Japan Update #5
About Halfway There
Welcome to the blog for this week; at this point in time, I’m about halfway through my study abroad experience. It’s been amazing so far and I’ve learned so much. Since I’ve arrived, I reinforced what I knew in Japanese and learned more. I was reflecting on my prior expectations and preconceived notions about the country and host university recently and came to the conclusions that I underestimated how great this would have been. Nagoya is a massive city with so many people and things to see. I’ll be sure to put a couple pictures of some of the cool things I see on my trip. The university itself has been generous and helpful to all of the foreign students that come to it. The school even plans expeditions that students can take part of. One of the trips I’m looking forward to is at the end of the semester, where we will go watch a live sumo match! Another thing that I underestimated was the quality of friendship that I was going to have with the people here. I knew that naturally I would find friends and hang out with them on my free time. What I didn’t know was I was that everyone would be so friendly and willing to hang out all the time. Along with having fun, so many different foreign students also provide a great opportunity to learn about other culture and make friends with other around the world. Recently when we go to eat something, we talk about the difference in our cultures and experiences. More surprisingly I find that we also share a lot of experiences. I never thought that I could be in a room with 15 people from other countries laughing and reminiscing about the same memes that came out 10 years ago. Just the other night we had a little competition over who could recall more Vine videos. I definitely plan to keep in touch with them after this semester ends. Thank you for reading this week’s blog, I’ll keep updating as it goes along.
– Luis
