if teachers and students weren't there to restrain them.

Thursday was our last day in school, although we would be attending one more lesson on the following Monday. We gave out our souveniers from Singapore, which consisted of various keychains. I also gave one of my school badges to this guy called Shunsuke, aka Ni Hao, due to his love for that phrase. The teacher in charge seemed especially happy to receive one, as she wasn't expecting it. We also got some nicely laminated copies of the class photos that we took earlier.

The next day, we would visit Kyoto, but I'll talk more about that some other time. Sorry if my updates are getting less frequent, and I will try to update more frequently... Also, sorry for the lack of nice pictures, but my "State-of-the-art" phone deleted all the pictures I took...

That's all for now, stay tuned for the next instalment!