Another great afternoon in Toyota City. Today we were told we were going to learn how to make japanese food. 🙂 Nice!!! ~ Many of us signed up for it because what a great opportunity.

We started with the “learning” it wasn’t as simple as we thought, of course, there are so many details that go into making a japanese dish… we thought it was going to look HORRIBLE to be honest but at the end, it wasn’t too bad. It actually looked REALLY GOOD!

We learned how to make sushi… but… once you cut it, the inside of the roll looks like roses. Yes! like roses, can you believe it? Those Japanese people really know how to make food a special thing not only to eat but to see.

Take a look at the picture!

In the City of Toyota you can find a very big community of Brazilian people. On this day we went to an apartment complex where 8300 people live, 4000 of them are foreigners. Not only from Brazil, which are the majority of them, also from Peru, Philippines, China and other countries.

Inside the Apartment Complex we visited a Non-profit organization that works with the kids of the immigrants, kids that can go to school because they don’t speak the language or are not up to date with the school work and can’t keep up, that’s the price they have to pay for being immigrants.

Mrs. Imura decided to open up this NPO 10 years ago called Homi Danchi, to help those kids to continue to go to school. Today the NPO keeps helping kids and even young adults to continue with their education. Some of them keep going to the place just to do homework or to feel part of something.

Toyota is a very interesting community because is very different from the rest of Japan. You can find many foreigners there, specially from Brazil, and diversity is not seen as such a strange thing. People are more used to seeing people from other countries there, many people speak English and the interest for learning about other cultures and languages is obvious.

It is good to know that we, as World Campus – Japan, could see a little bit of a different Japan in the City of Toyota. Every place in Japan, for sure has its own magic and Toyota has a very special magic.

Obviously, we couldn’t leave the City of Toyota without visiting… “Toyota!” Even though we couldn’t visit the cars factory itself, we got to see the Toyota Museum of Technology.

Now, you’re imagining a boring museum, full of old cars and stuff like that, right?

Wrong! The Toyota museum was surprisingly fun! In Techno-land, for example, you could do and try all kind of experiences, so that you could learn about physics forces that they use all the time to produce cars. And for those who love robots, they had one that would play musical instruments! We posted a picture a few days ago with a caption “Future”, check it out!

And, obviously, for those who love cars, they had one part where they would explain how things are done in Toyota factory. So, even though we couldn’t get to see the real factory, we understood the whole process.

We sure had a good time, hanging in the museum! The fact that the Nagoya college students were with us, giving us some explanations sometimes, made it a really good day!

(Ana Margarida – Portugal)

When that morning we heard we were going to the community of Asuke to pick up weeds from the rice fields, it sounded like a cool experience but doing it was a complete whole new deal. Not only did we put our feet with just sox in the mud and picked up weeds from the rice fields, we also discovered a complete new world of flying, swimming and jumping bugs we had never seen before. Anywhere from frogs to flies to spiders to worms. They were all there, waiting for us to put our hands in the mud to jump, swim or fly either away or towards us.

The truth is, even though it wasn’t that pretty we had a great time going through the experience together. This was for sure a lifetime experience, not only coming to Japan but putting our feet in the mud, dealing with the bugs and doing it all with a bunch of friends from all over the world. Where else can you do something like that? where else can you get to experience this kind of things.

World Campus – Japan is THE unique access to Japan. Today more than ever, it teaches us to appreciate how comfortable we are at home and how to appreciate other people’s work.