When you wish upon a blog..

Yeeah I've been lazy. I know. But my father won't sponsor my bustickets if I didn't do another post..

And I've always been an "all or nothing" guy.

[werk en purogwezz peepl.]

AFS Kyoto Summer Camp

Hokay! So, this is late, but the summer vacation started and ended in one go.
In Japan, you only have about.. 3 weeks of actual vacation, because of "hoshuu", which is basically where you just go to school. Yeah.
I didn't have to participate, but I did anyway.

Then, the AFS Kyoto summer camp.
Basically just a camp where exchange students and Japanese highschool students around Kyoto gather and have some fun for 4 days. I think I was just about one of the furthest away people coming.
I went with Nyuu, 11 pm in the evening on a night bus for Kyoto. It took 6.30 hours, i.e. we arrived at half past 5 in the morning.
And I didn't sleep a minute the whole trip. God damn it, I was tired.
I don't know why, but I can't sleep inside busses in the night.. for some reason.

We arrive at Kyoto station, and were picked up by a nice young girl around 19, who took us to her house, where we'd stay and rest before meeting up with everyone else. At her house, there were two other exchange students staying there, Adela from New Zealand, and another girl whose name escapes me from Thailand.
I crashed immediately as I sat down on their sofa, so I didn't get to talk a lot to anyone..

Around 8, we're driven back to Kyoto station, where loads of young people are standing around talking. I don't immediately recognize any faces until I spot a fair-haired giant standing in the middle.. It's Anna, from Denmark! After that, I slowly begin to remember a few faces, but half of the people were Japanese students or AFS volunteer university students.

We were divided into 6 groups, ippan, nihan, sanpan, yonpan, gohan and roppan. First group, second group, and so on, respectively. I was in group four, which is why you see me holding out 4 fingers in many of the pictures. I made that up, and everyone used it. ^^

Steve from Australia was in my group, and we met each other back in the beginning of the year. He has a goddamn fanclub at his school, because of his looks - but he doesn't have a girlfriend, grrr, bastard, haha.

In group four, him, me, and one of the two volunteers in charge of our groups were the only guys out of 12, so the group unofficially became the "Fuu-chan fanclub", lol. Lasted only a day though~
We enter the busses driving us to the camp, and right from the start, everyone's pumped, happy and cheerful.

We listened to a tape the volunteers had made with a quiz - stuff like, what's the theme of this camp (Everyone's a friend), or how can you tell if a girl's popular in school (She wears eyeliner - THIS IS TRUE).

It took a good hour and a half to get there, and when we arrived.. we had to walk 20 minutes. In 31 degrees C man, gah. And so much luggage.. Ofcourse, I'm a guy, so I only had two bags, fairly light. But being the gentleman I am, I carried some of the girls' UBER heavy stuff.

Made me realize that while it hurts on the good guys in the start, it pays off afterwards. And opposite, while it pays off for the bad guys in the start, it's gonna hurt afterwards. Heh.

The camp is a "doujo", which is not a Judo/Kendo dojo or the like, but like... a camp. It was written with the kanji "earth place" if I remember right.. Fairly clean, new (I think) and open. Boys and girls divided into 5 different cabins, so we had LOADS of free beds everywhere. Steve and I got a whole room with beds for more than 15 people for ourselves.

After we'd settled in, we gather outside in our respective groups, which we would do every morning every day. A leader is elected for each group - me! Woo!, and then we proceed to lunch and activities.

We did a LOT, so I'm gonna cut it somewhat short. Also, I forgot. Sorry.

First off, there would be a campfire the first day, so we were to practice dances that we'd all do together. It was to three different, super summer-y, happy songs. Here's my favorite one embedded. "Summer color" by Yuzu.

As you can see on a few of the photos, photo-bombing was pretty popular. Can you find me in this one to the right?

The dances were strangely hard to memorize, even though I really, honestly did my best to.. It just didn't stick most of the time, but it worked out in the end. Everyone looked like an idiot anyway.

Next up was a skit for the talent show for one of the evenings. Each group had to do their own thing, and then people could sign up too and do something. I did We Will Rock You again.
Ho yeah Danish cheerleading. Didn't have any beer to throw around or train chairs to wreck though.

We decided to do a little play, which was spun up pretty quickly on the place. It went mostly back and forth between Manami (By the blue shirt) and I. She's Japanese, 17, but recently came home from a 1-year exchange to the US. Her English was so good, I thought she was a volunteer translator.

She also acted very older-sister-like, always telling me to put on my cap outside or SHUT UP haha, I love her. I seriously thought she was around 24.

It ended up being something like, a gaijin enters Japan and wants to try out the new exciting culture, and starts with the unique food. What I recall was nattou, takoyaki, sushi and wasabi, and probably something else..

