Throughout the retreat, I had the opportunity to meet many different people. There are twenty two interns in the program, with some just graduated and some had only finished one year of college, from UC Berkeley to UCLA to USC to USF. But no matter where we came from, we were all able to form bonds with each other. We also got to meet with supervisors from some of the LA NCI programs, including Kizuna, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), and the California Japanese American Community Leadership Council (CJACLC).
We also got to participate in many activities. We did a video scavenger hunt, in which we broke up into teams and ran around Little Tokyo to either bring back items, take pictures, or take videos of different things in order to win points. This included eating natto (and having the aftertaste stick around for an hour), sticking chopsticks up our noses, and finding important artifacts to Japanese American culture. We spent time in the JACCC as we did workshops with Amy Phillips, who led the scavenger hunt and told us the history of NCI and keeping the JA community together into the 21st Century, and Debbie Ching, who taught us networking skills. We stayed the night at the Miyako Hotel, which I found interesting primarily because it had the fancy Japanese toilets and mint shampoo. The next morning we got an exclusive tour of the Japanese American National Museum to see the history of the Japanese American community.
I look forward to seeing all the NCI people again during the mid-season retreat at San Jose!
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