The Smell of Sakura

Bina Antarbudaya
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

Nabilla Puti Sabrina (INA AFS to Japan YP 2017-2018)

22nd March 2017, I landed on Narita Airport with 2 of my friends, Syifa and Vina. I couldn’t believe what just happened last year. I’ve always want to go to Japan since I was a 3rd grade of elementry school because of some animation that I watched with my sister and I got hooked to it.

“ Aah, I want to experience the highschool life in Japan”

“ Their school uniform its so cute! Why my school uniform is so plain?”

“ I want to study there!”

That’s what the little of me thinking about in past 8 years and now I can experience it by myself in 1 years, it was very incredible things that ever happen to me.

I met many various kind of people on National Orientation in Japan before we met our host family. They are really funny, approachable, and warm. The orientation itself is so fun, we play a lot, we even tried onsen together, naked. I’m so shocked by that, I always thought that they are going inside the onsen with at least towel wrapped on their body, but I’ts not. So, I tried the onsen together with everyone and it feels nice. I even went twice with my host family.

My host family makes me feels like home. They are super duper nice to me, I even have a cute little sister who share room with me. We sleep in a traditional japanese room, they called it “ 畳部屋”and she sleeps like log. Sometimes, she pulls my blanket or kick me in the face while she sleeps. I’m really suprised but at the same time it was funny, because I always sleep alone in Indonesia, so its a new experience. To got a kick from a little sister hahahaha.

I always love attraction and scary ride, but hiking is a new thing to me. My host mother and father asked me to go hiking with them, so i said yes without thinking much. I think hiking is not hard as much its looks like. So we went to はっぷーさん(Happu Mountain) in Saitama and it was very very very hard. I never once in my life walk 4 hours straight to the top of mountain. My father and mother leg is so strong, they can walk non-stop if i don’t make them stop. At the top of mountain we ate our lunch Onigiri, my mom made it and it was very tasty,my mom is such a good cook, after lunch we down the hill and i thought, it must be less tiring and i was wrong again. Yea, it less tiring for my leg but not good to my heart. It’s scary to see the river down there with sharp stone, and i saw some plank that have “ Beware of boars” write on it. And i imagined all the bad things that could happen in that period of the time. Alhamdulillah, I’m still alive and still could write this newsletter. In the end of the day, we went to onsen and have some reflexation. I even ate ice cream. Eventhough its very hard day and i probably won’t do that again in the future, but still it was a nice experience.

7th April 2017, it was my very first day of school. My school is such cool school ever. I introduced myself in front of the student as an exchange student and they welcome me very warm. My host school is very cool school. Its really change my way of thinking that Japanese people can’t speak english verywell, the students in my host school speak english fluently and their pronouncation is nothing like me. The teachers are very warm and nice people. They thought me everything that i probably don’t know about Japan.Every Monday and Friday I attend japanese class in my school, it was so fun. There is some collage students come to teach me. Eventhough, the students can speak english, i’m required to speak japanese with them and it was a nice thing to make me more fluent in Japanese and guess what, speaking japanese in this past 4 months make me forget how to talk in English.

Recently we had some Sport Fest, it’s my very first time to join that kind of festival and i was really hyped. My class is in Blue team and we won the 2nd place and after the sport fest is done, we ate Okonomiyaki and Monjya together. おいしかったです!

See you in the next newsletter with new a story from me.

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