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I then started studying Japanese and Economics at university. It was funny, we covered everything I knew from my GCSE Japanese in the first 2 weeks of the course. The course at SOAS (my college at the University of London) is so fast. And with reason, there are so many characters to learn. 
At the end of the first year at SOAS, we got sent
to study in Sapporo, which is a city on the northerly island of
Hokkaido. Sapporo's claim to fame is Sapporo Beer and that it
hosted the Winter Olympics during the 1970s. Every year they have
an ice festival which is apparently very impressive. We stayed
there for 3 months, living with local families. Although my Japanese
had improved a lot since my Reuters trip, I still didn't feel
very confident to speak. I hardly knew any household words, and
suddenly I was having to live with a family. There was a dad and
a mum; their children were grown up and no longer lived at home.
The mother was so friendly, and I really felt that she treated
me as if I were her own son. On many occasions the neighbours
came over. Everyone seemed so eager to meet us. We weren't really
in Sapporo itself, but at the end of the outskirts, which meant
that there weren't many foreigners there at all. I had blond hair
then, and people used to stare at me in the streets. They'd try
(sometimes anyway) to do it subtly, but it is so obvious when
someone is staring at you. We were the type of people that they
saw on TV, not people they bumped into at the supermarket. It
was a little surreal. Over the course of the 3 months that I was
there, I went from being surprised by people's reactions to us,
to liking people staring (who minds being the centre of attention?),
to being irritated by it (It might be raining, I might have been
tired, but people would stare anyway) to eventually not caring
The three months went by very quickly, and before I knew it I was back in London. |
about it at all.