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!

I’ve been sitting on this post like a crazed gunman with an itchy trigger finger.

The newest addition to the Pokémon  line of games is finally upon us, HeartGold and SoulSilver. It was released in America a few days ago and will be released here in Australia in a few days time. When it came out in Japan last year, one of my Japanese teachers was able to pick me up a copy and bring it back over, of which I’ve been playing ever since.
At the time, my blog was offline, so I figured I’d hold onto this lovely post until the time of the English version release, where people might find some of this information useful (As opposed to posting it during Japan’s release, where it would be all but forgotten by now).

When my Japanese teacher was on exchange with some students in Japan, I emailed her and asked if she could pick up a copy of the new HeartGold over there. I chose Gold over Silver since Silver is what I got for the GBC originally, and wanted it to be different than before. She said she checked out a Sofmap on her last day there, and found this copy of HeartGold, which was the last one they had. Suffice it to say when HeartGold/SoulSilver came out, they were selling like hotcakes!

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Whew! Just got home 30 minutes ago… really tired, but I thought I’d try and crank out a blog.

So for the unfamiliar ones, Wai-Con is Perth’s premiere anime themed convention that’s usually held in January each year. Aside from a host of stalls selling all kinds of anime/manga/Japanese merch, there are also a lot of cool events such as drawing panels and such, a dedicated video games room and a freakin huge cosplay competition.
For the past few years, I’ve usually just picked a panel or two I liked the look of, just went to them, and then nicked off after… not this time.

I got a message from a friend who is one of the co-ordinators last week, saying that there is a slight shortage of volunteers and asked if I’d like to help out. I was already considering volunteering from before, but after hearing there was a shortage, I knew I had to jump in.
So, this year around, I was an official volunteer for Wai-Con, mainly helping out in the games room, but also a few odds and ends elsewhere too. And I must say, it was a pretty awesome experience.

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Here’s a little story on my ever ongoing Japanese language escapades.
I got in a little hot water in my weekly Kumon Kokugo lesson over the importance/neccessity of Kanji. XP

As always when advancing to the next level at Kumon, I took a diagnostic test to guage my Japanese skillz. My results were pretty good; 100% on all sections (w00t!) bar one; written Kanji… where I got 0%.

My tutor was somewhat confused about the apparent contrasts in scores, and asked me what happened. I didn’t really think about what I said, but just blurted out “I don’t really have any drive to learn to write Kanji”, as to which the reaction I received was somewhat of mortification.

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