Our October café’s ended on a high note with the first successful run at our travel café! We held the Weeknight English Communication Café on Thursday, October 19th, and saw some new faces to talk about work ethic and ideals. People seemed rather intimidated by this month’s topic, but it really was nothing to worry about. With questions like “what is your ideal work schedule” or “How many hours would you like to work” participants were very open to talk about their ideal world.

On Saturday, October 21st, we headed out for our very first travel café! Or our first business trip, if you would. We took our café to Minami-Soma City, starting at the Central Library for our course on Egypt. The Central library is a beautiful building, easy to access, and incredibly clean and quiet. Everything we could ask for in a location. The room we used could fit 30 people, which was more than enough for the 18 participants and 5 staff who were working behind the scenes. We were incredibly thankful for the full-on participation of everyone involved, particularly in asking questions to our guest speaker, Mr. Ahmed Galal, who happily answered all Egypt related questions. We also got to enjoy dried dates, tasting the rich sweetness of the Egyptian fruit.

In the afternoon we changed locations to the Minami-Soma International Association where we held our regular English Communication Course with all new people! It was great to see such a high level of English in Minami-Soma, and it is my hope that everyone continues to practice speaking in English as much as possible. We again discussed our ideal working situations and ideal jobs as far as we knew them. I had a lot of fun, and hopefully everyone involved fully enjoyed themselves. I’d like to extend a big thank you to the Minami-Soma International Association for working with us to bring our café to another city, and for being so welcoming and accommodating with all our requests. I hope to work with them again in the future!

For next month, we’re back on home ground on November 16th and 18th in Fukushima City at the Fukushima International Association. The Global Communication Course will be listening to a talk on Kenya, while the English Communication Courses will be discussing “Bilingual Upbringings” and looking into topics like the pros and cons of being raised bilingual, and how exactly one might go about attempting that. Can’t wait to see you all there!