The families from the Arao area hosted all of us on World Campus Japan first session and the week was full of amazing activities… the host family day, visiting really beautiful gardens and temples and internal work for all of us World Campus Participants, but the best part of all it has to be our Arigato Event. Time for the families to get to know each other, for the participants to express their gratitude and for everyone to become a big BIG family. The World Campus Family.

We all worked really hard to pull the Arigato Event off, learning songs and dances and creating the environment for an amazing performance at the “Blanca Hotel”, right next to Greenland. (Amusement park we will talk about on the next post, you can’t miss it)

Arigato Event (Thank you event) is not only a performance or a time to get to know each other, is a time when the Japanese Culture and our very personal culture mix together like one, we all laughed together, sang together and played together.

It is the end of a city for us but the beginning of amazing relationships we will develop with time with the host families and community members we interacted with during our visit.

Thank you ARAO…
Next post: Greenland!

Ichi go ichi e – (Once in a life time)… That’s what it was for us, the opportunity that we had during our host family day in Arao. After having a great Soba Noodles Lunch and walking through a great garden with a river, we went to our final stop of the day. A recently built temple where we not only took the most amazing pictures you could imagine, which we’ll share at the end of the week, but we also had a once in a life time opportunity.

Inside the temple you can find four statues of gods, like the one on the picture above. They protect the west, east, north and south. This particular one is the God that protects the South. The best part of the visit started when a man approached us, introducing himself as the artist that makes the statues. I have to say, it was already a pretty nice experience to be able to see the statues, even nicer to be able to meet the artist, I was already happy with the visit at that point, then the unexpected happened… He invited us into his art studio where we had the chance to see the statue of the God protector of the West, being made. We counted the pieces, about 100 of them, we smelled the paint and saw the colors being mixed, to create an amazing piece of art. No one has this kind of opportunity, ever. The artist never opens his studio to anyone besides his team, young interns from the local university.

Host family day: Great food, great site seeing, once in a life time opportunities… Ichi go ichi e