Orientation

Team 2510! Much smaller than my sponsor district's group. 

Saturday was orientation day for the District 2510 inbound exchange students, as well as a welcome home to the Japanese students who spent their years abroad in Europe and America, who did presentations for us on their years abroad. It was fun meeting them all for the first time, and as you can see, Canada isn't the only country that gets a bright red blazer, Japan shares our fabulous sense of style. USA went for dark blue, and Australia dark green. And I really need to work on getting some more pins for that thing, it's looking rather bare, isn't it?

There's only five inbounds in my entire district, which is quite different from my sponsor district, where I believe we had around twenty. Not that that's a bad thing, a smaller group can be fun, too, and by coincidence, we're all English speaking. In the new year Thomas, the only male inbound, will be heading back to Australia (they time the exchange year differently in Australia and New Zealand, I'm not sure why) and we'll be getting a new addition to our group. I also learned that rotary has arranged for each of us to have a private Japanese tutor, so that should help my language skills. The other inbounds and the rotex all seem like really cool people, so I look forward to getting to spend more time with them.

The Inbounds: (from left to right) Isobel (America), me (Canada), Thomas (Australia), Alicia (America) and Hannah (America)

Also, school is continuing to be pretty great. This morning I introduced myself and gave a short speech in Japanese, which I'm pretty sure went fairly well. Last Friday Hokusei had its sports festival, which was a lot of fun even though my class didn't win anything, but we got some pretty cool Pokemon themed t-shirts out of the deal, plus everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun.