Back from Japan

The Golden Pavillion - Kyoto

Miyajima Island across from Hiroshima

The National Museum - Tokyo

I am back from Japan (Nipon) and getting used to being home again. I spent two weeks in Japan traveling from Tokyo to Hiroshima, Miyajima, Kyoto and Osaka having the best time ever.
I went on a program for youth of South East Europe organized by MOFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan) and I can honestly say it was fantastic.
The program included the cultural experience, sessions about Japanese Economy, Politics, History, Language, Culture and Diplomacy held by the best professors in Japan.
The program includes 17 people from Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and obviously, Bosnia and Herzegovina and all between the ages of 19 and 28, so you can only imagine the blast we had, going out and having fun all together.

The cultural shock wasn't at all like the one I experienced in India and when I was in Tokyo I had a feeling like I was somewhere in Europe (besides from the fact that most women were shorter than me, everyone spoke Japanese, most of the writings were in Japanese and everyone drove on the left side of the roads, like in Britain, India etc).
I was amazed by the technological development I had only read about before and the working culture in this gigantic city.

One night we went out for a drink in Ginza St. (the famous street with all the lights and designer boutiques (if you watched the movie ‘Lost in Translation’ you would have seen it) and it lasted from about 9pm till 11pm and at when we finished drinking we went looking for another bar, club anything… and the Japanese hosts went back to work because they didn’t get enough done during the working hours…
This attitude amazes me because in my culture we look for ways to get out of work and do as less work as possible but here….

The real cultural shock came when we flew to Hiroshima and visited the Peace Memorial Centre which was built for the victims of the A-bomb attack in 6.8.1945 (8:15 am) and very close to the actual hypo-centre where the bomb exploded. We listened to a story by a lady who is 78 today and had 18 when the bomb fell and was only 1,5 km from the hypo-centre. She had 18 skin transplant operations and still can’t use the right side of her body. We saw videos and visited the museum which is very sad. There are still 70.000 ashes of unidentified bodies in the memorial centre.
The most interesting part of this visit for me was the stay with a traditional Japanese host family in Hiroshima. This was so cool. I got a chance to take a peek at their lives and analyse the culture from within. The family was so good to me, they took me everywhere, showed me everything and I had a lot of fun staying at their home.
During one day I even visited Miyajima, best known for it’s shrine and the O-Torii which seems like it’s floating on the sea (an island across from Hiroshima which is an UNESCO protected site and where deer run free round the island, maple trees turn red in autumn and the temples are incredible).

I traveled to Kyoto by Shinkansen (bullet train) and got there in just over 1 hour. Kyoto amazed me. So many castles, shrines, temples, traditional houses and Zen gardens. The weather was wonderful so we had a chance to go to the mountains and look at the entire city from a bird view.

I was sad to be going home after establishing some kind of understanding with the culture, but what amazes me the most is the mentality of people. Totally different from SEE. From heated toilet seats, rotating restaurants, 15EUR coffee, crazy fashion, high standard, sense of pride amongst people, crazy model cars you wouldn’t see in Europe, mobiles with no SIM cards, GPS in all taxis and cars, whitening face creams, small shoe sizes, lack of animals on the streets…. Everything was quite intriguing for me…

I will never forget Japan, the land of the raising sun.

Bayram

It is almost that time of the year. Two more days to go and it will be Bayram - the Muslim holiday which marks the end of Ramadan (the fasting month) and during which young people chill out and party like crazy... well at least they do in Bosnia.
There are specific traditions like spending time with your family and visiting family graves, waiting for guests and serving them all sorts of food and drinks, eating the traditional cakes (which are too sweet and too sticky for my taste but they are still a tradition). Parents award their children with money and sweets for the effort they made during Ramadan.
But as soon as the night falls, the craziest parties begin and people (who kept away from alcohol and all the pleasures during Ramadan) drink and party like mad.
It is even more popular than new-years-eve here.
For me it will be 3 days of packing and trying to spend as much time with my grandparents as possible. I will be away from all computer devices and trying to get back to 'the real world' and read books, eat cakes and drink lots and lots of coffee during the day...