WASEDA SILS FALL EXCHANGE TRIP TO JAPAN 2009

10th-17th December

Still at changi airport, waiting to board plane. The ghostbuster cone.

Boarded the plane at 10:51pm! And horrible food. I watched mamamia on the plane. Snippets from my journal:
1:30am - They are serving drinks and cute tissue!
5:29am - Serving breakfast soon... no sleep! Feel drowsy... nose keeps running as usual. Will probably clear up after landing. The mystery of it all.


On the bus after touching down at Tokyo! 630+am.

7:05am - Cold walk from airport to bus! It's 9 degrees celcius.. waiting in bus now...


First we put our luggage in a hotel room then off to the university for the opening ceremony.

Waseda cheerleading squad does fancy cheer. They are very enthu about it all.

After this was a model lecture through which i slept cuz so tired from the night flight where my nose kept running and i couldnt sleep at all!

1:57pm - The uni has an awesome toilet! Looks cool and simple. Going to MOFA now. Yan Hui's gonna talk! Yay.

Horrible horrible lunch at the uni cafeteria Okuma garden! The thingy in the small bowl is like gooey sticky kimchi and tasteless tofu and together it makes the perfect vomitting tool. Then there's the hard spaghetti. But the pork and fish were nice. And the proportions of rice are like gargantuas so of course i couldnt finish it.

12:03pm - It's not so cold now but its icy, my lips are cracking. Ow.

5: 28pm - MOFA was alright. People giving speeches in japanese, taking turns to show off. The minister not really answering any questions. We are going to eat now i believe. Its REALLY COLD. bRRR!

Black Char Siew Ramen! We were given a choice of ramens to eat and we randomly picked this one. It was salty! But initially tasted nice. Oily! Oh this is where i got the capybara pouchy, and the baby monkey! Cutest thing ever!

Cigarette vending machine!

8:03pm - Just left the Ramen place. Bought nice stuffs!

Then we retired to our hotel rooms at Rihga Royal Hotel which we were gonna see for the first time! Hotel pics will come later though, when its farewell to the nicest hotel of the trip!

The convenience store near our hotel where i bought the winter pokky from. It's the only place i ever saw it.

Breakfast from the hotel, the best tasting meal of the day.

7:33am - Wakey wakey! FREEZING when i woke up... Going to eat breakfast buffet soon! hungry... then off to kamakura highschool. I love heatpacks! They save my life! Im wearing 4 layers on top now. Too bad for my legs. They dont have the same comfort.

8:51am - Had breakfast! best meal so far! Cute and juicy and perfectly round cherry tomatoes, strawberry spread and toast, bacon and eggs, hot tea, can fruit cocktail and sugar packets and tissue!

Taken on the bus ride to kamakura.

katana shop

ferris wheel pic out of nowhere. It's 100m across.

The cloud maker!

10:14am - Tired of twisting my waist and stretching to great lengths for photos. I didnt get the window seat this time and it's so hard! Everyone's sleeping. I should stop my trigger happy or my batt's gonna die real soon.

It's a LONG ride to kamakura but we made it! Around 2hours later...

Kamakura highschool

Classroom interaction. Split into groups and let the japanese people ask us questions in english! Gasp. I could hardly understand them...

Bento for lunch. Onigiris too saLTY No time to even finish eating and we had to go -.- What lousy organization!

Then outing with kamakura students. They take us on the train. These are cute little elementary students.

They take us to see the giant buddha first. There's nice scenery around.

We also go inside the buddha but its just a hollow with a hole at the top. The metal is warm though, or whatever material its made of.

My outing group.

And then off to the shopping town which is like a whole street of shops. For us to waste money yay.
Hyperventilates* A totoro shop!!! But we were eating ice cream cant go in!!! Had to move on.. SADNESS.

The cakes at the ice cream shop are so unreal! I only have plastic versions of them!

They even make noodle cake.

More wonderful unreal cakes.

ice cream with weird names? But the students chose the flavours for us since we were taking so long. And we ate caramel, cookies and cream, green tea and strawberry? i think. I actually wanted the vampire one -.-

So after walking the whole shopping town, it was to the meeting place, this shrine.

Fortune telling is so advanced now! Fortune slips come out from vending machines!

Since we were early we went to look around in a clog shop.Many many pretty colourful clogs. Small and big, fat and thin, square and round. The students went and used the remaining money given to us to buy us a little gift, which was a wood dragon head handphone charm. At least thats what i got.

Back to the hotel after another 2h! I bought this from LAWSON. sPICY noodles!! And they are so considerate they gave me cute tissue! Bought the chicken thing too cuz it was so cold and the chicken thing was a hot snack. Unfortunately it was too salty and not to my liking so i didnt inish it, once again.

Too hot and spicy, also cannot finish :C

Our room number.

Thank you note to housekeeping person!

The light above my bed

My bed! It's a separate compartment from the other two beds. My room had 3 people. Whee. Me being solitary and all.

The awesome bathroom. With a bathtub to lie in. How nice.

Well on the 4th day we had a japanese class. Mine was the moderately know japanese class so we just learnt how to introduce ourselves and state our future dream and what we like to eat and so on. My group consisted of these people shown above. The guy on the rightest was the japanese fellow helping my group.

The whole class.

We then went for a campus tour of Waseda university. Here is the inside of the clock tower.

