JAPAN - PART 3

Monday, the first day of training was pretty uneventful… here we found out what damage literal translation can do – make you laugh till you can’t laugh anymore!

Anyway, after 5 pm, we found ourselves activity-less, so after dinner which we had at 6:30 pm, we decided to head out to the local area to check out their version of Carrefour and visit the 100 yen shop.

Tuesday night dinner –

The training division decided to have a dinner together for all the trainers and trainees that night. We had a chance to dine the proper Japanese way on the low table. The food was amazing. We had steamboat, salmon, octopus (this is a must try!) and a variety of mushrooms.

The low table where we had our dinner

After eating we were ‘forced’ to participate in some games like to use 3 matchsticks to make 4 triangles, or try to ‘push’ off a 1000 yen note of the table without actually touching it, and the local version of rock, paper, scissors. Next, each country had to go out and sing a song. Why????

The trainers rocked the house by singing Sukiyaki. Those from Thailand sang a song by the name Rayong and did a some very graceful traditional dance moves. The solo Singaporean sang a Mandarin song beautifully. The Indonesians sang a traditional children’s Indonesian song, and we from Malaysia sang Rasa Sayang… it’s something we learned in pre-school too :)

Wednesday

More training –

At night we checked out Midori, the electrical appliance store. Playstations are way cheaper over there than in Malaysia, but we couldn’t get anyone to tell us if it could be played in other countries. I got myself a cool ipod protector and a pair of Sony earphones for my sister.

Thursday

More training and news that the participants from China and Taiwan who attended this same training a week ago had 5 out of 12 people fail the test. So of course Thursday night was spent revising the notes and trying to figure out the type of questions that may be asked. Most of us were particularly worried about the fact that we may not understand what the questions actually want because of the translation issues.

Friday

Turns out that the translation of the questions was unimaginably incomprehensible (It was done using software that couldn’t seem to do its job) so the test was cancelled halfway since all of us kept asking what this or that word meant one after another :) Instead, we had a discussion on the questions.

That day, after the training we had dinner at one of the restaurants that served teppanyaki style food. Teppanyaki is basically a grill/hot pan where you kind of cook the food yourself. Dinner ended pretty early, and we ended up at the dormitory hall for another small (unofficial) party where lots of craziness occurred.

Cooking on the grill