Vogel Park

3 years ago, my family hosted a Japanese girl, Natsumi, who had just graduated college and had to come to America to be a student teacher before she could become an actual teacher. When I found out I was going to Matsue, I contacted her to see if it would be possible to see her while I was there. Turns out, she actually went to college in Matsue! So last Saturday she came to visit me. I was so happy to see her! I met her at the station, and we took the train to Vogel Park. Vogel park is a giant green house/aviary thing in Matsue, and it was amazing! We talked so much on the train that we missed our stop (and went two stops further before we realised), so we had to get off and get on another train back. On that train, she opened the present from my family, and when she read our card she was so happy that she started crying (I almost did too). And we missed our stop again, The first time, another train was there immediately, but this time we had to wait an hour before another one came! But it was nice, because we got to talk a lot. When we finally arrived at vogel park, it was amazing! I wasn’t sure what it was before we actually arrived, but we stepped in and there were tons of flowers and beautiful plants hanging from the ceiling and on the ground. So pretty!

After we’d walked through there, we took the longest escalator in the world up to the Aviary part of vogel park. THAT was awesome. There were birds everywhere, pelicans, swans, toucans, penguins, and tons of other weird birds I’d never seen before. In some parts, they were roaming free and would just come up to you. Oh, and I got to hold a toucan!! That was definitely the best part. We got to see penguins being fed, and I also got to feed some emus (which was actually kind of scary.) Later, we went to see the owl show, where they had tons of really cute and fluffy owls! They asked for volunteers, so I raised my hand, and they picked me! I got to hold a hola hoop while an owl flew through it. Usually they pick little kids for this kind of thing, so I felt kind of silly, but it was really fun! Once that was over, I also got to hold an owl. Through that experience, I learned the Japanese word for fluffy: Fuafua. That’s become my new favorite Japanese word!


Basically, Vogel Park was really amazing. Later, we went back to my apartment and had dinner with my family. After that, Natsumi had to leave…I was really grateful that I got to see her. When we took her back to her hotel, I couldn’t help but start crying! For some reason, Natsumi’s visit really made me thing about how lucky I am to be here, and all the wonderful things I’ve gained so far from this experience. It made me think about the things I can do with the knowledge I’ve gained here when I get back. It also really inspired me to start studying Japanese more, because Natsumi is trying really hard to pick up English again. She said I also inspired her to study english harder, because three years ago we could barely speak to each other because we didn’t speak each other’s languages well. Now, we can have really long conversations and understand everything the other says. It felt kind of surreal seeing Natsumi again. can’t really explain it, but we were definitely both effected by this visit 