A former student of mine dropped by the classroom yesterday evening to tell me about his recent trip to Hawaii. He goes pretty frequently with his family, staying in Honolulu in a hotel on the beach. He (like us) took advantage of the strong yen to stock up on all kinds of goods, both normal and luxury – it’s a good time to spend money overseas. The more pictures he showed me, the more I wanted to visit again myself.
It was interesting to see that he stayed in the same hotel that he has stayed in every time he goes, and he visited the same restaurant he always visits. He never strays far from Waikiki beach. Interesting – to him it is a sense of comfort and coming back to someplace he knows well, but for myself and Kuniko we wouldn’t want to take a long distance trip and do the same stuff we did last time. We definitely like going back to the same places, but I think we’d want to do something completely different the next time. I guess it comes from a sense of not being able to see everything whenever we take a trip – we always have to make sacrifices and see only a few of the things on our list.
My former student also brought back some omiyage for us – some cookies and chocolate. I handed over some omiyage from our trip (Reese’s peanut butter cups) and the meeting was complete. We don’t meet up much anymore as he completed the class last year, but I’m hoping that he’ll be able to take the class again, as he is a really good student and is pretty realistic about his English ability and goals. Nice guy.
