Danielle Popp

2003-04 Outbound to Japan

Date of Birth: October 2, 1986

Hometown: Gainesville, Florida

School: Gainesville Eastside High School

Sponsor: Gainesville Rotary Club, District 6970, Florida USA

Host: Kanazawa South Rotary Club, District 2610, Japan

Danielle's Bio

Danielle Popp is currently enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program at Gainesville’s Eastside High School. Though her schedule is often hectic, she enjoys the challenging program. Her favorite subjects include chemistry, history, and French. Danielle is a member of the National Thespian Society, and participates in as many theatrical productions as possible both around town and in school. She looks forward to going on to a challenging university theatre program. 

Outside of school Danielle especially enjoys the stimulating activities of loafing, sleeping, and vegetating on the couch. When at home she enjoys drawing, reading, and writing if she isn’t either doing homework or passed out from exhaustion. Dancing is also a major part of Danielle’s life. She takes part in various classes when time allows in jazz, ballet, tap, and modern dance. 

For two years Danielle lived in Uppsala, Sweden. She attended Swedish public school, and when asked the common question, “Are you fluent in Swedish?” she answers “Fluent enough to read physics textbooks.” She has also traveled elsewhere in Europe, including France, Spain, Norway, Greece, and her favorite, Iceland. 

Danielle is thrilled at the chance to broaden her horizons by going to Asia and to experience a culture so foreign and beautiful to her. Going to Japan will bring to life something that Danielle has long dreamed about. She is determined to make this next adventure as fabulous as it can be.

En Route to Japan

Postcard from Danielle - Received September 30

I'm having a wonderful time here in Japan! Seems I fell into perfection. I'm the only student here who isn't full of complaints! I'm sure I'll have my rough moments too, though I've only made a few cultural blunders thus far ... most having to do with when and when not to take my shoes off. 

So far, I've walked in a parade, taken part in the school festival, toured some of Kanazawa (went to the garden on this post card!), and made many friends. Will write my monthly report as soon as our computer is fixed.

Danielle 

(Photos below courtesy of Japan District 2610 YE Chairman Shigeru Yamamoto - Click any photo to enlarge.)

January 6 Journal

This is the fourth time I've tried to begin this entry. Got to be the most difficult introduction I've ever written, so I think I'll just skip it at this point and just go. ^^;

Japan. Wow. What can I say about Japan that would even come near to describing truthfully the experiences and feelings I've had over the past few months? Amazing to me, really, that I've been here for months…time must move differently here, because months have never flown by in such a rush before. When I think back, Japan has been this mass of excitement and people and neon lights and intricate characters all balled up and thrown right in my face…a whirlpool of overwhelming colors and feelings that's swallowed me whole. I swear I haven't even done that much, yet thinking back all I get are visions of festival lanterns and chanting monks and again, SO many people, as if all the swirls of memory are something from some busy movie rather than experiences I've actually gone though.

My first night here I was already out with my host sister, who's my age, and a group of Japanese teenagers, weaving through the crowds on the endless (or so it then seemed) Katamachi, the main street in my city. It was like I had tripped and fallen into the Discovery Channel; all the neon sighs and half-English half-Japanese advertisements everywhere, seas of black-haired people and so many boutiques and restaurants and little stands, and everywhere venders calling out "IRASHAIMASE!!" right in your ear. That means welcome. ^_^ Never going to seem quite right to walk into a store in America and not have at least five people screaming welcome at me. Hee.

I entered school right at the time of the school festival. What a time to get there…school festival means students everywhere, projects and costumes and food and havoc. Everyone is everywhere all the time. I really felt the size of my school then. The first sight of my school included a huge model of Atstro Boy (famous Japanese cartoon character) towering over me made completely out of soda cans. There were boys in dresses all over the place. o.O The festival would last for three days, and the opening day I was wrapped into a traditional yukata (like a kimono only cooler, because there are less layers) by one of the teachers and paraded around town…no really, I walked with my school in a parade right through the heart of the city to open our festival.

