The Eye of Patrick

Hello Everyone, Sorry for not posting lately, I just graduated on Thursday and have been busy saying good bye to friends. But I wanted to give you something to read, this is a post from when I was on exchange at Kansai Gaidai. I will post some over the months to come, until I am in Japan and can give you more JET stories.

Take care,

Patrick

Since coming to Kansai Gaidai I wanted to get involved in the Japanese culture so I decided to join a club. When you join a club in Japan it is a major commitment as you are required to dedicate a lot of your time to club activities unrelated to the purpose of your club. In my case I joined the golf club because I have golf before in my life but I have never actually practice to much so I thought why not pick up a good skill set for future job applications. Also I thought it would be a good way to meet new Japanese people and break away from the many Japanese at my school who are simply trying to become friends with foreigners because it is cool or they want to speak English. My first time at the golf club was great everyone was very nervous including me, but they had such a friendly vibe to them that I decided to come back the next practice and had continued to do that for the last while. Clubs are an important aspect to any school and as a result when my school had their name sake day, Kansai Gaidai Days, my club and many others opened little shops around the school and sold stuff. I think there was at least 20-30 different clubs and booths selling stuff, this was no amateur operation as the equipment that was used by these groups was sometimes very complicated.

We started day before the festival getting ready, we had a meeting at our club house and discussed what we were going to do and sell, my club had been selling baby castellas for the longest time (Baby Castellas are small balls of cake with chocolate inside) So we got to work painting and decorating the stuff that would be covering our booth, I was held responsible for writing some of the English signs as we made the booth as bilingual as we could as we had many different people attending and we were unsure of their Japanese or English ability.

Then the next day came, it was a Saturday but we had to be at school for 8 am to set up, even though the festival was not till 1 pm that afternoon. When I woke up that day I questioned the reason why I joined the golf club ha-ha…. so I got to school earlier then I ever had before. All my golf mates were there and starting to set up, so I pitched in and helped.

Then we realized that one of the local food stores was selling eggs at a discount compared to other stores, there was just one catch and that was you were only able to buy 2 per customer. We got around this by going in a group of 4 and going through each checkout line, I think there was like 14 lines so we were able to get many eggs. It was worth it, as a penny saved is a penny earned as the saying go.

Other actitivities were going on at my school while I was there. My school has a cheerleading squad and they were doing some stunts, they were different then what I was used to in Canada, as they did more dancing then gymnastic kind of activities. But still to watch them was so interesting and exciting.

Before the festival started I was unsure on the number of people that would come to the festival as my school in Canada has hosted similar events and the turnout to be say to be poor at best. But that was not the case, even with the poor weather we had, which was rain, many people came. I was in charge of selling to English speakers, so this meant that every foreigner that entered the school was required to talk to me. Plus I had to go up to Japanese people and speak Japanese to them and shock them into buying my product, this worked a couple times. If you know me I am shy person so this was hard at first, but it got more fun as time progressed.

Here is a funny picture I took, it is a picture of the takoyaki machine that we used to cook the baby castellas in… in this picture it looks like the devil.

And as I had to go to class I went to the washroom where I was able to get photos from the roof.

So all in all it was an interesting experience that has taught me a lot about Japanese culture that I would have not experienced had I not decided to break away from the confines of my gaijin life.