Skip to main content

Graduations and Goodbye Parties

Well. It's official. I have graduated from PII and this very evening I shall head via night bus to Tokyo to catch my flight to Chicago tomorrow afternoon. It seems rather surreal--it's hard for me to believe that I"m really leaving (yet at the same time part of me just wants to hurry up and leave already, it's a very confusing dichotomy).

After finishing up the final exam yesterday, I took myself out for a treat.


That, my friends, is a medium fries, hot apple pie, and Japan-exclusive McDonald's menu item: teriyaki burger! (Which was surprisingly delicious...that teriyaki sauce made the usually dry burger quite tender and juicy). I don't think I've allowed myself this much McDonald's in a long while, but after these eight weeks I feel like I'm forgiven.

Then, today, was the PII graduation ceremony and farewell party. We all assembled at RIFARE in the morning and were called up one by one to receive a snazzy, and very official, graduation certificate:



There were of course speeches, from some of the students thanking the program staff and RIFARE staff, as well as from the head of the program (and who I like to think of as our tiny, adorable mascot) Makino-sensei:



(Alex's mom...I've heard you read this so here's a photo of your son delivering the thank you speech on behalf of the students. He did a good job. :) )

From there we all went to a nearby hotel where there was an extensive buffet and student performances to wrap up our experience together:






Each class had a final performance as well (2.5's was a rendition of the popular Korean girl's group the aptly named Girl's Generation, replacing the lyrics with ones we wrote ourselves and then singing/"dancing" to it on stage). One group had a haiku recitation, one group sang, and then individual students had their own performances. Yale's own did a banghra dance (apologies if I spelled that wrong), and many others who brought their own instruments (those dedicated fools) played pieces as well. It was a lot of fun, and I'm really sad to say goodbye to these amazing people.

It's been a lot of fun. For those of you who jumped on board this blog for this trip (or those of you who've somehow stuck about for BOTH my Japan experiences) your support and interest really mean a lot to me. Looking forward to returning to the US and getting to see you all again--it has been TOO long.

XOXO Claire

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 25, 2014 at 2:01 PM

    Thank you Claire for doing such a great job with your blog. I really enjoyed every post.
    Enjoy the rest of your summer...Alex's Mom

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enoshima: The Heavenly Maiden and the Dragon

This past Monday was a national holiday -- Mountain Day -- so, of course, Troy and I headed to the beach instead. Well, to an island near a beach since (as some of you may know) I'm not exactly the beach-going type. Plus I'd just climbed Mount Fuji, which was more than enough mountain for me. Enoshima is a small island off the coast of Kanagawa Prefecture, fairly near Kamakura. It's connected to the mainland via a bridge, so you can just stroll on over from the train station. The entire island is dedicated to Benzaitan, the goddess of everything that flows -- time, water, speech, music, and knowledge. According to the "Enoshima Engi," (a history of the shrines and temples on Enoshima) there's also a legend associated with the creation of the island involving Benzaitan and a dragon. In brief, the area around Enoshima was once wracked by violent storms and earthquakes. Eventually the tumult ended and a heavenly maiden (Benzaitan) descended from the clouds....
2 comments
Read more

Homecoming

This is it. It's Friday, February 3rd and in less than 24 hours I will leave this house for Tokyo train station, which will take me to the airport, which will take me...home. Most of this week has been taken up with goodbyes: to schoolmates and teachers, and later, close friends. There were tears involved. I think the photos will do it a lot more justice than I could: Kohei, from tennis group. All the tennis people got together for dinner at an okonomiyaki (think cabbage pancake, with yummy stuff like shrimp in it) but first we went to a boardwalk which had nighttime light shows. Top: Anime Club. They threw a small party for me, where we ate lots of food and watched (what else) anime and talked. Bottom: one of my English classes. They asked me to teach them an American game for the last day, so I taught everyone how to play Heads-Up 7-Up. They were pretty good at it. The other exchange student, Nom, and my Japanese teacher. The last view of school: the walk leading u...
13 comments
Read more

Reflections on Typhoon Hagibis

As some of you may have known, this past weekend Typhoon Hagibis blew through Japan, specifically the Kanto region where Tokyo is. It had the grim distinction of being the strongest/most deadly storm to hit the region since Typhoon Ida in 1958. Typhoon classification scales are confusing (and, interestingly, the only difference between a "typhoon" and a "hurricane" is the naming convention of the region in which it occurs ), but at one point Hagibis was classified as a "violent typhoon," the strongest category the Japan Meteorological Agency has, roughly the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately it didn't make landfall at that strength, downgrading to a Category 3 equivalent storm. Personally, although Typhoon Hagibis (which means, appropriately, "speed" in Tagalog) was not the first typhoon I've (pardon the pun) weathered here in Japan, it was most certainly the most extreme. Most typhoons don't directly hit Kanto, inst...
1 comment
Read more