Culture Class: Tea Ceremony

The final entry in my GenkiJACS culture class series! Not only because I've left Japan and am now catching up; but also because I did just about everything I was interested in during my six months.

Tea ceremony! This was something I'd been wanting to do throughout the stay, but somehow it always ended up scheduled when I wasn't available - in class, in Korea, ill... so I was anxious about getting on the last slot, just two days before I left school. Thankfully, this time it came together. In fact, due to the incentive scheme* for writing about your trip, I actually got to do this for free! It would have been shameful (to me, anyway) to get through six months in Japan without taking part in tea ceremony, nor wearing yukata or kimono even once.

* The school encourages people to write about their trip, and you can get credit for blogposts relevant to the school. I should emphasise (for fear of my reputation being besmirched) that this is guaranteed not subject to review or censorship. I simply wrote blogposts and sent a link to the school; they checked the posts were relevant, and gave appropriate credit. Not sure what would happen if you wrote anything particularly offensive, because I didn't.

End-of-trip reflections

So, now that I've finished, come home and had some time to digest it all, I wanted to reflect a bit on my whole six months at GenkiJACS, coming back to my feelings in the half-term update. I'm also looking at the evaluation form I completed at the end of my stay, although I won't post specific extracts.

While I will mention various negatives, it's always easier to pinpoint problems than things that were good. The latter tend to be vague and diffiuse, the former are often specific.