Konnichiwa Room 5, it's Eddie here
again. Wow, what a camp. On Thursday night we went into the
city by densha which is a tram. There was no air
conditioning working on the densha so we were sweating
buckets. Finally about halfway through the ride the driver
turned it on. We go to the train station and got
our tickets, but we had about 40 minutes to wait. We sat and
had a rest.
An old man from Kyushu, which is another Japanese island came up to
Mr Luke and said "You are very big, where are you from?" Mr Luke said
he was from New Zealand and the man then asked if everyone from NZ
was that big and Mr Luke said "Yes". We all started to
laugh.
The man had been doing the 88 temple walk. On
Shikoku Island there are all these temples that you can walk to and
get special stamps in your book. Lots of people do it.
A Shikoku Island temple. Going to Nakamura by train took
about two hours. The trains over here go really fast and I
was a little scared and a little "travel sick". You have to
make sure you are holding your ticket as someone comes to
check it every so often to make sure you are going to the
right place. When we got to Nakamura we were met
by two more NZers called Wendy and Matt. We stayed at their
place on Thursday night. On Friday we all got up early and
went for a walk along the river before the bus came to pick
us up. We hopped on the bus and the students looked really
scared of us. The camp was about 20 minutes away. When we
got to the camp we were assigned rooms and put our stuff in
there and then got ready for the games. The Buzzy Bees won some of the
games, of course with the help of Mrs Luke. They won the
sporty type games. Mrs Luke was making them do press
ups and sit ups if they dropped the ball or weren't
concentrating. She told them that if they were in NZ they
would have to go for a long run if they did something wrong,
and they believed her. She told them that she knew 8 year
olds that could throw better than them. That made them try
harder.
The Buzzy Bees team was made up of five students and Mrs Luke. One
of the students was an exchange student from the United States. He
was from Oregon. His parents paid for him to come to Japan and he
stays with a family for 10 months. He has to go to school with the
Japanese students and have all his classes in Japanese. He said he
doesn't understand the classes too much. He also has to go to English
class with the students. He will be going home in two weeks.
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The students are part of an International course run at their High School. They have to apply to be in the class and need to have a good understanding of Englsih. They have a lot of English classes and they will be going to NZ next year as part of their studies. During the whole camp they had to only speak English so they carried their dictionaries around with them trying to speak English all the time. |
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We also had to make a TV commercial. Our one was about David Beckham as the Japanese love him over here. It was really funny. One of the boys in the group was really tall and he was the school sprint champion. We made him Beckham but he talked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everyone laughed when he talked. |
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At night we had BBQ, Japanese style. A BBQ is placed in a hole in the middle of a big table. You sit around it and cook small pieces of meat and eat at the same time. You have a huge packet of meat and veges and cook and eat all together. It was really hot sitting there but also very delicious. |
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After the BBQ we sang English songs, mostly the Beatles and the Carpenters. They love all the old music. The music here is about 10 years behind NZ.
 The Beatles (to left) and The Carpenters (above) |
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On Saturday we finished camp and got ready for the long trip home. Wow, what a couple of two days I made a lot more friends and took photos so you can see what we did. I will be coming back soon, I just have a few more photos to go. Hope you are all trying hard and studying about Japan. See you soon, Eddie |