The nice forbidden room. Looks like something out of a movie to film dramatic romantic scenes.

Performance theatre.

In honour of this fellow, who translated shakespeare into japanese.

The library in which we couldnt take pictures but evil people did.

Lunch at Okuma street! A blinds for a shop that i saw.

we had lunch here.

Yanhui's hamburg. Sizzling on a hot pan.

My omuraisu. It could have been nicer. My first taste of it was awe and wonder, but then i got sick of it and the sauce was really salty!

After this we had a model lecture on Pop culture, and we learnt about Mickey and i didnt know he was such a pervert eep. And i didnt know he had an enemy black pete the cat!

Off to nagano!

8:03pm - On the way to nagano now.. since like 1.5h ago... the cold is seeping in through the window. Think im getting a sorethroat. Dam. Stupid lady call wrong number just now and keep talking in indian and refuse to acknowledge that she call the wrong number. Idiot Waste my phone bill.

Stopped for dinner! Rice with lots of pickled stuff.

The placemat

There's apricot, sweet potato, mushroom, quail egg, and 1 ton of rice.

Finally got to the ski resort! This is our wondercrump room.

tatami mat room! We were quite lucky. The other groups some of them got just plain double decker beds. How boring!

Just nice for us four with poofy blankets!

The onsen. Public bath! Oh my god.

It snowed on the night we arrived. Was about to go bathe when it started snowing! Little white flakes falling on my face...

8:42pm - I didnt take photo of my dinner today cuz lazy to bring down cam. I had fish. ONE WHOLE FISH, while everyone else had beef. There was also rice, chicken soup that tasted strange, chicken in tomato soup. I ate quickly then took my yoghurt pudding and disappeared to yan hui! Then talk awhile and went back to my room and deliberated how to pack my bag...

The onsen bath was totally crap! I was trying very very hard to keep myself covered with the pathetic towel they provided. Then soak in the sauna pool...

Anyway i only have the picture of lunch at prince karuizawa shopping center. It was mainly just letting us buy things for that whole day and nothing else! That's a whole egg in the burger btw.

Breakfast the next morning! Had rice, fish, and other dishes but i only ate the salad and the yucky yoghurt drink cuz no appetite cuz of my darned sorethroat.

It's skiiing day but i didnt take any ski photos cuz i scared the camera spoil Anyway i love skiing! It's so fun and satisfying. And i could ski quite well! The instructor asked me whether it was my first time and i said yea and she was like honto! Yay. I am not so failure.

Anyway it was the last day at the seminar house! There was GOOD gargantuas chicken thigh for dinner, strange soup again, a morsel of rice that i scooped and vanilla yoghurt! It was a nice dinner.

Then the farewell party! We Owned man, totally! We practised real hard and it went really smoothly and ours was the best best presentation! The rest were like song and dance but ours was a skit with song and cheer! And becuz it went so smoothly it was so awesome yay.

Then there was the bingo game! 6 people from nj won and i also won something! Miss Kavita called my winning number and i got a waseda thick long sleeve thingy. So nice, using it for shooting now! I was feeling really sick though, *cough wheeze dies*

Dian Feng was the first to win a prize, and he got like a 50 000 yen travelling voucher! Cool man...

Then aafter the whole thing i went back, packed, ate panadol cold and slept.

The next morning there was yucky stew that looked deceivingly nice, nice bread with strawberry and margarine and mixed veg and fruit juice which contained asparagus, dou ya, apple, carrot, lemon, capsicum etc etc. A funky tasty blend.

Ele sleeping in tatami blanket.

Oh there was a table tennis match on the last day too, with Kah Han representing Nj! He played until the top then lost by 1 point arhhh [to the stupid teacher that crashed into me while skiiing@]

We are now leaving the snowy place!! so saddd

Oh pop out of nowhere, the lunch i had on the skiing day.

My snow-covered shoes.

Went sightseeing at zenkouji temple!

monkey you cant run from me!

I took this pink car especially for huiwei.

Soba making!

this is our dull soba. But it tastes nice! A bit tough though...

By the masters! Shiny soba! Awesomely nice!

The worst dinner ever! Oh wait. What dinner? Well i didnt eat it. I had to dine fine with 3 teachers[cuz i couldnt eat beef and neither could they] who were snatching the cooking thingy from me all the time, how nasty. Like they were any better at doing it, really. They were really confused and left the seafood on the hotplate to get burnt. It was horrible, the omelette wasnt cooked properly, it was raw and gooey and i tried to eat it but it made me wanna puke. So i didnt eat dinner that night. Arg.

Tokyo tower! Only stayed there 30min or so? So rushed!!! Didnt even get to go imperial palace when we were supposed to!!

The rainbow bridge brings us to narita excel hotel, our last stop for the trip.

my nice bed.

the other two beds. I just happened to go up to the rooms first thus took the bed right inside. But i didnt even sleep there in the end. Went to sleep in the other room where everybody was enjoying their last day of chattering.

Clocks of many countries.

And the scenery outside the hotel marks the end of the trip! Off to the airport and home sweet home!!! I slept on almost the whole of the plane ride, every now and then waking to see food appear and disappear before me. There was hagen daaz ice cream too. So glad to be home!! Thanks to huiwei and fuddy and ele and mom and sis and dad for fetching me at the airport whee!