Do you remember...?

Generally, I look upon not having classes as a kind of holiday almost, since it frees up the better part of my day to do things like... sit at my desk... study Japanese... and wander around talking to students occasionally. I mean, it's a mixed blessing, since it often means I'm sitting for most of the day, don't have any club activities, and stand a good chance at being bored unless I can find something to do (and even then!)

I had only one class today, since the second years are on their class trip and my single first year class today was cancelled because another teacher wanted that spot, and since the other first years weren't having Oral Communication (my class!) my team teaching partner decided to keep it even. (I'm so jealous of Japanese school kids! A class trip sounds like so much fun. We didn't really do much as a class except for during senior year. Senior picnic at water world, and then grad night locked in the bowling alley together. I don't count the individual honors class trips we took to DC and Oregon, though those were amazingly fun. But I mean seriously, these kids get the chance to go to Tokyo or Hokkaido together for a week or something. Super. Jealous.)

I don't know how I ended up leaving work at SEVEN O'CLOCK. My normal working hours are until 4 o'clock! What's wrong with me?! This isn't even a singular special event. I often find myself at school (especially my base school) far longer than my technical working hours, whether or not I have club activities.

I missed having OC though. This year's group of first years at my base school are super fun! They have a lot of energy, and they're good kids. :)

Last week, as a reward (kinda) my team teaching partner and I decided that while they're working on making their menus (the unit we're on is restaurants! Ohohoho.) we could play some music to make it a little bit more enjoyable.

Little did we know what we were getting into...

Unfortunately, we only had my small iPad speakers to go off of, but oh man! I love the boys in my last class. I asked them what they liked. They said Lady Gaga. They asked me if I had telephone, and I said unfortunately no (fail at pop culture, self) but that I did have other songs, so we started with that. We played Born This Way and had a grand old time of it. The boys in the front started dancing, bless them. It was pretty awesome. They sang along too, and we had a fun little talk about what the words meant (since they asked, and I was more than happy to oblige). When Lady Gaga finished, I put on some Michael Jackson (they asked for We Are the World, which I also don't actually have, another failure on my part) so I played The Way You Make Me Feel, and then after that they asked if I could play Thriller (which they danced to).

The best part though, is that I had gone back to change songs to play a little bit of Earth Wind and Fire, since I swear Japan is full of stuff like the Carpenters and the Beatles, who are probably okay (I don't think I've listened to the Carpenters outside of Japanese classrooms though) but I mean like... very little soul, R&B, or funk or those kinds of music. Plus two weekends ago when I went to Kibichuo (which was awesome. I should really write about that sometime), we woke up with a song since for some reason September was in everyone's heads and hearts, so while we were making breakfast we played September on repeat and just sang and danced our way through breakfast. It was beautiful. Oh, but I digress. I put on September, thinking they probably wouldn't know it (since I had asked them if they knew Earth Wind and Fire, and they replied negative).

They totally knew September.

Well enough to kind of sing/hum their way through the whole song, while also dancing along.

Best. Class. Ever. I love these kids! They're so much fun. I'm going to be ridiculously sad when I have my last class with them. I'm already sad that I didn't have class with them this week!

Hello there rainy season and bugs

Ahh, things have gotten so busy as of late! Where does the time end up going? I suspect those boring moments in life steal them away from the more interesting ones.

I have a plane ticket back, though one slightly different than the one they approved me for. I suppose that's the problem with allowing us the freedom to choose our own flights and dates and times; we need to get it approved by a whole slew of people, taking something that's better done with a couple phone calls and making it more difficult. First we need to give the proposed flight quote to our supervisors. Then, it moves up the chain to the vice principal, and then the principal (at least that's how it works at my school). Then it gets faxed or mailed to our Board of Education - in my case, the prefectural office. Then they approve it, and fax it back. Then we're supposed to buy our tickets. But it needs to wait on at least four people - four people who are generally pretty busy.

Yet somehow, when we faxed the paper to the board of education in the morning, by the evening the flight on kayak.com was no more. thankfully though, I was able to find A similar flight - the same times even, on the same airline for the first leg - for just a little more money. Sooo I bought it, and I'm really hoping the board of education will say alright since it's only a little more expensive. Pain though, to use my American credit card when I'm getting paid in yen. It means I have to transfer more things, which honestly, I think is a huge pain in the rear.

It's why I haven't really sent money home other than physically bringing it back and selling it to people in the states who want yen.

On a completely different note, it's gotten disgustingly hot and humid. I've already turned on my air conditioner. As far as I'm concerned, summer officially started when they turned on the AC in The train and stopped automatically opening the doors at all the stops. Yet still, there are days - like today - where for one reason or another it's just really freaking COLD and it throws me off because I have no idea what to wear ahaha.

Humid, (and the occasional rain) means also that the bugs have returned in full force. It's kind of disgusting. You can't ride a bike anywhere without getting pegged by a couple bugs. Bugs up the nose, in the mouth (despite trying to ride with my mouth closed), in the eye (despite my small eyes lol). Ugh. But worse... is that the bugs have invaded my house!

