I attended 2005 World Students' Tourism Summit last weekend. It was held at the Asia Pacific University in Oita.

The participants of the summit were very diverse; they were from 79 universities of 21 countries.

On friday, we had plenary session and workshop. The plenary session was about the current situation and challenges of human resource development in tourism. Afterwards all students were divided into nine workshops and I was in workshop 3. The theme of workshop 3 was inbound and outboud tourism. I chose this workshop because I just started studying marketing this summer and I found the tourim market very interesting. On friday night, we had a welcome reception dinner. It was wonderful! We had so many foods from all over the world.

APU, Oita Prefecture and Beepu city were sponsors of this summit and
they prepared for foods and accomodations for all students. I really appreciated it. I stayed at the Japanese style hotel with two roommates. We stayed up late chatting various things.

Next day, after the plenary session, we had two workshops and tour planning competition. At that night, I joined the night walk tour of Beppu with bunch of foreign students. At the night tour, I met a girl from a college in Hawaii. I introduced myself and we were talking for a while in English. After a while she asked my nationality and started laughing. I found out that she was Japanese as well! I thought she was an Asian American who was born in Hawaii and never imagined she was Japanese. It was funny that we switched to talking in Japanese immediately. This kind of thing happned all the time at this summit. Asians are hard to tell which countries they are from.

On the last day, APU had a surprise to us.
Japanese prime minister, Mr. Koizumi has come to the summit!!
how impressive it was to meet prime minister for the first time in my life!

I had such a wonderful experience at this summit. I hope that I can keep in touch with the all new friends I made.


workshop3




night walk tour







Welcome Reception


I really wanted to take a picture of Mr. Koizumi but the battery of my camera was dead.......