Trip to Aogashima

Hello again dudes 🙂

Hahhaha…. as usual, I`ve been absent from my blog for quite some time 😦 Well.. it can`t be helped. Got a mouth to feed 😀 Hehehhe… and due to my lazyness, of course.

Anyway, last month, my friend Habib and me were invited to attend Kokyusai Koryukai in Aogashima, starting from 31 January 2008- 2 February 2008. Kokyusai Koryukai is a Japanese term for an International Culture Exhange program. In this program, we were requested to introduce our country (culture, food, flora and fauna, etc).

Well, for me, the program was interesting because I got a chance to ride a chopper (hehhehe… first timer :p) and also a chance to see how the Japanese people in the remote area live their life 🙂 I bet it will be really different as compared to Tokyo. But, seeing is believing. So, when I got the chance, I took it without a second thought 🙂

The program was arranged to be held in Aogashima Junior High and Elementary school. Yeahh… we were going to present our country to the kids 🙂 Therefore, the event organizer told us to prepare the powerpoint presentation slide for this occasion. And…. to make things worse, it should be done in Japanese 😦 Heck… I can`t even talk Japanese properly and now they want me to present in Japanese??? Sighh…

But.. I told to myself, this will be a good chance to improve my Japanese. More pressure means more chances to remember new words :p hehehhe… So, I prepared my slides in English first. Then, I asked my friend help to translate the whole things into Japanese. After that, practice, practice, and practice 🙂 Well… I can certainly say that it works. From this experience, I got a lot of new words and sentence to be used in practise 😀

So.. after the slide was done, I was ready to go 🙂 Two of us, plus Nakazawa-san from JICE, who will be our coordinator for this program, started our journey on that fine Thursday morning, around 5.15 am. Well.. it was really early 😦 However, we have to be in Aogashima by 10 am, so no choice 🙂 we went to Haneda airport and took a plane to this Island, named Hachijojima. It took around 45 minutes from Haneda to that Island. Well… that island is quite famous for its beach and hot spring. However, since we didn`t have time for it, we have to pass those chances 😦 Then… well… this is my favorite part, we took a chopper to Aogashima 🙂

Hmm… the chopper was build for 9 passenger, 1 pilot and 1 co-pilot. It was quite full on that day. I guess it was because some people want to go to Aogashima for fishing. From the airport, we walk down the corridor and went to the heliport. The chopper was quite big in size. I went in and took the second seat from the front. When they finally started to increase the propeller speed, the whole part of the chopper was shaking. Darn… it was scary :p I thought that I was inside the Bajaj… you know, the old public transportation in Jakarta, imported from India; where the whole parts are shaking and giving a loud noise when the engine is started 🙂

I merely thought that the chopper was falling apart :p hehehhe… then… the chopper started to lift from the ground. But, to my surprise, the chopper was not really horizontally lift up 😦 It was more like leaning right and left, giving the impression that it was not stable. Sighh… will the chopper make it to Aogashima?? I thought to myself 😦 But, fortunately, it worked just fine. It was blown by the strong wind sometimes, right and left, up and down 😦 Darn… that was scary. I finally relieved when we land in the heliport of Aogashima. Fheww…. that was interesting, and scary at the same time 😀

to be continued….