Stephen Lam participated in this year's Yokohama/Vancouver Exchange program which lasted 6 weeks over the summer.

Yokohama is the second most populated city in Japan. More than 3,200,000 people live in this city located south-west of Tokyo. The city is situated on the coast line of Kanagawa Prefecture on Honshu Island. Facing Tokyo Bay, Yokohama has one of the best and busiest ports in Japan. It also has the largest population of foreigners. Many students from all over the world come to Yokohama to study Japanese. Yokohama is the closest large city to Tokyo, about an hour train ride from Tokyo. Although it is the largest city besides Tokyo, it is not as famous to tourists as Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kobe, and Hiroshima. And frankly speaking, there are not a lot of attractions either. It is basically the residential extension of Tokyo. However. it does work out that Yokohama is probably the best place to stay if you want to visit the Tokyo Metropolis. Accommodation is definitely cheaper in Yokohama, it really isn't too far away from Tokyo, and it is also quite close to other more interesting places such as Kamakura, Hakone and Mount Fuji. If you have the money, you can even travel to Osaka and Kyoto using Shinkansen (the bullet train) in about 4 hours.

Yokohama has established sister/friendly cities and sister/friendly ports all over the world. San Diego (USA), Shanghai (PRC), Constanta (Romania), Lyon (France), Bombay (India), Melbourne (Australia) are examples. Yokohama established a sister city relationship and a sister port relationship with Vancouver on July 1, 1965 and on May 15, 1981 respectively. Recently (while I was in Yokohama), Yokohama also established sister a Chinatown relationship with Vancouver.

To facilitate cultural exchange and to promote friendship between the City of Yokohama and the City of Vancouver, Yokohama Private School Board of Education and Douglas College organized a Yokohama-Vancouver Sister City Internship Program. Because there is officially no school located in the City of Vancouver (UBC is in the Endowment Land), the program was broadened to cover the Greater Vancouver. Every summer, one student from SFU Engineering, one student from Douglas College and one student from UBC are chosen to go to Yokohama for 7 weeks. The students live in two Japanese families (one for 4 weeks, another one for 3 weeks) and work in one or two Japanese companies. Yokohama and San Diego also have the equivalent Yokohama-San Diego Sister City Internship Program. This year, 5 international or Asian business students went to Yokohama from the San Diego State University; one student from children education in Douglas College, no one from UBC, and I was selected as the representative from SFU Engineering Science.

To be continued next issue...