Four travel scholarships offering unique insights into lifestyle and culture in the United States, Japan, Ecuador and Mexico are being offered to students by Experiment in International Living (EIL), an organisation established between the world wars to promote peace and understanding through intercultural learning, in conjunction with Education & Living . Four Irish students won similar scholarships last summer.
Michael Lynch, a Leaving Cert student at Presentation Brothers' College, Cork, stayed in the Suwa region of Japan with two host families. "They were unbelievably hospitable, almost to a fault," he said. "Europeans tend to view the Japanese as cold because of the social formalities they observe but they're really warm and hospitable.
"The experience you get gives you a new outlook on life. You're totally immersed in Japanese life and all its customs. Everyone is unbelievably well mannered. People ask me if it was annoying taking off your shoes and using chopsticks, but I saw it as an exciting challenge."
And what about language? "I have a small bit of Japanese now. I didn't have any Japanese when I went away, but for the first week I had language and culture classes."
Initially, though, it was "thumbs up and thumbs down communication" with the teenage boys of his first host family. He played Irish traditional music on the violin for the high school class which he joined for three weeks. "They liked it a lot. There are some phrases which are similar in both types of traditional music," he said, describing Japanese music as "soothing, almost meditational."
During his stay, Lynch went to a high school baseball game. "Baseball predominates and then people think Japan is just like America - but that's not the case at all. Japan is still married to its traditions," he said. "Before the game the two teams lined up and bowed to each other and afterwards each team's supporters sang a song honouring the other."
He was particularly struck by the Japanese fondness for technology, with "mobile phones as common as keyrings" - and the density of population density.
The village of Krofa is not as technology obsessed, according to Eoin McGrath, a Leaving Cert student in De La Salle College, Waterford, who spent five weeks in Ghana on a scholarship. "People in rural areas are aware of it and have access to it," he says, "but it doesn't bother them.
"There's no need for electric light - people wake up with the sun and go to bed with the sun. They have a generator which they use if they need it, maybe to power a sound system for a party."
McGrath spent two weeks with a host family in the capital, Accra. He still keeps in touch with the family's son, Nicholas. He also travelled around the rural north of the west African country and took part in the construction of a well in a village as part of a development project.
"What we would view as development seems to have been concentrated in the major cities - you only have to look at Lake Volta and its hydroelectric dam. However, as the rainy season which preceded his arrival was lighter than usual, there were water shortages. Electricity was also cut off, sometimes for half the day. About 98 per cent of Ghana's power is hydroelectric.
"You notice that the values they hold are very different but you still accept these as valid. People don't have the same concept of time - Nicholas had four or five watches but he kept them all in his press.
"The culture is a lot more laid back and relaxed. They don't worry so much about the distant future."
The future is most definitely in the thoughts of Michael O'Regan. The Future World Leaders Summit which he attended last summer in Washington DC helped the Leaving Cert student from Tralee CBS to make up his mind about a career in politics.
"There were about 400 delegates mainly from the United States but also from countries such as Azerbijan, Uzbekistan, China - and many European countries," he says. "I was the only one from Ireland, so we had the smallest delegation. We were divided into 10 groups and given the task of writing a communique which would have to be unanimously agreed upon by all the delegates at the summit.
"I ended up in international aid - this gave me a greater insight into bureaucracy and diplomacy. I'm now more appreciative of how difficult it is to get even minor progress."
And Washington? "I liked it a lot. Obviously they kept us in the nice region, so what you see is very attractive. The city is made up of four sectors - one is made up of government buildings and the other three are made up of people living below the poverty line. I suppose we got a rose-tinted picture of the city."
A TRAVEL scholarship to Mexico was won by Susannah McAleese, a third-year business and economics student at TCD. "The idea was to visit museums and archaeological sites which I did do," she stressed, "but I felt I learned more by going out and meeting the Mexican people.
"I learned a whole new culture, a new way of life," says McAleese enthusiastically. "Mexicans lead very simple but very interesting lives compared to Europeans. They place a value on family and enjoyment.
"Mexicans are either very wealthy and very poor and there are very few in between," she says. On her first evening in the country, she was shown around Mexico City and was shocked to see "people living on every street, in huts, trying to sell bits and bobs to make a living. There were old men and women with young grandchildren."
McAleese visited three major cities - Mexico City, Oaxaca and Puebla - and lived with three families for 10 days each. "They were lovely. They showed me around their particular areas."
