#8 Day 2- Berkeley PDO

We did a ton of stuff today. Our day is planned by the minute. We were always doing something…

We (and I mean “we” as in “Japan exchangers”) are all given three square meals a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all located in the UC Berkeley Cafeteria. It’s pretty good food too. I think I would get a little “heavy” if I ate there every day, if you know what I mean…

In between breakfast and dinner we have “sessions”. We have sessions with our Kumi (Go Purple!), language classes, and then cultural workshops.

In our Kumi sessions we basically played a couple games, worked in groups, and talked about things that all pertained to getting us prepared to go to Japan. In our language classes we were divided by our current relationship with the Japanese language. Those were the kind of boring but really informational and interesting type of sessions.

The cultural workshops on the other hand were a blast. We got to be outside of our Kumi (not that I don’t love Purple Kumi) which allowed us to hang with other people.
I got to hang out with all the Californians! Haha.

My first cultural workshop was cooking Takoyaki. It literally translates into Octopus Ball. It’s a small ball made out of flour on the outside with the Octopus in the inside. We got to make it, it was really cool. It didn’t taste that bad either. Octopus is kinda chewy.

This is us making it. :)

Here’s me eating my Takoyaki with my special Takoyaki sauce.


The second cultural workshop was a Japanese sports tournament type thing. I can’t remember the name at the moment! I think its Undokai. But, it was started after World War 2 to boost the moral and community spirit. The Japanese people would form teams and face off against different communities.

What we did during our workshop was different relay races. We were split into the Red Team and the Blue Team. I was Red :). The Warm-Up game was the old pass-the-apple-to-the-end-of-the-line-without-using-your-hands type relay. We lost. :( Our real challenge, however, was this big long complicated relay with all sorts of different stations. There was one station where someone had to pop the balloons, one where someone had to say a Japanese tongue twister without messing up, and another one where someone had to eat a doughnut hanging off a string without using your hands… Oh yeah, I was at station ten, designated doughnut eater. There was a bunch of them though. Unfortunately, Blue Team kicked our butts! We got hung up at the chopsticks station where the poor girl had to use the chopsticks to transfer skittles from a plate to a cup.

Here’s my team. We were good sports though. There wasn’t that much name calling…

It was a busy day.