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My first view of central Sapporo every morning when exiting Sapporo Train Station ["eh-ki"].
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Festival dancers running down the streets.
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Ladies who performed the Tea Ceremony.
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Japanese people painting near the Low Temp Building.
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Laura, Jessiqa & Ed @ Low Temp Building.
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(L to R): Scott, Mike, ?, ?, Leah, ?, Jessiqa, Laura, Justin, Laura, Ed & Shana
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Justin & Josh actually bought and wore the same vest one day.
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My Class:
(Clockwise): Corrie's arm, Grace, Nicole, Andy, our Teacher, Jake, Mike, Paolo, Erik & Ben
Late at night on June 21st, everyone arrived at Chitose Airport to be greeted by Kumi Kono, the director of the summer session program at Hokkaido University.
Some people were already friends with each other and others immediately got to know the ones they just met.
We drove to Sapporo by bus and stayed at the Christian Center for our first night; most of us being very tired from all the hours of flying.
The next day, we went off to our separate home-stay families and met back up at Hokudai [the university] the next Monday.
That weekend we saw groups of kids/adults running down streets wearing elaboratly colored costumes and wondered what was going on.
It just happened to be the Annual Dance Festival ["Yosakoi Soran"] in Sapporo where over 30,000 dancers perform in a parade through downtown, so my host family took me downtown to watch and film some of it. The dancers had been practicing throughout the town and had to run to where the parade started, so I caught a couple pictures of that.
It was a beautiful display and pysched me up for my month in Japan.
From my first family's house, I walked about a mile to the nearest train station [Inazumi Koen] where I would ride the train southeast for 5 stops and exit at Sapporo's center.
From there, I walked about half a mile to Hokudai, where all the exchange students were divided into 3 classes for our Japanese class.
This was a nice, yet somewhat long walk for me. Being overweight and not used to the mild humidity didn't help either. All vanity was thrown out the window within 2 days of this.
Anyways, we had Japanese class every morning in separate classrooms, then a cultural lecture all together at the International Student Center.
Lecture topics ranged from quite boring Japanese Economics to more interesting topics [for me] such as Buddhism and multiculturalism within Japan.
The first afternoon after lecture, there was a demonstration of the Tea Ceremony. I didn't stay long [as it is a lengthy ritual], but I did get a few pictures.
That evening, all the students went to a Mongolian Barbeque at a nearby campus park. It was my first time eating mutton and at the time, didn't know I was eating mutton, but it was very good. We got to barbeque our own in small metal pots over tiny bonfires.
The next day we had an on-campus fieldtrip to the Institute of Low Temperatur Science building, where we learned about the first artifical snowflake every created and watched a video about low temperature testing. The only thing I remember from the video is everyone laughing when they showed the avalanche simulation they created by dropping 4 million ping-pong balls down the local [Okura] ski jump. Everyone laughed because someone was standing at the bottom.
Thoughout the week, friendships between all the exchange students quickly developed and it soon became a 'thing' that everone met outside the building on the steps before class.