Oct 16 - friendships

First full, full day of the delegation with more gifts, tours and remarkably thoughtful leaders.

We toured both an elementary school and our sister university; I was quite impressed with the grade 4 class as they were very interactive and had to speak English.  The university leaders were charismatic and easy to listen to (translators spoke almost perfect English) but the students were painfully shy.  Both schools spoke about the importance of friendships for sustainable futures.

Had a chance to chat with delegation members and they all have very different motives and reasons for being here.  The benefits of sister city relations are to increase economic, educational and cultural ties and certainly lesser of the former which begs the question is it worth taxpayer dollars to continue (the relationship has cost Kamloops 225k over the 23 years) but the responses I got is sometimes you need to do things because its the right thing to do, in my mind, this means comraderie and/or tradition.

Highlight for sure was the family hosted dinner, was not sure at first as the grandfather seemed quite nervous and spoke no English but as the house filled with the grandmother and the grandkids we had a delightful time although leaning on my Japanese (or lack of) was interesting but we made it work.

Savannah is starting to be, well, Savannah ;) and has, without providing any rhyme or reason, started to call me Mike (used to be Pappi - Icelandic for Dad) - I like where this friendship is going.