Wow. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun haha. Before I knew it, I’m back in good ol’ Perth again.

Well, if I gotta sum up the whole trip in a few words: it was pretty epic.

The Asian Youth Camp was a very cool experience. Just to rehash what I said in my last post, it was a 2 week course covering many issues and aspects of multicultural interactions in the Asia Pacific region, and also included several days of going out and experiencing Japan too. We were also required to present a report on our own respective countries, unto which I had a total blast pimping out Australia’s cities, animals and slang (She’ll be roight, mate!).

Overall, the camp experience was really cool. I learned a lot of new things, gained a lot new experiences made some very cool new friends along the way.

After the camp ended, I’d booked an extra week before my flight so I could have some free time around Japan (As I expected, the camp was so intense, there wasn’t much time to go out and do any shopping at all!). I caught a bullet train over to Tokyo, and stayed there for a few days between a really cool youth hostel and a good friend’s house.

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Hoo boy. Talk about your crazy epic prep and packing frenzy. The last thing on my todo list was to write a blog on what’s goin’ on, and I finally got to it.

I’m writing this post on a plane, currently flying out of Hong Kong and headed for Kansai, Japan.

Earlier this year, a fellow ECU student and myself were very lucky to receive scholarships to attend a study seminar in Kobe. The seminar will be focused on ‘multicultural symbiosis’, and will run for 2 weeks. It will consist of a lot of pretty interesting activities, including hanging out with a host family and going to make soba noodles out in the countryside.

Since I was very fortunate to receive a similar scholarship back in 2006, I’m extremely honored to be chosen again for another one and plan to do the very best to represent my university, and Australia as a whole.

Now… the last time I went to Japan, I tried to blog about the stuff I did everyday, but found out that there simply isn’t enough time to do that.

So this time, I plan to leverage the latest social media tech to the extreme, and post updates as a go along. This will probably consist of Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins as often as possible (But hopefully not up to spam levels haha).

I learnt from my past trip to Japan that using global roaming on one’s iPhone is a VERY BAD THING TO DO, and this time, I’ve tried renting out a 3G SIM card from DoCoMo, which I’ll report back on here on how well it goes.

Anyway, the plane’s about to land. I’ll be posting this the next chance I get.

See ya round!

Again, same deelio with the photos. I’m SERIOUSLY considering buying a DSLR camera with good low-light sensitivity for next time.

Whew… sorry for the late post. I was pretty much straight home and into bed last night. Words could not describe the level of knackery I was feeling.

Anyway, quick rehash of how it all went down:

Rocked up at 7:30 again. It was a few degrees warmer this time, but still darn near freezing point. This time I brought gloves, but my feet froze haha. Going to go back and work on my Perth winter wardrobe…
A few volunteers weren’t able to make it this time, so the tasks got re-allocated a bit. Thankfully my posting didn’t change; back into the seminar room for more crowd control!

I’ll see if I can do another re-cap of the new guests this time as well:

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I took a few pics, but they’re so blurry and bad that I don’t want to put them here. I’ll see if a few public ones trickle through at some point.

Sitting in bed now… thoroughly buggered after official day 1 of Supanova.

It was a pretty interesting day. I rocked up at 7:20am (became the mayor on Foursquare. Zing! ) and stood around for a bit until I was allocated my task for the day. I was allocated to the main seminar room (where all the guests were speaking) where I would be responsible for managing the crowds of people coming in and out, making sure they behaved properly while they were in there, and keeping the place clean when they weren’t. As a side effect to this, I was able to see every single panel held at Supanova.

Just for the lolz, or if anyone is curious as to how each panel went:

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Sorry for the bad photography. I only had my iPhone on me at the time. Can’t wait for iPhone 4.
NB: WTF! WordPress flipped my pics! I’ll have to fix that later tho, sorry!

Whew! Well, day 1 of volunteering at Supanova is over! Boy am I knackered!

It’s been a pretty interesting day, and although there were a few hiccups here and there, generally it was all good.
Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve decided to document how the whole experience goes so there’s more information about it available online to other potential volunteers.

So I thought I’d go about this in 2 phases. I’d document down everything that happened, and then write my overall feelings on the matter.

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