SEKAI HOTEL holds icoima events for local children in the area almost every month.

In May of this year, we held an event to teach the local children about Easter, one of the main holidays in Christian countries.

If you want to know what icoima exactly is, make sure to read Vol. 1 of this series!

Happy Easter

Being a country that was highly influenced by buddhism and shintoism, Japan isn’t very familiar with Easter.

As you may know, Easter is one of the most important holidays in Christianity, as it celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who was crucified and executed.
It’s usually held between the end of March and the middle of April every year. Typical symbols for the Easter holidays include the symbol of resurrection, the egg, and the symbol of prosperity, the rabbit.

Because of that, during this icoima, we made original Easter eggs and rabbit baskets with the children.

After that, we used our self-made baskets and went to different local shops to find eggs and sweets that were hidden by the staff in advance.

Bicycles are lined up in front of SEKAI HOTEL Ima, which was the event’s venue. It was the 7th time doing an icoima event at SEKAI HOTEL, but still, there were many children who participated for the first time, and everyone seemed to be looking forward to our event a lot. Children who had already participated a few times also came back and thanks to that, in general many children came.

 

Making Easter Eggs

We started the event by showing the children how to make their own original Easter eggs.

Everyone was decorating their eggs with a serious look on their face.

We also made these cute rabbit baskets with the children! Their Easter set is now complete! Let’s go search for Easter eggs!

 

Local Egghunt

The first stop of the egghunt was “Shiotani”, a lovely little café in Nishikujo. The children immediately started finding eggs that were hidden at the entrance of the shop.

The next stop was “Takoyaki Santa” a Takoyaki shop close to Nishikujo station.

This is a photo of the egg discovery.

The shop’s friendly master kindly provided all the children with “Takosen”, a popular and delicious snack in the Kansai region. It’s basically a sandwich made of senbei with Takoyaki in the middle.

Afterwards, we went to the front of SEKAI HOTEL. Many of the children said that while they knew about SEKAI HOTEl, they had never been to the reception. Therefore, this was a great opportunity for the children to get to know our front desk. We hope that they will came back many times now that they know about it.

The last of our stops was a local, retro café called “New Mako”.

It’s an old Japanese café, where people come to drink in the evening and therefore, it’s a place that children usually do not enter.

The children seemed a little intimidated by the atmosphere and were a little nervous, but thanks to the friendly master, everyone had a lot of fun.

The completed, very unique Easter eggs

 

Meet and Connect with icoima

A variety of icoima events have been held a number of times already, so the children who are always coming, bring in their friends which is why the number of participants is increasing every time.

Furthermore, for the first time in icoima history, a foreign guest of SEKAI HOTEL came to see icoima because they had seen the event announcement on facebook. We were happy that one of our foreign guests was interested in icoima and decided to participate.

The guest was able to talk to the children and take pictures. For the children and for our guest, this turned into a natural international exchange.

We were incredibly proud to see that icoima has spread not only among local children in the area, but also to the outside world.

We will continue to try our best to make the event grow even more and to include more SEKAI HOTEL guests.

Of course, we will always continue to hold events that focus on strengthening the community and from a stronger bond between SEKAI HOTEL and the local area.

Make sure to join our next icoima event as well!