Happily fifth French group already at Cooking Sun
In this month we hosted a group of French high school students in our Kyoto studio. This was not the first time we welcome French student groups. Last year we welcomed one group, and we welcomed twice in this spring, and another group in this July. So this was the fifth time we welcome young men and ladies from France. (and sixth group is visiting us next week :) )
Companies offer overseas trips to their employees’ children…hmm how generous
We notice that they are all same type of travelers. They are children of company employees in France. As a welfare package of the employee, companies offer overseas trip to their teenage children. Such welfare service does not exist in Japan, so it looks very unique to us. We don’t know how much the companies support their trip financially, but we must say it is a very generous welfare package, and we thank the people of travel arrangement companies to choose our cooking class as one of the highlighted events in their trip.
Well behaved students enjoy rolling sushi too
Most of the children we met come from Paris, but some of them are from other cities such as Lyon. Some of them do not speak English, but as far as we notice most speak English at sufficient level and they are mostly very polite. We just wonder if Japanese high school students will be able to speak English as well as them if they ever do the same type of overseas travel to France or other countries… First of all we imagine most of them are too shy to speak to local people even if they are able to speak basic English.
Fortunately for us, they enjoy cooking very much. Rolling sushi is a fun activity for French teenagers too. They also like teriyaki sauce (it is sweet) and many dip sushi roll to the sauce left on the plate, which is universal. Perhaps eating Japanese dishes is not so common to them, but they eat the foods that they cook as we do not see too much leftovers at each visit.
Brave, independent, cost efficient travel style
What is also interesting about them is their brave, independent and cost efficient travel style. They don’t hire a bus, they don’t hire a local guide, they don’t hire travel agency. They plan independently (well, not student themselves but student travel arrangement companies do) and travel independently. Again, if this is Japanese students, we think things won’t be able to run as flexibly and smoothly as them.
That morning they walked from their hostel to our cooking studio for 20 ~ 30 minutes, and they walk left to Manga Museum which should take another 20 ~ 30 minutes.
As we heard from this group, they did a long 60km Shimanami cycling tour between Imabari and Onomichi and are going to walk up to the top of Mt. Fuji. Now that you can get a lot of travel information online, it seems people do not need travel agents if they have time to check out all the details.
Thank you for choosing our cooking class!
Last but not the least, thank you for choosing to visit our cooking class in Kyoto from a countless of many options. For many children, we are sure that this is just one travel that is followed by so many others as they grow older. But one day please come back to Japan again and please also to our cooking class!