My Brain Hurts

It seems to be becoming fairly common for student groups touring another country to include a short home stay with a local family. Last year we hosted a 17 year old lad from Chicago for three days. It was a great experience as we were able to find out much out each other’s country. Our view of Chicago had been tainted by too many gangster movies so it was good to hear what the city is really like. Apparently the title “windy city” is well earned. Google Earth was a great tool to use to add meaning to some of those explanations.

Last week we had the opportunity to host two 16 year old boys from Nara, Japan on a cultural exchange. Nara is a sister city to our own Canberra. The boys were again wonderful ambassadors for their country but a big difference this time was a langauge barrier – they spoke very little English and we spoke zero Japanese. A lot of pointing, hand gestures, showing of pictures, nodding and smiling seemed to work. We avoided speaking louder and slower.

An information sheet we received prior to their arrival stated that they were both allergic to vegetables????? Oh well we could indulge that for a couple of days – the wide eyes and smiles as some fairly large steaks went on the BBQ indicated that they approved of our meal choice. Come dessert time though neither of them liked chocolate . . . vegetables I can understand but chocolate?? All our limited stock of dessert items contained chocolate. However, we managed to feed them some carefully selected ice cream that had only a little chocolate in it – reminding me of the old Monty Python Spam sketch.

Google Earth was again very helpful and despite the languge barrier we managed to pass on a lot of information to each other. So if the opportunity to host some overseas visitors comes your way I encourage you to do it, with the promise that it will be a very rewarding experience.