The excitement did eventually die down, and the students turned into the regular uniformed, intellectual kids who live and breathe school, as I had first expected. I'm still having trouble understanding classes, but hey, YOU try reading the board when the writing system consists of over 3000 pictograms. And this from someone who's really good at reading Japanese too. It's tough. Not to mention the fact that the teachers have horrendous handwriting. ^^;;;

Let me explain a bit about the Japanese writing system. There are three writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji is the scary one that everyone recognizes…the complex pictograms that number 3000+. There are easier systems though. Hiragana and katakana are more like what we would think of as "alphabets". They have 46 characters each, each character representing a syllable (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, like that). Japanese can be written completely using the easy texts, though usually what we see is a mix of all three. Kanji is used for the words, hiragana is used to change word endings and such, or for words that don't have kanji. Katakana is for foreign words (which there are a lot of in Japanese) and sound effects.

I've become obsessed with kanji. I love reading and writing, and I'm far better in those areas at this point than I am at speech. That doesn't, however, mean I know much kanji at all…kanji is impossible to just sit down and memorize, because not only are there so many characters, but there are more than one reading for most of the characters, and many ways to use the character. @_@ You just have to learn kanji as you learn Japanese, and this is why I still can't follow certain classes at all. Classes like history and old Japanese are nothing but kanji. Math is easier to follow, and actually helps me to learn kanji, and then there are classes like PE and calligraphy which are easily my favorites because I can fully participate.

Moving off the writing tangent…I'm now with my second host family, which consists of host father, really cool host mother, and three older brothers.

I am having the time of my life.

My brothers are so great. Especially over the holidays there's been no lack of brothers. Only one lives at home year-round. He's the middle brother, at 24. The oldest (25), is in town, but we don't see much of him. He and his fiancé were around quite a lot lately though. The youngest brother (20) is back from college in Tokyo for the time being. There've been movies and outings and even a trip to Kyoto with everyone. With all the brothers around there's been sports on TV 24/7, and already I'm learning the names of wrestlers and actually coming to appreciate the difficulty of golf. I even watched a football game the other night of my own free will. Craziness. On top of warming to sports, since it's all guys all the time, I've developed quite the "otoko Kanazawa-ben", or boys' form of the Kanazawa dialect. So apparently I'm going to go back to school talking slang like a boy. XD Plenty of video games and boys comics too, which are my favorite anyway, so I'm set.

We've had fun. ^^

So school starts tomorrow and it's back to the old routine. I'll be sad when it's just my host mom and I around for the most part, once everyone's back at work/school. I certainly will miss having my huge family around. I wouldn't mind staying in this family for the rest of my stay.

I see the other exchange students now and then, mostly my friend from Canada and a guy who's in my Japanese class with me. (Yes, I even go to cram school at night for Japanese, just like in anime! XD) Hopefully I'll have more time to write some entries now that I've gained computer access.

Minna-sama, Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu! (Happy New Years, everyone!)

February 14 Journal

Thus I am making brownies for all the boys in my class. *grin*

The last month has been...eventful. But more in the Danielle-thinking-too-much or the Danielle-converses-inside- her-own-head-too-much way than true EVENTS. I guess I'll start off with the fact that I had a bout of severe displeasure for a few weeks. I was upset with myself for not being better at Japanese. I was upset with my family and my school for not letting me be better at Japanese. I was upset at Japan for not being what I wanted it to be, and upset again at myself for wanting it to be more than it already was. I was restless, rather bored, majorly negative, and just all around wanted to go home for awhile there.

All in my head. It was only natural. I was fine at Japanese. I kept telling myself that, but just couldn't accept it. Until. One day, no special day in particular, I went to school and WOAMYGOSH! I'm suddenly a Japanese high school student. I could understand my classes. Not all, by far, but I could copy kanji off the board, thanks to the disgusting amount of time I put into practicing kanji before. Then I could go home and slowly, painstakingly translate it. Thus more insane hours focusing on kanji. I studied all day until midnight every day for a week or so (just like the other kids), and whatdoyouknow, I can now open my math book and read it.

Practically killing myself in school perked me up so much. XD I felt like I belonged. Finally. I could communicate. Really. Not just sit there and pretend I could figure out what the conversations were about. ...But now there's this other sort of sadness. I wrote a journal entry on it a few days ago that I think proper to quote from:

"...it's become my life now. Somewhere along the line, between my elation from being in Japan and my disappointment with Japan at the same time...somewhere in there a life began. And all of a sudden, I'm in this pattern. This fabulous pattern that feels so natural. It's like I've never lived anywhere else. Traces of the American culture keep slipping away, and gradually the parts of America I used to long for seem a turn-off. And the Japanese lifestyle that once seemed so simple to me has become anything but. After a short spell of depression and general upset feelings geared toward everything around me, I fell into this perfect, wonderful existence.