They're also pretty fast. D:

Last week I had not one, but TWO centipede visitors.

One of them was this bug, called 'gejigeji' in Japanese. They're generally 'good' bugs since they eat other bugs and don't really bite or sting. Their name in English is "House Centipede." They're kinda non-aggro hahaha.

The other one...

I had another mukade in my house. D:　Longer body, black color, a little on the skinny side, and shorter legs. Yuuuuuck. Seriously, I was looking for pictures, but then I stopped because it felt like I was somehow going to summon another one just by trying to look for pictures of it.

I looked over and saw something moving out the corner of my eye, and it turned out a mukade had decided to crawl into my backpack. Nearly grabbed a lighter to burn it, but that would have destroyed my house maybe. Boiling water was not an option either, because I had electronics in my backpack.

Thankfully, I still had some of the kill-by-freezing bug spray that goes down to like. -82C I think? Sorry, -85C, or -121F. It took about a minute of panicked hyperventilating and spraying nearly the whole can for it to stop moving. Still in my backpack. Right up against the lip of the bag too.

Removing it... yeah. So you know that non-harmful one earlier? It was in my bathroom while I was taking a shower. I waited for my friend to come over to my house, and she helped me kill it by drowning, and then did what I couldn't; removed it with disposable chopsticks. Bless the woman, she also removed the dead bee that's been sitting on my window sill for a good month or so.

So yeah. Removing it was a challenge. I thought about vacuuming it up, but the irrational fear part of me was like, "WHAT IF IT'S STILL ALIVE? WHAT IF IT'S JUST IN A CYROGENESIS KIND OF SLEEP WHERE IT'S BODY IS HIBERNATING?" also the reason why I was like, nooo picking it up with chopsticks.

Eventually, after much shaking with my Mt. Fuji walking stick (nice and long) it kinda came to the edge of my bag, and I grabbed a broom and kind of swept it into the dust pan, put on my shoes, went outside, and hurled that thing far away from my house. Retrospect says I should have dumped it in the river.

I suppose I'm getting better at killing bugs, even if I still scream at them. Even then, I think that's gotten a bit better now too. I don't scream as loud... sometimes. I still hate being surprised, so when I'm surprised by a bug in close proximity to my person, I'll still jump and scream. But like, it's better than before, I suppose.

Yesterday at school, I had an interesting conversation with the teachers at one of my school, how there were a tooon of words to talk about rain. And that rainy season was finally here, with yesterday being the first good rain. It actually dropped the temperature by a good... 8-10 degrees Celsius. Which is a big difference, something I keep forgetting. 19 is a bit on the chilly side, especially if you don't bring a jacket! Not just any jacket though, because it was still humid, so the rain jacket I brought with me stuck and clung and made me feel kinda gross.

I did make a soup last night. Chunky and creamy tomato potato soup. Nom. Relatively healthy too, I think, in addition to being really filling! And when you add a little bit of feta cheese... ah, heaven. I think this is why I love the autumn and cool weather, and I don't mind winter too much. Soups. Hot foods.

That being said though, I love cold foods too hahaha. Actually, I bought some zaru soba (I think that's the cold stuff? Maybe? Ha! I don't actually eat it that often... maybe this is my second time) that's matcha flavored, so I'm excited for that.

Bullying in Japan

It makes me a little sad to say this, but this class of first years is the worst that I've taught so far (out of three different class years).

Don't get me wrong; it varies a lot by school, and at some of my other schools, the first years are a lovely bunch. But as far as kids with Attitude Problems, this year takes the cake. There's always been some students with motivation and attitude issues, especially at the technical schools. Generally (though not always) they're in the non-academic electricity/technology courses, since those are all boy classes (to be fair, boys at my academic school are a little rowdy as well sometimes). And the boys seem to aggravate each other, or one yankee kind of student will influence other students around him to be similarly bad (though this happens with girls too).

Hopefully things will get better though?

As an ALT who works in the countryside though, I've always considered myself lucky because my students have always been really nice, not like some of the horror stories I've heard students from around the cities talk about. No crazy boys punching each other or whatnot.

At least not until yesterday.

It was the first time I saw bullying in full force, beyond the usual taunting and picking on and mocking that will happen occasionally in the classroom. Literally, there were punches thrown and wrestling and forcibly restraining one student from moving and participating in the game we had been playing.

The "My Good Neighbor/Anyone Who/English/Ice-breaker Knock off of Fruits Basket" game can sometimes get a little crazy with students running and diving for seats, but I hadn't expected it to get this out of hand. Some of the students would, when one student stood up, would also stand up and grab the student so he couldn't sit down, and then throw the student away from the seat as they made a dash to grab the empty chair.

It was appalling and shocking. I didn't think the kids were this ballsy to be this mean and obviously violent against another student in the middle of class. In the middle of class. In front of two teachers! But no, they kept on going at it, even after we interrupted a couple times to tell them to play better and despite giving the bullies several warnings. I got so angry that I almost stopped the game in the middle and made them sit in silence and write for the rest of class. But this is Oral Communication class, so there's a part of me that doesn't support doing something they're going to have to just sit and write.

