International Foreign Students Forum In Kashiwazaki - Part 2

Niigata Sangyo University in Kashiwazaki City.

The forum ended around six in the evening; however there were another session - International Students Culture Exchange Party held at the nearby Niigata Sangyo University. It is located on the outskirts of Kashiwazaki City that it took a bus ride of about fifteen minutes to get there. There is nothing surrounding the university but rice fields and forests. Quite an ulu place also, I would say haha.

I got to know that the majority of the students of this university came from China, so I decided to join this event, because I thought perhaps I would get the chance to know some Chinese girls there haha. Well, that's just a lame excuse to attend the event, isn't it haha.

People began to fill the venue.

See, I told you got cute girls to look at.

The party was held at the cafeteria of the university. Besides the students from that university itself, international students from other universities were there as well, including Nagaoka University. However, I found out that almost everyone there came from various parts of China and areas neighbouring Mongolia. That is why when I was in the bus from the forum hall to that university, I heard a group of students talking in alien language, and I was certain it wasn't Mandarin. I later found out that it was Mongolian.

After a short welcoming speech by the organiser, we had a "kanpai" session before everyone began feasting on the food served. The food was nothing much special, just normal stuff like fried rice, yaki soba, fried chicken and prawns, eda mame, deserts and of course free flow of alcohol drinks.

I was a good boy; I only consumed a little alcohol that day.

The girl in white on the left is the one which led the long line.

The party continued with a game session. First, everyone in the hall had to line-up in one line, according to their date of birth. Sounds easy peasy, isin't it? But the catch here is that you can only use non-verbal communication with other people. No talking or whispering is allowed. Everyone seemed blur, not knowing how to start lining up until a few of us started to show signs of their birth month. From there, we got into groups according to our birth month, followed by arranging ourselves according to our birth date.

It was a little bit tricky because different people from different countries have different method to convey their message when it comes to date after the 10th. That is when we began to play cheat and started whispering to each other haha. We were wondering how the winner is determined from that game; however we later found out that it was just a slot to break us into groups. Everybody sighed when they heard that haha.

The April group; my presence made everyone look so small here haha.

I was in the April group and we had six of us in our group, including Yamamoto-khun who graduated from my college last year and used to be active in the Interact Club in my college. The rest were three Chinese and a Japanese, a staff from the Chūetsu Organisation for Safe and Secure Society. We were given few pieces of papers and colour markers, and our task was to draw a pictogram about something, and that drawing has to be understood by everyone there, no matter which part of the world they came from.

We can use any forms of drawing to convey our message as long as we do not use any alphabets and signs, not even a question mark. Our group was assigned with this sentence: "Where is the toilet?"

And here was our group's drawing.

The person who conducted this game came to our table and he felt that our task was a bit too tough, so he change the line into: "Happy Birthday!". It's a simple and easy task for us that we only had to draw a birthday cake with candles on top of it, and a few colourful ribbons hanging down from the ceiling. Every groups had to go to the front and present their drawing to let the other groups to guess what their drawings' message were.

I went in front holding up our drawing high up and just before anything, there were already so many voices that guessed it correctly.

Look how close the people got to the front haha.

The more the game progressed, the crowd got more excited and thrilled that the distance between the one holding the drawing and the crowd got closer and closer. During the early stages, everyone guessed from their own tables but in the end, the distance became less than thirty centimeters that the host had to asked the crowd to make a few steps backwards. It didn't work for long because after a few seconds, the crowd got close to the person in front again that some guys holding their drawings seemed to be so afraid of the girls that got so high and so close to them. They face expressions were just too funny.

Even though our group didn't make it into the top three, we truely enjoyed our time there.

Komi, a third year junior in my college, in white shirt who went there together with me posing with several Chinese students.

A group photo taken with Mr Qi Koh Hong and some Chinese students from Nagaoka University.

On a whole, it was a wonderful forum and party, two events that served has an eye-opener and a learning experience for me personally.