Wednesday, January 26, 2011

and Finally...Part III


Hi All,

Finally part III, the last of my recount of my Christmas break!... Well for the most part.

For New Year’s we were particularly interested in celebrating it Japan style. We wanted to do the whole “wake up early and watch the sunrise”, “pray at the shrine and make a wish”, “hear the bells or drums”, we wanted the whole nine-yards. Of course we didn’t do it exactly, but we had a good compromise =)

We had our own “party” to a wait midnight. We made it a potluck do we had a bit of variety in food and it was a nice small get together, the 5 (Ka Lai went to China to celebrate with her family) of us exchange students and one other friend.


Close to midnight we went to the shrine and to our surprised it was super crowded. There was a ton of people!! We heard loud cheers to what we assume was some sign of midnight and then the masses started moving inward towards the shrine and we came to the realization that we were in a massive line that curved around inside the shrine.

We followed and donated our money and made our New Year wishes. We walked through and found many stands and foods as any festival we had been to before. There was a massive fire (still not sure why people were burning they just bought New Year’s souvenir) but yeah…


We pulled all-nighter to wait for sunrise. And it was cold, and slow. We headed to the shrine again and bough wooden plates to write our wishes and to hang at the shrine. Oh we also buy a fortunes and if you like it you keep it, if not you tie up and pray for a better one.

After New Year’s we met with my Japanese TA and now friend Mariko and she gave us her own tour of Yokohama. It was great.

Mostly we did a lot of New Year’s shopping (or window shopping). But we also got to go an amusement park near the station. We rode the Ferris wheel and got a magnificent view of the surrounding Yokohama.


We also found a T.G.I.F in Yokohama, American size food and menu. It was phenomenal.



It was all very great =). Japan rocks. Well that's all for now.


Later

5 comments:

  1. Hey I was wondering. About how many exchange students are there at Nihon University?

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  2. I don't know about Nihon University as a whole, it's a pretty huge school with many campuses. As far as Nihon U. Mishima (International relations) the campus I am currently at, they have more Korean and Chinese exchange students than "Westerners". We were only 7 in the entire campus.

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  3. omg 7 westerners? damn >_< do yal try to communicate and what not with the other koreans and chinese exchange students? I feel like im going to be in between alot of groups lol westerners, japanese, chinese, koreans. hopefully I can make some good friends as you and as i did before at Kansai Gaidai

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  4. Sorry for the delay reply. It's difficult to communicate with the other Asians students because the level of English and Japanese among us varies greatly =\... But it's ok, you have to really be open and get past the language barriers, once you do, it's all good and worth it.

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  5. Well sounds pretty much like KGU except the other asian students were able to speak more english lol will you still be here for this coming spring semester?

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