Aika

Hi there. It’s Aika from Bream Bay College. It’s started getting warm. I’m hoping that summer comes back soon. It’s already been more than 7 months since I started staying in New Zealand. Time has gone so quickly. Today I’m going to write about what I experienced in this country.

 

I will write about the thing I struggled with this time as nobody’s written about it deeply yet. I struggled to make friends. I’m pretty sure that almost all my classmates and seniors of Eiryu course struggled with the same thing. When I started going to school, I didn’t understa0nd what people said to me at all. I found a group to hang out with, but I was just sitting there quietly because they talked so fast. I tried to talk to them and ask them some questions, but I didn’t even understand their answers, so I stopped talking to them once. And they also stopped talking to me because I was a boring quiet person.

 

When I was looking for a good way to make friends, my host mother told me about the Stage Challenge. As Hitomi has written about it in her essay, it is a kind of dance competition for students. To be honest, at first, I didn’t want to join it because everyone on the team could dance so well and I had never done dancing at all before. However, I decided to try it because everyone around me said it would be so much fun to join it and perform on the stage. Finally, we came in 1st place in Northland for the first time in the past 10 years. It has turned into one of my best memories. And it helped me a lot to make friends. 

 

I used to have no confidence in my English. I was afraid of speaking English. So, it took a long time to be close to my teammates, but I didn’t give up that time. Now I have many good friends through the Stage Challenge. I believe it was good for me to make a hard decision. I also used to think that nobody wanted to be my friend, but I found that I was just thinking too much. Everyone is very nice to me. Then I started trying to be more friendly so that I could many more friends than I did before. It made my school life much more fun. Now I’ve got lots of friends not only in my year but also in younger/older years. And now some friends tell me that they love me every day, so I say to them that I love them, too. That is the best moment, isn’t it? 😉

 

I went to the school ball in the beginning of August. It definitely was super exciting. I had a pre-ball party at one of my friends’ house as well and then we headed off to school. The auditorium of my school decorated by year 13 students looked amazing. It didn’t look like our boring auditorium.lol On that night, everyone looked so stunning. I enjoyed dancing with my lovely friends until midnight. We should have one in Jin-ai, too! It would be so much fun. Haha