Orientation In California

Yes, I'm backtracking, but I just thought I'd fill in the blanks for a minute. Sunday morning I flew out to San Francisco airport. Once there, the group of us from YFU were met by the YFU staff and transported to San Jose University. Orientation was tons of fun. I got to meet students going to Japan from all over the country and made some really good friends. The orientation staff had us scheduled from 7:00 AM to 10:30 PM every day. On the day we arrived, the first item on our schedule was "dinner with kumi." Everyone was asking "Who is Kumi?" We were coming up with some pretty far-fetched ideas: the all-mighty headmaster of YFU, some dictator sent over from Japan... No one thought to look it up in a Japanese Dictionary. "Kumi" ended up being the word for the smaller groups that we were broken into, that we would have all of our classes with. The first thing we did in "Green Kumi" was establish where everyone was from.


That's me, all alone, out in the middle of the mid-west. Awesome.

Green Kumi!!! - There were eleven of us exchange student, our teacher Pato (front row far right) and our alumni assistant (front row center).

On the last night we learned traditional Japanese Bon Dancing, and then had to make up our own dances within our Kumis. It was pretty funny. There was some ridiculous stuff. Green Kumi won third place! LOL