Nara JETNet 20th Event
International Treasure Trail
On Sunday, October 28th, 2007, International Treasure Trail, the 20th event by Nara JETNet was held at the Nara Palace Site Museum in Nara City. The JETNet council, which is comprised of the 5 Coordinators for International Relations and one Assistant Language Teacher at the Nara Prefectural Board of Education, has been planning international events in Nara since 2001. This event included 70 citizens of Nara Prefecture and 39 JET Programme participants, representative of various countries, including France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, China, Korea, the UK, Ireland, South Africa and the United States.
The International Treasure Trail was designed to be an adventurous day where Japanese and JET participants alike could interact while looking for unsuspected places in the palace site, guided by clues and solving mysteries.
The event included some ice breaker activities that greatly helped all the participants to know each other and later on act as a team. Each team (total 10: monkeys, llamas, cranes, rabbits, squirrels, frogs, kangaroos, hedgehogs, deer and phoenixes), led by a JET participant able to speak both English and Japanese, then headed outside to the palace site, taking with them a set of clues and questions, with the objective of finding all 6 locations if possible, but in the very first place to have fun. Each team was then to answer questions about the place they were. A scoring system was later used to tell the wining team. Artistic and funny pictures as well as children’s artwork were taken in account too.
The JETs arrived at the venue at approximately 9.30am and began setting up the room, before the participants began to arrive. Each participant received a nametag upon which was written the name and logo of the team they belonged to. The event culminated while participants were looking for the goals following the clues. Surveys revealed that all the participants, JET and Japanese alike, felt that the event was very interesting, as it provided participants with the opportunity to discuss and discover a wide variety of cultural places while walking outside as teams.
The JETNet team would like to express its appreciation to everyone who participated, and we hope to see you again at a future event!
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