Existence. But there's so much more than that now. Now, instead of just existing while Japan went on around me, I'm now living Japan. I can communicate. I can understand. I study in school and joke with my friends and go through piles of manga (Japanese comic books) in a few hours rather than the one a day I MIGHT have been able to pull off around Christmas. My old American habits baffle me...what I used to do, how I used to think. And not that it's all gone, I mean I'm still completely me...just a bit more Japanese."

"And you know, I forget so often that I'm foreign. I forget that I don't look like everyone else and that I won't always be in this place I feel like I've lived in forever.

Then I catch someone staring and the truth comes crashing down around me. It's like in a manga, when the background around me seems to melt into darkness and leaves me in the spotlight there...the gaijin in the schoolgirl costume clinging to her bento (lunch) and bag of Japanese-learning textbooks. And I bow my head and let my Japanese-style hair fall across my face so that maybe no one else will notice my eyes. I could be just a schoolgirl with dyed hair, right?

Right?

...

Four and a half months."

*

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back?"- LotR

April 29 Journal

Well now. I must insist that it has definitely not been over a month since I last wrote. Valentine's Day was last week, it's the rest of you who are displaced in time and can't quite see that. ........... Wow. May already?

So busy comes not even close to describing how the past few months have been. I swear to you that time moves differently here. Japan is this big routine of school and club and work and if you're lucky a little sleep, then school and club and work and work and school and work and club. And once you get stuck in this pattern, there's no emerging unless you happen to get a week of holidays, like I'm on now. *whew* Honestly, I haven't had a moment to breathe or sleep, let alone think of anything other than school in...well a few months.

It all started on spring break. The business started anyway, not the school. That ended. Heh. Spring break was me running all over Japan to everyplace I've ever wanted to go. There were towns and temples and Universal Studios, ATM machines and t-shirts and a general spending of too much money. Then on to more towns and meetings and Rabid Rotary Kids running all over town doing exchange-y things. Plus Tokyo and restaurants and brother (but not really).

Did you get all of that? That's ok, I'm not sure I did either, frankly.

What's lame about being so busy is that while you're trying to keep up with everything, you end up missing a lot. School's rather like that too.

School, which started again, and suddenly I'm in second year and I'm able to keep up with classes. Well, keep up with classes, that is, if I study every waking moment, and most of the moments which should normally be spent sleeping. That's what I did, alright. Let me tell you, translating textbooks takes FOREVER. But I'm doing it. It's fun, in a way. I get to learn lots of stuff, and I never get tired of working on cracking Japanese. Actually, I can't keep up with all my classes. There just is no possible way. Takes me all my time and energy to keep up with Japanese history, world history, chemistry, and vocabulary tests. Now add that to club (cheer club and helping with English club) which goes till about six-thirty every day, Japanese cram school which goes later twice a week, and all the stuff I have to do outside of school on top of that...well, you can see why this entry is such a hectic mess. Because that's what my life looks like. My mind's programmed into my pattern now, and to break from it is just...woah. (o.o) Ok...slowing down now. Let's see...I'm currently addicted to green tea. I can't get enough of it. I think this is because I haven't had it in so long. For some reasons, families tend to stock wheat tea....*makes a face* I can drink it, since I have to every single day, but I really hate wheat tea.

There's so much good cooking I'll miss when I'm gone...wish I had time to learn to make some of it. Maybe I'm taking this whole Japanese student thing a bit too seriously...but when everyone around me is busy working to the point of being ridiculous, one tends to want to be busy too. I recently sent home a bunch of stuff (mostly comics, of which I've acquired quite the collection, but hey, that's why I can read so well now.), and I'm going to do my best to NOT let a lot more stuff build up. Moving to my last house on....a day that keeps changing that should be sometime next week. *laugh* Everyone's too busy. Always, always. Break the pattern for moving? What?

Sometimes I love this pattern. Sometimes I hate it. I don't think I could live it forever. I really, honestly don't. I couldn't deal with doing the same thing day after day after day for the rest of my life, without varying. It's enough for now though, because it feels right, because that's how everyone here lives. And that's where I am. I'm here. (^^) Until the next, then.