International Salon and JATA International Tourism Convention

     So lately I keep writing posts and then not actually having time to upload them! So I actually have three posts that are about to go up :o And because of this, I'm going to start dating my posts based on the actual day that I wrote them as opposed to when they actually make it up here. It makes more sense that way.

September 24th, 2012

---September International Salon---

     Last Thursday was the first of a series of International exchange events that I have to organize for work as a CIR. Since I'm new to the position, and there are three new ALTs to Minamiboso city this year, this event focused on information about the new kids! We started with a quiz where the audience had to choose from A, B, C, or D what they thought was correct about me or my home town, and then the new ALTs gave their own self-introductions. After that I taught them to play “Heads up, Seven up” and then we did some international exchange (AKA the ALTs and myself were barraged with questions while everyone else got to eat dinner). I was surprised/really excited that there were 45 people that showed up! It was a lot more than I expected. I'm glad that there's so much interest in international relations in this area.

---JATA International Tourism Convention---

Minamiboso's booth

      The following day, I attended the JATA International Tourism Convention at Tokyo Big Sight to help out with interpretation. Minamiboso city had its own booth in the Japan area where I alternated manning the booth with another interpreter, and some fellow workers from the Tourist Promotion Division of the city hall.

 During my time away from the booth, I visited the booths of countries from around the world, gathered information, chatted with other foreigners living in Japan about their home countries, and ate some foreign food. It was a lot of fun, I learned some stuff about other countries, and now I just really want to go on vacation. Here are some of the highlights...

Free Thai Massages

Really impressive booths!　(Turkey)

The India booth was really awesome too.

Ladies wearing traditional clothing from their various countries (in this case, Malaysia)

Belgian Chocolate soft-serve ice cream. You can't even imagine how delicious it is.

On the way home we stopped in at this chinese-style ramen shop near my apartment. Not impressed. The restaurant owner was terribly confused when I asked for egg in my ramen, to the point where she just blankly stared at me for a minute straight before finally saying “We don't have any eggs...” What kind of restaurant doesn't have eggs! Then there were gnats flying around everywhere, and when my ramen came out there was a dead gnat in the soup. The only toppings on my ramen were bean sprouts and gnat. Seriously not impressed. I'm going to stick to the delicious ramen at Hananokura from now on...