« My House | Main | Japan Email #1 »
May 10, 2004
The Eurocentres School
On my first morning in Japan, my host mother helped me buy a month-long JR pass and showed me the way to school. It was a decent walk, but I enjoyed it every day. Riding the train you get to see a lot of people every day.
The first thing we did was take a Japanese placement test and have a short interview to judge our language skills. It was all in Japanese and I didn't do too well. ;-) There were 17 students at the school: Joy Baer (Canada), Chris Booth (Australia), Frances Chen (Canada), Urs Gort (Switzerland), Leo Hourvitz (USA), Simon Kammerman (Switzerland), James Kirby (USA), Seul Lee (USA), Sandra Leyva (Spain), David Lovett (USA), Leslie Luchayco (Philippines), Pierre Maeder (Switzerland), Matt Meyer (USA), Jose Saenz (Panama), Jacques Villettaz (Switzerland), Christian Waidacher (Switzerland), and Hans Wirz (Switzerland). Of course we only ever refered to eachother in our Japanese names. We spent that morning getting to know eachother talking a bit, and trying to ease out of any shyness.
The students were divided into different classes based on skill level. My class was named tori which means "bird." Probably because we were all bird brains. At 6 people, it was the largest class, and probably also the craziest. Everyone in there made class a whole lot of fun.
 |
 |
 |
Each class day was divided into four 50-minute lessons with a short break in between each one. The day last from 9 am until 1 pm. Afterwards we'd go to lunch, sometimes to the train station, other times to the Mietetsu M'za, a department store nearby which had a large cafeteria in the basement. The M'za became the favorite location for our group, as it had the most variety and allowed us to come back to the school to eat.
After lunch, usually around 2 pm, the school usually held some sort of cultural activity. The first day's activity was a tour of the neighborhood immediately around the school.
Posted by dminky at May 10, 2004 04:30 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://dminky.freeshell.org/MT/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/199