The Road Less Traveled

April has been a landmark month for Max!

First was his 17th birthday, which we celebrated doing a couple of our favorite things - going out to eat and watching a movie! We took Max out to a Japanese restaurant, where he got to practice a little bit before his trip to Japan, and then went and saw Sione’s Wedding. And a few gifts of course! When Sarah saw his birthday pictures, she summed it up by saying how grown-up Max was looking. And indeed, he’s matured in many ways over the past year. We are very proud of him!

Then, despite the challenges of moving to a new country and new school, Max got straight A’s in his first term at Westlake Boys High School and glowing feedback from all of his teachers. And this is doing the Cambridge (i.e., Honors) track! I continue to be very proud of the fact that both of my children are smarter than I am!

To cap off the month, Max had the opportunity to go on a two-week exchange program to Japan during Fall break (yes, it’s our Fall break), which he has just returned from. There was a group of 16 boys from school, along with two teachers. They travelled to Ichinomiya, Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nara, Tokyo, and Isesaki. They visited the Toyota car factory and museum, Hiroshima Peace Park and musuem, temples in Kyoto and Nara, the Imperial Palace and shopping in Tokyo. They stayed with host families in Ichinomiya and Isesaki, visiting the local schools. During the welcoming ceremonies, the boys sang the New Zealand National Anthem, the Westlake school song, and performed the school Haka. Since Max was new to New Zealand and Westlake, he didn’t know any of these, but he did a great job of learning them before the trip.

Max’s pictures are on flickr here, and follows is his guest blog entry about the trip:

“Japan is a unique place, and twice I have had the pleasure of traveling there. I traveled with a group of students from my school down here in New Zealand along with one of the Japanese teachers, Mr. Renau, and Mr. Rivers, the deputy headmaster. We had a long trip onboard a 747 equipped with on-demand entertainment systems. I watched movies such as Aeon Flux, As Rumor Has It, and Finding Nemo. After taking a second three-hour flight from Tokyo to Narita we met the families who would be hosting us for the next four days. They made me feel really comfortable, they even left a cooler of water in my room. They enjoyed the gifts I gave them, and they served a really delicious cherry blossom cake that night.
The next day I went to a neat art museum for the pieces of Setsuko Migishi. She had painted many beautiful suggestive paintings of Europe. Later that day my host family took me shopping at a large shopping center called Jusco. They bought me three really nice ties along with a cute totoro doll. I felt a little bad because they had spent a little more money than I had, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Later we saw a movie called Firewall. It wasn’t a bad movie, and the fact that it was in English made it quite a bit more enjoyable for me. That evening, we watched Howl’s Moving Castle in Japanese. I really enjoyed it, but understood fairly little.

The next day I got back together with the group and we went to the Toyota car factory. It was really neat to see how the cars were assembled, but my favorite part was the machine room. Here, close to fifty robotic arms would all come down at once on a small line of cars causing sparks to fly everywhere. However the Toyota exhibition hall was awesome, there were many really neat futuristic vehicles. Some of the one-person vehicles could easily make segways a thing of the past. That night my host family set up a hot plate and we had various sautéed dishes including yakitori.

The next day we were supposed to go to an amusement park, but because of the rain, we went instead to an aquarium. One of the coolest fish there wasn’t even real. In a really dark part of the aquarium there was a projection of a deep-sea fish in a fake tank. It looked really cool, and it took me a few moments before I reached into the hollow in the wall discovering the illusion. That night the Ichinomiya high school gave us a welcome ceremony, including koto playing (a Japanese harp), geisha dancing, several forms of martial arts, and taiko drumming. I really enjoyed the taiko drumming, someday I want to go back to Japan and study it. We also performed our school Haka, and luckily, we did it pretty well. Afterwards I went home with my host family, and we watched one of my favorite movies, Laputa.

My final full day in Ichinomiya got off to an interesting start. This day we were supposed to teach students our Haka, originally we would be teaching this during a class, but when we arrived at the school we found out that we would only have about fifteen minutes. Then, once we had introduced ourselves to the students, we discovered that we would be teaching them right there in the gym, and that we would only have about ten minutes. We did our best, but the girls kept giggling. Afterwards we played a few English games with a class and ate lunch with them. My host family ordered Lunch boxes for dinner, I didn’t care much for the desert, but it was very good over all. By the time I went to bed that night, my host family had given me an umbrella, Twilight Samurai the movie, an Iaido book (Japanese sword), and the three ties and totoro doll they had bought me at Jusco. By the time I got on the train the next day with yet more gifts in my bag, I was feeling really bad for having gotten them so little (little did I know that the day I returned from Japan, a package would arrive from them containing an origami book and paper along with some totoro napkins). My host mother cried as I waved goodbye from the departing shinkansen. The first part of my trip to Japan had come to an emotional end.

After checking into a capsule hotel in Hiroshima (they were actual quite comfortable) we visited the Hiroshima peace park. Being the only person in my group from America, I felt really self-conscious. By the time we left I was feeling pretty depressed, though it seemed that I was the only one. We went shopping later that day, I found a nice wax stamp (for letters) and another student on the trip bought a digital camera. That night I discovered that I had put my notes on the presentation I was supposed to do the next day in a bag that I had sent ahead to Isesaki. Luckily, I was able to recall most of it and felt reasonably prepared for the following morning. The next day we took the train to Himeji and at Himeji Castle I gave my little speech. It was a really beautiful castle, and I was ecstatic that the cherry blossoms, which normally fell a week earlier, had hung around. This gave me a wonderful chance to take pictures of Himeji framed in beautiful cherry trees.

We left Himeji after a brief lunch destined for Kyoto. After checking into a nice Ryokan, we took a bus to Ginkakuji (the silver temple). The sand formations there were incredible; there was a cone of sand as tall as a person! Unfortunately the temple was closing and we didn’t have much time there. We took a bus to Kiyomizudera, a huge temple in Kyoto to watch the sunset, however, due to the overcast sky, we instead occupied ourselves enjoying the fine architecture the buildings. It was here that another student on the trip spent five thousand yen on a fake katana. The next day, we visited Kinkakuji (the golden temple), which was similar to the silver temple, but brighter (except for the fact that it was raining that day). Afterwards we took a quick train to Nara and saw the imperial palace. This was absolutely gigantic, a huge structure beyond the scale of any other wooden building. Even the wooden statues inside were beyond anything I had ever imagined. We returned to Kyoto and spent the night in the ryokan.

After that we went to Tokyo and visited the fashion districts. This was interesting, but not my sort of thing. Then we did some shopping in places like Akihabara and many people were going to buy i-pods and PSPs because they had been told that they could bargain, decided against it when they found vendors solidly against bargaining. We were going to see sumo wrestling, but they finished before we got to the ring and so we just got to watch them sweeping up afterwards. While in Tokyo we went to a really cool amusement park and I rode this huge rollercoaster. We also explored Tokyo harbor and saw this neat building constructed around a large multi-storey sphere in the middle. Then we went to Isesaki and met our second host families. We spent two days going to lessons, which turned out being really boring, largely because I understood almost none of it. We also went to a doll making factory and glass making factory one day. It was really cool to visit these places, and I bought a neat glass horse with flakes of silver. While on this expedition, we also got a chance to make soba, since we had to eat this in addition to our packed lunches, I had trouble stomaching it all and ended up feeling a little sick that evening. The next day we spent a day on a bus bound for Tokyo and then finally caught a plane back home.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Us in New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.