Together with Ms. Inoue, the Japanese teachers and the exchange students from J.F. Oberlin University and Meiji University and a class mate, I visited the Japanese embassy. We visited the embassy because of the VIBE scholarship. VIBE means Vision on International and Business-related Education, and is a project between four universities: Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, University of Eastern Finland, Meiji University en J.F. Oberlin University. The scholarship is provided as a grant by the European Union and Japanese government.
We were kindly welcomed by ambassador Tsuji and the employees of the embassy. We entered a very old but beautiful meeting room. During this ‘meeting’, Ms. Inoue introduced the VIBE project and the exchange students shared their experiences with the ambassador. Luckily, I could understand 75% of the meeting. In the room was a very long table and the most important people, the ambassador, the embassy employees, Ms. Inoue and the Japanese lectures, sat in the middle. The people sitting at the end of the table are considered least important, guess who! Yes me and my classmate. Well, okay, for this case maybe the ‘rule’ didn’t apply but it happened to be this way anyway. Me and my classmate introduced ourselves shortly in Japanese. The ambassador and employees still recognized me from the Speech contest, which was very nice!
