Every Year we have many students traveling abroad on both short and long term exchanges and trips. In addition, every year there are many students studying here from many countries around the world.
　Last year we had students studying in Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, and Ireland.
　The following reports were written by three of those students.

My English has improved a lot thanks

What I would like to tell you the most about my exchange program and things I learned in Ireland are two things. The way I learned English, and the beautiful country of Ireland.

The first few months I spent in Ireland weren't all fun, in fact. When I couldn't understand what people were saying at all, they said "Don't worry, never mind." I felt some kind of sad feelings when I could only say "Sorry" to them. I knew I should've been braver to ask what they said. I thought I knew a lot of English grammar and words, but because I thought so, I was afraid of making mistakes.

After I finished my term in Colaiste Muire, a local high school in Ennis, I moved to Dublin to learn more English in a language school. As I moved to Dublin, I decided to do one thing, to say hello and tell my name before other guys start to introduce themselves. I thought I could be a more out-going person doing so. It slightly changed me and in the class, I met such great people to learn with.

One day I spoke about a few tours I joined in on in Dublin city center in the class. Then the teacher asked me if I was planning a next trip or not. I had a leaflet of "Glendalough" at that time, one of the famous sightseeing spots. I introduced that place and said that I was planning to go there. So, I asked my classmates if they wanted to come with me. Next weekend almost all my classmates got together to go out. This trip made us very close.

After that we made up lots of plans to go sightseeing. It was like having a school trip every week. We visited so many castles, churches and towns. When we went out together, we never wasted our time and we never forgot to study English. We taught each other. Sometimes they corrected my wrong grammar, and I did as well. We discussed words' meanings. We used new words and new phrasal verbs we had learned in classes in our conversation. We became more and more acquisitive of English. I can say that my English has improved a lot thanks to that.

And the country of Ireland is such a beautiful country with wide green landscapes made by nature, old-fashioned towns, buildings and very, very kind people.

Ennis is an old, small town with colorful houses. The main street was especially amazing. I was attracted to those things at first sight. Yellow, blue, red, sometimes purple... those were really gorgeous!

Most churches were made of stone. Inside the churches were always quiet and had a solemn mood. The stained glass was so fine and mysterious. I remember that I spent quite a long time just sitting around staring at them.

People in Ireland are all cheerful and kind. One of my favorite things to do was to meet new people on the train. Most of the time when you take a seat you must share the seat with someone, facing each other. Irish people were friendly enough to talk to strangers like me. For instance, one old lady taught me "welcome" and "good-bye" in Irish. Another lady told me about Irish history. Young boys and girls asked me about Japan and told me about things happening in Ireland. I guarantee that you'll never be bored on the train.

I found many differences between Japan and Ireland and I thought there are several things we must imitate the Irish. For example, we should be more open to others, like the Irish, to get close to make a safe community. I know it's hard to do in this present Japanese society, but I'd say there is a clue to solve this problem in Ireland.

If you have a chance to study abroad and you are still wavering, you should grab it! It will help you to be wiser, and you can experience lots of things you can't in Japan.

My Special Ten Months in NZ

"I'm sorry, I don't know." These words were the level of my English when I just started to go to school. I was afraid of my poor English skill which couldn't catch most words from native students and teachers and I couldn't speak any words that I really wanted to say. And now, I think that my homesickness helped to make me be negative in those days as well. Maybe I had a culture shock or something like that about foods, customs, everything around me. Before I left Japan I read some books about New Zealand and I thought that I understood all of them properly so it would be easy to be abroad for me. But that thinking was wrong. There were many differences from my imagination of New Zealand actually.

My school's name was "Mahurangi College" and my town's name was "Wark Worth" which is in the North island and takes about an hour by bus from Auckland. For the first five months, I stayed at a farmer's home which is called a farm stay. They have a lot of pets and domestic animals. When I just arrived there, I was quite heavily homesick because of my poor English skill. But my host family always made me smile and laugh so that my homesickness was gone somewhere in those five months. My host parents said to me, "Miki, you are our daughter so you don't have to feel lonely because we are your parents in New Zealand." They accepted me as a member of their family. Then I accepted them as a real family.

OK. Allow me to tell you about my school life for ten months. There were so many international students from Greece, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, China, Korea, Thailand and Japan. I was surprised at that. Some New Zealanders didn't like Asians so they were not very kind and sometimes they said to us many dirty words. Those words were very hurtful for us. But others were kind to us. I think Japanese are negative and shy and also I think New Zealanders are as well. So we needed to have guts to communicate with each other to get over the high wall. I was taking Home Economics, Spanish, Maths, Esol 3, Esol 4(English class for international students) as subjects. In the Spanish class, many students often talked to me and became friends with me. I wondered why they did that. I asked the Spanish teacher about that and she told me what she did. A few days ago she told students about me like "Miki is Japanese, but she is in New Zealand to learn English now and also, she is trying to learn Spanish with English. She is cool!! You guys should be friends with her!!" So they were interested in me. That was a big chance for me to make friends! Then I could make some good friends. Learning Spanish with English was not easy for me, but it was a good opportunity to study hard and also it was practice to translate. It made me learn lots of new English vocabulary. In Esol class, we often had discussions about "School bullying," "Some kinds of discrimination," "Religion," "Migration," "Egyptian doctor's spelling-mistake in New Zealand" and so on. We talked about these topics and then wrote our own essays. I quite liked those works because everyone had different opinions.

After school, I couldn't go to town or a friend's home very often because I was staying in the country-side which was 12 km from my school. I needed to catch the school bus. My second host family's home was by the beach called "Leigh Beach." It was such a beautiful place. A small problem became nothing after going for walk. So sometimes I baked cakes, breads and cookies. My host parents liked to learn anything so they always asked me about Japanese culture, customs, and the government party. It was difficult for me to explain to them because I didn't have enough knowledge about these issues so sometimes I needed to search for information from the internet. I felt ashamed as a Japanese. My best performance to make them understand about tea ceremony was showing them how to do with a coffee cup, spoon, a dish, a whisk and tissue. My host mother repeated after me like "Otemae ･･･ chodaitashu mashu ･･･." We laughed aloud.

Through those 10 months, I became stronger than before and also learnt about how we should always be proud of own country and culture. New Zealand has its own culture, too. I learnt about it. Do you know this word "KIAORA"? This is New Zealand's original inhabitants, Maori's language and means "hello." New Zealanders are keeping on passing Maori culture down from generation to generation. I think that Japanese young people should be proud of our traditional culture and pass it down from generation to generation like New Zealanders do. This opinion has come from my experiences in New Zealand. If I didn't stay there, I wouldn't think like that. I would like to go abroad again to study something like a special subject with my English skill and of course I want to improve my English as well. Probably next time, I would go to another country because I want to keep trying to learn other countries' cultures. It was a great experience for me studying abroad as I was in the second grade. Now, I really appreciate Ikuei creating special chances to study abroad for us.