Where did you spend your summer vacation?

I found it a little bit interesting that this week’s topic uses the question word ‘Where,’ rather than ‘What’. That is to say, the question could have been ’What did you do in the summer vacation?’ It is almost the same question, but I think the nuance is just a little different. Anyway, to get on with answering the question itself, I would have to say that I spent most of my time at home. Having said that, I did find myself doing a lot of travelling to different places for various reasons.

For example, my company was organizing teacher training in Okayama so I had to go there by Shinkansen two times. On both occasions, I had to go down the night before and stay in a hotel. Okayama seems like a very nice city but unfortunately I had no time to explore it. also, over the summer vacation, there are many camps being held for students who wish to study English with native speakers. Although they are called ‘camps,’ I personally do not think this is the best word to describe them because typically they take place in community centres and other buildings in which one can hold educational events. I worked as a teacher in one of these four day events, commuting to Nishio from Nagoya every day. That was quite a long journey.

Finally, since my wonderful wife has had to be hospitalized for about six weeks I spent a good deal of time going back and forth from the hospital. Of course, in these times of COVID-19 one cannot meet family members face-to-face if they are unlucky enough to be hospitalized. The experience made me realize how hard it must be for someone to have a loved one sick in hospital and be unable to visit them. To be honest, I think hospitals should make a little bit more effort to help the families of very sick people have face-to-face contact and even touch each other. Without this human contact, I suspect it is much harder for the sick person to recover. Oh well.…

Enjoy your week,

Buri