Monthly Archives: August 2010

City Life, City Theme Activities, Toride City

WCJ Helping Toride

Sake Factory

The town we spend this week at is called Toride, a City located right outside of Tokyo, about an hour train ride to it. Toride has the beauty of a small town, lots of nature around, super green but with all the benefits of being very close to the big city…Tokyo.

Our first day in Toride was a very busy and interesting one because we had a very special task to complete on a very short amount of time.

The idea was to make promotion material for four different stores in the area that have been around for more than 100 years and because of the developing of the City, they have been losing clients and the town’s citizens have lost interest even though they are one of a kind store in their own business.

A Sake Factory, a Japanese Season’s Dolls Store, a Pickle factory and a Shovel factory.

After having a tour an explanation of the business from the owners we went off to create the promotion material.

World Campus – Japan participants enjoyed the visit, learned about their business and the products they make and tried to make the best promo material possible to improve their sales. We hope our work meets their expectations because we enjoyed it 100%.

City Life, City Theme Activities, Ueda City

Oishii Arigato Event

World Campus Cooking

It was Arigato Event Day and even when this day is usually very packed, the LOC (Local Organizing Committee) members from Ueda planned a potluck for after the event which normally doesn’t affect our schedule.

This day we, World Campus -Japan Participants were going to cook the meals for the Potluck! We splited up into 5 teams and cooked something from our countries and cultures, we had everything from Caseroles from USA to Guacamole (Avocado Dip) from Mexico. From filled Red Peppers and Tomatoes from Greece to Mash Potatoes and Beef from Canada. It was defenitely very Oishii (delicious in Japanese).

Everyone cooked what they could with the ingredients they could find in Japan. The families enjoyed the food and so did we, but most important, We learned from each other and from ourselves, about team work, recipes, flavors and cultures and we had a great time doing it.

City Life, Ueda City

Stereotypes

Stereotypes

During the morning of this day we started by getting to know each other on a different way. We talked about Stereotypes.

Sometimes things that you have known all your life from someone or in this case about a country might not be real or sometimes the person from the country doesn’t even know the stereotype exist. Stereotypes are things that we think about a country, a place or a person without knowing deeply about it. Things that people talk about or things that people assume about that place, that person or that country.

Look at stereotypes as the tip of the iceberg… it is what you see but you don’t know what’s under the water, you see only a little piece of the whole iceberg, maybe is not as big as you think, maybe is bigger than you think, but you can only know if you ask questions and if you put yourself in a situation where you can talk about that “iceberg” (place, country, person, etc).

Today we talked about all those things we think about the countries represented in our group (World Campus – Japan), we learned many new things and had the chance to clarify our stereotypes about many countries.