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Sheena Marie Flores is one of the winners of my birthday giveaway 2011. I met up with her at Heaven and Eggs to give hand over her prizes as well as to interview her. Turns out that she’s an Electronics and Communications Engineering student at the Ateneo, who’s also actively involved at the Ateneo Electronics and Computer Engineering Society as a Vice-President for Special Projects.

Now, this girl is a certified Kikay Geek.

As with my other readers, Sheena is a delightful conversationalist. I’ve actually learned about a lot of other websites she guessed I might be interested in.

How she landed on Skysenshi.com
She found Skysenshi through blog networks since I’m also connected to MrsMartinez and Dash, owners of blogs she frequents.

We actually covered a lot of ground because she’s interested in a myriad of topics, from education (she believes, as do I, that this is the ticket to helping our society) to the Reproductive Health Bill (she led me to a very insightful website about it) to feminism (and its various incarnations) to Engineering and student life, which I could definitely relate to. Haha!

Sheena with her token prizes.

If she could be a guest blogger at Skysenshi.com…
She’d talk about anime and Japan.  The most interesting thing Sheena shared about was her stint as an exchange student in Japan. Here’s a transcript of her story:

I went to Japan as an exchange student for December 2007. I was in fourth year high school then. The sponsor company is the international organization AFS. AFS-Philippines handled all delegates from the Philippines and the major sponsor of the program was AFS-Japan. I was under the program Japan East Asia Network for Students and Youth – short Program (JENESYS Program).

There were 60 young Filipino delagates nationwide and I was one of the lucky chosen ones. Since it was a short program it was two weeks long which was 1 week educational tour and 1 week host family stay. I stayed in Gosen City where I enetered Gosen-kita Jr. High School and Gosen High School as part of the experience. Since it was an Asia Network for students, I met great people who became my friends from Indonesia, Australia, India, Thailand, Malaysia and New Zealand. I had a trip bestfriend Laura, who was an Australian. We had a reception event where all 600 delegates from these countries gathered and it was really amazing to see such diverse cultures but were open for friendship.

It was winter that time and me, being not used to the weather, felt really cold. It was awfully cold! Good thing they had those pocket heat sheets that you can buy to keep you warm – I only discovered it when a co-delegate shared some of his packs to me. My host family also gave me some.

When I was in my host family stay-in period, we went shopping and tried Japanese Crepe and it was really delicious. We also took a lot of these mini sticker pictures which I kept as a remembrance. It was winter but I saw girls wearing skirts and no leggings and they seem to look pretty comfortable and warm – very impressive cause I was wrapped in layers of clothes but I still felt cold. Since I am a fan of the anime Naruto, I really wanted to visit a ramen restaurant and we did – the food was amazing!

The trip was all expenses paid so the food, hotel stays, tours, transportation, plane tickets and many more were free! I really enjoyed my stay there and really plan to go back to Japan and visit my host family after graduation or when I have the money to pay for my visit. Until now I keep in touch with them and I’m glad that the recent Japan Tsunami event did not hit Gosen City. My host sister said that their fear was the radiation but as of now they are ok.

I wish I had been as adventurous as her when I was her age. That sounded really fun!

Congratulations, Sheena! And hope to see more of you soon! (With a slightly bigger group sounds so much exciting, too!)