#5 Regional PDO

Konichiwa!

I had my Regional Pre-Departure Orientation on Saturday :).

(Sadly, I totally forgot to take pictures, which really sucks because I will most likely never see the people I met at my PDO ever again. But, I had a great time. I’ll try to capture the few memories using this blog.)

So, my orientation was located at a high school in a town not far from San Francisco. This orientation was for American and International students in the area. This means there were people from the US who were being prepared for their departure to another country and there were also people who had come from other countries, studied in the US, and were being prepared to go home.

My mom and I got to the high school at around 10:45, so 15 minutes early. There weren’t that many people there… People really didn’t start flooding in until 11. Anyways, it was awkward in the beginning which is what tends to happen when people don’t know each other.

The parents were eventually kicked out and the American students were separated from the International ones. We all introduced ourselves and we included the country we were going to. It was kind of funny because as we went around the circle a pattern developed it went like this, Japan, Japan, Japan, France, Japan, Japan, Japan, Thailand, Japan, Japan, Japan, Sweden, Japan, Japan, Japan, France. Basically, there was a LOT of Japan. Haha. There was a brother and a sister that came in late and they were both going to India for a year. I thought that was kind of cool.

I have to say the YFU volunteers were very unorganized. The whole thing was poorly planned out. (I had to email and my mom had to call to figure out where the thing was in the first place.) They didn’t really know what to do, so we basically had a question/answer thing going on the whole time. One volunteer was a YFU alumni, she had gone on exchange for a year in Japan when she was a sophomore in high school. The other volunteer was a man who goes to Japan on business all the time. So, it was kind of lucky for those of us who were going to Japan.

We had lunch. I just started introducing myself to everyone and eventually we had a huge circle of people eating lunch and talking about everything. That was one of the best parts. We all got to talk about our excitement, what we were looking forward to, our fears, and just everything else that was going on. It was pretty cool getting to know everyone. I even met Minny! We talked on our YFU Japan ‘2010 Summer Exchange Program Group on Facebook. :)

After the lunch we did our question/answer thing again with our YFU volunteers. The questions ranged from, “How much can our suitcase weigh?” to “Will we be going to school?” I knew most of the information, having researched YFU thoroughly beforehand, but hearing it again was reassuring.

The parents came back around 3. They were separated from us, where they got to do their own informational meeting. While they were in their meeting we played games, the international students were there too. It was really cool to meet them. I met guys from Germany, Chile, Lafia, Lithuania, and Georgia. There were girls too but I didn’t meet them, there was one from Germany, I think.

Overall, I had a good time. The volunteers were nice, a little unprepared, but nice; the American exchangers were cool; and the International exchangers were interesting.


Update:

I got host family gifts after the PDO. I got a couple t-shirts from San Francisco and some Ghirardelli chocolates. I might make an album and a mixed CD but that might be a little much… I still don’t know who my host family is or where I will be staying. So, I still have that to look forward to. :)

I got my departure date! I will be driving down to Berkeley on June 11th, than flying to Tokyo on June 14th. I return on July 27th, a day after school starts. Hmm.