And in the end, an "ikemen", literally cool-face, appears, and tells the gaijin that even though Japan is so different, there're also things that are alike. I.e., beautiful(?) guys. Very deep eh. I was the gaijin. Guess who played the ikemen.

We didn't have time to write down a script, so I adlibbed pretty much everything I said, worked out pretty well though - me being the only one having more than two lines.

The other groups performed mostly skits too. There was a mute skit with a guy, specifically the Thai exchange student Thanabodee aka Fo, who'd go out shopping with his girlfriend.. and pick up literally hundreds of girls, mothers, grandmothers and whatever he made eyecontact with.

Then there was a dance show, about some puppets who'd dance when humans were not around. Then 5 humans entered, each picking up invisible "threads" behind the puppets, and making them move around, dancing. That one was my favorite, it looked so smooth~

For individual people, 15-something turned up. The three Thai girls showed a Thai "punishment game dance" which became outrageously popular during the camp, and was used spontaneously by many of the volunteers for no reason. Three Japanese girls came as a group, but individually did; a gorilla imitation (It was great, seriously), pop star imitation (Apparently one of them looked like some specific one), and some kickass robot-dancing. The last one was Akane. You'll find out.

One guy, an exchange student named Nick, played his clarinet that he brought along. He looked a bit like me with the hair, glasses and height, and like Europeans etc. can't tell many Japanese faces from each other, Japanese can't tell many European faces from each other either. So it resulted in many volunteers going "Nice playing on the clarinet!" to me and such, hah. Now I have contacts though.

Fo, the Thai guy, did some Muay Thai fighting dance, I loved his movements, he looked like.. well, a monkey, heh.

Gimantha, a Sri Lankan guy, also did a dance of his country, while wearing this armor-like .. bell suit. It was pretty crazy, he turned around and jumped like crazy, I wondered how he could still keep balance and smile at the same time. Apparently he'd been doing it every week since he was 10.

We also made curry outside in our groups, over a bonfire we made ourselves - like it wasn't hot enough! And the washing was the toughest I've ever done - the soot that stuck to the bucket-like things we used to cook the rice with was near impossible to get off (Rice was cooked perfectly though, woot), my group was first out, though. At 1 hour and a half.

Every morning and evening, there would be 3-4 exchange students doing a little speech in Japanese, while people were dining. That was fun, except I forgot to write mine beforehand. And I was too busy having fun to write one during the camp, whoops..

Ended up scribbling some ideas of what I could talk about, and otherwise freestyled everything, and it went much better than I'd expected, since I'd talked about the stuff/ideas before, to my friends in school. I didn't even have time to talk about the giant net incident..

The volunteers had also made a "kimodameshi", literally "gut test". Basically a .. what the hell do you call it in English, scare run?

We'd go around the camp in groups of 4 people in the middle of the night, solving riddles, while the volunteers would do their best to scare the living hell out of us - haha, was fun, but I wasn't really scared, because it was always easy to tell when they'd try something. Yes, I was with 3 girls, and I was ofcourse the one in front, literally being pushed, lol
Also the reason the guy on that pic up there is dressed up like some kind of.. zombie, with a giant syringe.. thing.

We were often divided into new groups to get to meet new people, too. We had animal, birthday and color groups, IIRC.
Animal groups were for the dances, birthday was for one morning's breakfast, and color was anything else than that.

During the camp, I'd naturally spotted a few cute girls here and there, and there was a semi-cute girl in my group named Reika (Pictured on the right) that I reflexively advanced on.
However, she quickly saw through my disguise..
Mind you, I honestly thought Manami was 20ish until the last day, so.. yeah.

Then, we were divided into birthday groups, i.e. one month for one group. I was.. I don't know.. I don't know, but, holy sh*t, my group was awesome.
If I recall correctly, it was five B-E-A-UTIFUL girls and me. Everyone of them. And they were chatty and nice to boot.

It was a nice breakfast, and that morning had the most speakers too. Enjoyable eternity~

Especially one girl, who sat almost right infront of me.. Akane.
A tiny girl of 144cm or so, extremely lively and cute. I don't know how our conversations went, but she ended up sending flying kisses to me (5, I counted) and making staring contests which she inevitably lost. She's on the right, with the hat on the back.

There was also Yocchan, pictured, who was really good at English and plays piano. She possibly had the most beautiful face I have ever seen. Friendly, but she wasn't interested, haha~

Later that day, the volunteers sold these AFS Summer Camp t-shirts that they announced with a song, going like this:

Atsui~
Natsu ni~
Shiawase~!
(Happiness, in the hot summer)

Dakedo, kimitachi
Nanika wasuretenaika?

