All My Best Titles Are Inside Jokes Past Review

Was it worthwhile? In a word, absolutely. What didn't I gain would be a much better first question. Perhaps most significantly, I made a lot of connections with people on this trip. Now, I don't consider myself a big people person, but it was so easy to make friends not only with the UIS students on the trip, but with the local students at AIT. I can't think of very many people we ran across in Ashikaga that were anything but nice to us. It could have been just because of this trip, but it seemed to me that it's just part of Japanese culture to welcome people this warmly. I made several friends in the form of AIT students, my host family, and even people I traveled with whom I'd never met before. I also gained a lot of cultural perspective. This sounds really vague and cliched, but it's a difficult thing to put into words. Perhaps the best example of this is when I, a pair of UIS students, and a pair of AIT students sat talking in our hotel lobby at the New Miyako and practiced four different languages between the five of us (English, Japanese, Spanish, and German). Maybe our Japanese barely approached even a rudimentary level, maybe their English was broken, maybe I needed the Colombian student on our trip to speak a bit slower so that I could understand the Spanish, but it was still something I never expected from that trip. Of course, there's always the things like signs being unreadable and cars driving on the left side of the road. But then there's also things you notice that point to a larger cultural difference between Japan and the United States. For example, police don't carry guns and emergency vehicles follow the rules of the road. What does that say about the prevalence of crime in Japan, and how it's treated? About the level of trust between citizens compared to in the U.S.? We made observations like this every single day. I gained a lot of things on this trip. Friends and connections. Another cultural perspective. The start of a new language-learning journey. This trip meant a lot to me personally, and, while I cannot speak to everybody because not everyone values what I do, I can guarantee that anyone can find something to love about this trip.