“We both kind of had the same idea to keep our eyes open”
Hello, my name is Jad Assaf. I am in the undergraduate studies class related to MI Diaries, and this is going to be my MI diary for my profile.
I guess I should start off with a story that could kind of describe a little bit about myself and just who I am as a person. So, I’ll go with the recent story. Recently, I went with six of my friends to Japan for a trip, you know something we’ve been planning since my freshman year of high school and it was after the end of senior year so it was almost like a graduation trip we’ve been playing for a very long time, and I’ll tell you about a specific story where me and one of my closest friends, who I’ve been friends with for I couldn’t even tell you how long I’m since I was a child, we were in the major area Shibuya Crossing and we’re kind of just in that area walking around and my friend for some reason, had a strange desire to go to Taco Bell in Japan.
Me, being the supportive friend I am. I decided to tag along with him and go with him to Taco Bell. So, we go out to a bit of a mall-ish area where there’s a food court, and there’s a Taco Bell; we go in there, and he gets his meal, and I was interested in trying Taco Bell for myself there in Japan, but I was really feeling up to it I just had a meal, so blah, blah, blah. You know, we go, we go sit down in the food court and we’re just sitting there, we’re just talking, and he’s loving the food, you know, good for him, things were looking up, but what happened afterwards was as we were sitting in this food court, two older ladies came next to us and started speaking to us in English, and if, if you’ve ever been to Japan, you would know that that’s a pretty strange occurrence because virtually no one in Japan speaks English. It’s a very rare occurrence to come across people that do.
So, when they started speaking English to us, we kind of just rolled with it because we wanted to speak to Japanese locals, you know? It was kind of a desire we had, so we just kind of hit it off with them and these older ladies we didn’t realize at that moment but they were actually trying to indoctrinate us into a cult. The cult being a, a cult centered around a magical stone in the Kyoto area of Japan. And the name of the rock was called Sunomiya. So we’re talking to these ladies and they seem lovely. I mean, they seem like a great, you know, pair of gals, but we didn’t really understand what their plan was. They just kept, you know, adding more and more references to this rock and how athletes when they touched it, they healed from injuries, but we didn’t really understand the gravitas of the situation. So, as we’re describing, you know, me and my friend though we, you kind of started to each figure out something was a little off.
So, we kind of steered the conversation in a different direction, specifically towards the Japanese language, and we just used that situation to learn more about the Japanese language asking these ladies questions about certain pronunciation of words, or certain aspects of the culture and actually became more of a learning experience we flipped a awkward situation into a great learning experience, if that means anything. But, it definitely was a lot, they also gave us, you know, their contacts; they want to keep in touch with us, and we knew something was very, very wrong when it came to the point where they told us to close our eyes, and that they were going to basically have almost some sort of ritual placed upon us to make us feel calm or just kind of like how they believe that if you rested your hand on that special rock, the Sunomiya stone, you will feel calmer, and you will gain rewards from such actions. So, you know, we decided to follow along and then they tell us to close our eyes, and then we know something’s wrong. We were worried at first that our phones were gonna get stolen. So, we both kind of had the same idea to keep our eyes open, and, you know, even though they were telling us to close our eyes because we weren’t exactly thrilled about the situation we were put in, but after that situation played out, we then decided from there, you know what this is about time we started heading back to the hotel. We had about a 40-minute travel time from where we were on the public transportation back to the area that we were staying. So, we quickly get out of there, and it was just it was an awkward but very educational and interesting experience, and now I know it kind of was almost a moment of self-reflection that maybe I was a little too gullible and a little too excited to talk to, you know, Japanese locals. So it was just a good experience all around with some parts of bad in there.