(Although, you guys, haven't you forgotten something?)

Sore wa

Shaatsu da yo
(That is, the t-shirts)

Shaatsu no sei da yo

(It's the t-shirts)

Sama kyanpu

Tii-shatsu~
(Go figure)

Then it went onto something about "Buy one now for 1500 yen! CHEAP! Or two for 3000! CHEEAAP!!!"

And everyone remembers it, heh. Everyone bought one or more, because we'd use them to sign and leave messages on the last day.

Then, the bonfire. After we ate dinner the last evening, we went back to our cabins to find a huge wood-like contraption.. apparently to become the bonfire. Looked like you could live inside it to me.

We danced and sang, Tomodachi, President Obama, several Japanese athletes, Spider-Man, Shocker, among other strange and totally out-of-context famous figures appeared during the thing. It was awesome though, I love Tomodachi. *holds up left index finger, yeah, not right pinky*

One of the songs was "Stand by me" - although only the first verse, which kept getting repeated. Some few of us knew the rest, including me, which we started screaming out afterwards, haha

I was dancing casually with Reika from my group, when I was suddenly, literally, pulled down in the neck by something.
"Fuu-chan is Akane's!!"
To which I was dragged out in the middle of the circle people were standing in. Ah, I didn't mind~
Although it was a bit hard to put my arm around her shoulder and dance at the same time without falling over.

All of a sudden, albeit expected because it apparently happens EVERY YEAR - it starts raining. And how! The earthy brown ground became a huge man-eating mud pool. It didn't stop people from singing though.

We afterwards gathered in the dining hall, took pictures and stuff. I had totally forgotten to take pictures during the actual camp, so pretty much all of these are from the final day - except for the ones I got from friends.

As we were drying off our shoes, Akane, who was apparently a close friend of Reika, boasts to her, infront of me "Fuu-chan and I were dancing like Aladdin and Jasmin, you know~!" to which she totally went "Hmph!" to, turned on the heel and walked into the hall. Whoah, dude.
Although her name means "madder", Akane is my gilded butterfly. You'll see in the "Returning to Kyoto" part.

The next day, we were spending most of the morning signing each other's shirts. Took a damn long time, there wasn't enough pens..
After eating, we were driven back to Kyoto station to say goodbye. A lot of people were crying, and as you can see, Shef and Acchan (Leaders of my group) had red eyes on this picture. Although I'll miss my friends, then there's a reunion party in October.

While taking pictures and getting the last people to sign my shirt, I was poked on the shoulder by a young woman - who was apparently my host sister for the next 2 days. I didn't complain, and said goodbye to everyone.

And that concludes this lifeslice.

Pause

Ami was the name of my new sister. She's 21 and a University student, somewhere.
We had to take the train two hours to get to the house, so we got to talk a lot. She's both funny and talky, so I looked forwards to the next two days.

We were picked up somewhere in Shiga prefecture, which is outside Kyoto, by her mother and their dog, Kukku, chihuahua. Man, that thing was hyper and aggressive, but it luckily took a liking to me.

I also had an older brother, although only +1. He seemed pretty shy and was in his room most of the time, although he could talk. Unlike some other people's brothers.

They had a piano! I played casually on it after asking, and halfway through the song, I noticed they were all standing behind me, father with a camera in his hand, videotaping.

Same evening, we watched movies together that they had recorded, including Grave of the Fireflies, A letter from Iwo Jima, and Spirited Away.

The next day, Ami was working, so I went with my mother and Kukku to a nearby fossil-museum of some sort. The house was right next to the biggest lake in Japan, Biwako.

Never really been one for museums though, aheh.

I'd been exchanging e-mail addresses with several people from the camp, mostly girls, which held me up ALL night, replying to them. With about 11 people, I was messaging NON-STOP for several hours. My poor hand.. God, damn it.
I got to sleep in though, which was nice. My mother did come in once around 1 pm to check if I was alive, haha.

Ami apparently worked at an ice cream chain shop, along with other university friends. Since then, I've noticed that chain all over the place, although I forget the name.. 38 something?

Before I noticed it, the two days were over, and I went with Ami back to Kyoto station. Before meeting up with Nyuu as planned, we went around and shopped a bit, ate ice cream and udon.

By that time, I had forgotten completely what day or date it was. Admittedly, I hadn't been able to keep track of that since I left home.

Eventually met up with Nyuu and her family, which she also liked a lot. Her sister at +1 was a real nerd, so they'd been playing games all night.

Boarding the shinkansen Nozomi, fastest one there is, we waved goodbye to our temporary host families, and headed for Hiroshima.

AFS Hiroshima Camp

Culture festival


Sports festival








Returning to Kyoto