Farm stay

This is Masa. I have been to a farm for Work Experience for a month. Actually, it was like a farm stay, but it must have been variable experiences for me.
The farm earns by farming and also there is an accommodation for kids. It’s not a hotel. It is a facility for learning environment. Children do some activities such as walking to the beach, running in a forest...I remember I had a similar experiences when I was young. I guess you couldn't imagine.
Basically, my work was to help the kid’s activities and prepare for dinner when there were kids around. Otherwise, I chased cows. I did not work much. Actually I couldn't do a lot for them because I felt exhausted to play with kid's who have inexhaustible vitality.
I was worried about communication during a month. I couldn't catch children's English first. I won't forget that a girl asked me "why are they (cows) scared of us?".Then I realized they don't speak fast, it's just because of my poor skill of listening. I couldn't understand staff's conversation as they spoke too fast! and dirty English...but I think I got used to listen to native chatting during farm stay. After Work Experience, I had a chat with my host family and I felt my English skills had improved. I can listen better and speak faster than before. Also, my host family ware glad that I made a big achievement!

Masa in Melbourne

2011 College Festival

We held a college festival on the 19th and 20th of November.
On the first day, it was raining, but on the second day, we enjoyed clear autumn weather.
Many groups of students set up booths with different themes.
The hotel course set up a restaurant with “Tohoku” as the theme.
The theme-park course gave a song-and-dance show.
I think all the visitors enjoyed the festival.
I want to thank you all for coming!!

Yoshiyuki Sugawara
Public Relations Department

Students Go on Air

Hospitality & Tourism College students were on TV on Oct 29.
We were filmed for a special program called “News from a Good Country”.
We help the “Shunran no sato” project in Ishikawa prefecture where the tourists can experience rice planting, charcoal making and stay in farmhouse bed and breakfast. This agritourism has been receiving attention, and has been selected as one of the finalists of the BBC World Challenge, a much-loved sustainable development show that has been held by the BBC since 2005. I believe our desire to re-build the farm and village, which young people now want to come back to visit, is appreciated globally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur2u0XbduK0&feature=related

Shinya Takahashi
Tourism Course Supervisor

Assignments for F1 Race Circuits

Representatives of Trajal Hospitality & Tourism College arrived at Suzuka Circuit to act as service staff for V.I.P. guests at the F1 race.
The twenty seven students are also representatives of Japan, as well.
They struggled at the job site because their supervisors are all foreigners, but I think this was a rare opportunity for them to move ahead another step and improve their skills.

Kazuyuki Ishikawa
Section Manager

Soggy Half Marathon

Thirty-five students from Trajal Seattle are registered to run in the Honolulu Marathon in December. I was concerned that most of them are taking too casual an approach to the full marathon (42 km) and not training enough, so I suggested that they test their strength and guts in the Seattle Half Marathon (21 km) on November 27th. Only five brave students took up the challenge. I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to hold a marathon event in Seattle at this time of year, when it is almost guaranteed to be cold and wet – sometimes even snowing! This time the cold was bearable – about 5 degrees C for the start at 7:30 AM. But just when the starting air horn sounded, the cold rain began falling and continued all through the race. Clothing, shoes, socks – all got soaked, making it easy to get blisters on the toes.
So it was a rather miserable morning run, but the five students all finished between 2 hours and 2½ hours – quicker than I had expected, but it took its toll physically (most of them stayed home from school the next day. Now I think those five students realize what they are facing in the full marathon in Honolulu, and I hope they will make their friends aware of it too, but now it’s probably too late to begin an intensified training program.

Neal Colodner

Halloween

From mid-October, the Seattle weather usually starts getting cold and cloudy, but the colorful autumn leaves and mountains of bright-orange pumpkins piled in front of supermarkets and produce stores make the season a little brighter. All stores decorate their interiors for Halloween – with various forms of monsters, ghosts, witches, cats – some creepy and some cute.
This year Halloween (October 31st) fell on a Monday, but college campuses held their Halloween costume parties on the previous Friday, since there are few classes on Friday afternoons, and there is no school the next day. But children going house to house yelling “trick-or-treat” had to wait for the actual Halloween on Monday, as that is the only day that people in their homes will give out candy. The HTC ESL classes also had their Halloween activities – like pumpkin carving and costume contests on the 31st.

Neal Colodner

Japan Festivals in Seattle

In Japan, autumn is considered the season for sports competitions and culture festivals. America doesn’t have those traditions, but some major American holidays such as Halloween and Thanksgiving come in autumn.
On October 12th, our students at both Edmonds and Shoreline held the annual HTC Japan Festival. (Actually, this is also the date of another American holiday- Columbus Day – the day that Columbus first landed on a Caribbean island.) At the Japan Festival, HTC students introduce some traditional and modern Japanese culture to the general students and college staff. The Shoreline students had stations for wearing yukata, learning kanji, using chopsticks, origami, the “face game”, and getting brush-painted kanji for visitors’ names. The Edmonds students took a more modern approach – providing Japan tourism information, pop music, and Japanese-style makeup demonstrations in addition to calligraphy and origami. But of course, the most popular table was the one giving out rice balls wrapped in nori. HTC students at both schools performed a dance to Soran Bushi – a famous fisherman’s folk song from Hokkaido.



Neal Colodner