Part of me wanted to just kick him out of class. I wish there were some system like detention here, but to my knowledge, if there is one, it's never utilized. If the bully was doing poorly in school, I think I heard that it's a bit easier to kick him out because it's likely he'll drop out anyways. But this kid... his English grades are actually really good. It might just be that he's simply really bored in class, and taking it out on this kid is his way of alleviating his boredom and is also a kind of performance so that people give him attention. Still though, even if that's the case, it's unacceptable, the kind of things he's been doing in class. It's disruptive and dangerous sometimes. This kid though needed to be disciplined. Badly. It doesn't help either that both me and my team teaching partner are women, since I think men have it a bit easier when it comes to intimidating the rowdy boys into behaving. Those are excuses though.

I just felt so bad for the kid who was being bullied. I talked to my teacher afterwards, and she talked to the class's homeroom teacher to tell him about the appalling behavior of that one kid. His response was that that kid was always like that, and that the kid they were picking on usually got picked on. He's a small guy too. It made me feel even worse, though mostly frustrated because both I and my JTE were unsure about how to proceed from here on out. Both of us were disappointed with how the class with, so much so that we're probably not using that room again in our lessons since it made most of the classes overly relaxed, undisciplined, and quite rowdy (though personally, I think not having a desk and sitting in a circle had something to do with that).

Today though, I was talking to my sister and she suggested that we're just so used to obeying orders that when people - the kids - don't, we get annoyed and want to discipline them with things like "okay you're going to sit and write here for the rest of the class and so help me god I better not hear you say a word." Believe me, I would have loved to either kick the kid out, make the kid sit isolated in the corner of the room (I don't really think he'd listen to me though), give him and the other misbehaving kids a homework assignment where they have to talk about how the other person probably felt and factor that into their grades or something.

If my Japanese skills were better, I would talk to them directly. In my head, I imagine I can speak perfect Japanese and that I give them one helluva dressing down and somehow manage to intimidate them into not bullying this kid any more. Or to somehow make it so they could experience the same treatment they were giving this kid. ...I'm allowed to dream, right? I suppose though, I should dream instead that they realize that hey, they're being mean idiots and they apologize to the poor boy and become good behaved students.

...yeaaah, one helluva dream.

Afterwards, my teacher told me that the bullied student, while he had been thrown on the ground, wrestled, held back, probably punched, and teased during class, had a strong heart so he was okay. But I'm worried that it's not, that he's just putting up a facade. Even people with strong hearts break sometimes though. Some people pretend to have strong hearts around others but don't actually. I'm scared that they'll bully him so much that he will join the ranks of students who become a tragedy and a statistic, another suicide. I don't want that to happen, especially since he always seems so cheerful. Like really, he's a sweet kid. I wish there was something I could do to help him, but short of speaking to the homeroom teachers and designing classroom activities with this in mind (guess who doesn't get to do games anymore) I can't really think of too many ways to work within this system I'm an outsider in, especially when I can't fluently speak the language.

We're taught to mock people who are hikikkomori - shut-ins - because they stay at home all the time; we presume they are wasting their lives away playing video games and that they simply do not want to be social. I heard somewhere (I forget where exactly, perhaps a friend, perhaps a news article) that bullying actually plays a sizable role in the reason why some kids become shut-ins. They don't want to go to school any more. I don't really blame them too, if I was going to get picked on, shoved, punched, tackled, and mocked every day. It's put a new perspective on this hikikkomori thing that's come from Japan; it's a lot more complicated than it seems.

Mori no Sanpo 「森の散歩」 Forest Walk~

Not all who wander are lost - J.R.R. Tolkien

Today I did a bit of wandering... though I think towards the end, I did get a little lost since I had noooo idea really where I was geographically. In an attempt to justify hours and hours of video gaming today to myself, and to check out what was up with this Bitchu-Matsuyama Castle Festival, I decided that today was going to be a good day for walking and set off walking up the mountain. It's a really pleasant walk to the hiking point. There's also a hiking route available but yeah, I prefer concrete sometimes (especially when there are loads of bugs...) plus the concrete path that the cars drive up is also actually quite beautiful, especially when the rice has been planted (and even more beautiful when the rice has grown all green or is almost ready to be harvested). The hike up to the castle is nothing new, since I've done it several times. It's been a while since I've gone all the way from the bottom to top; last time with my parents we took the shuttle bus up. I thought it was going to be a nice little hike full of exercise, no more than two hours, two and a half tops.

Yeah, nope.

The festival bit was kind of small, and mostly consisted of banners lining the road all the way up to the castle from the base of the mountain (next to my house even). They had shops selling Takahashi things (yubeshi, a kind of yuzu flavored mochi, and "Indian yakisoba" made with curry powder and tomatoes) up near the shuttle stop, and the shuttle was free as well. Oh, at the top, right outside the castle, they had armor that you could pay to dress up in (or were free if you were a child). I think there were other things going on as well, but alas, they were at times I wasn't there. 

There was a path leading behind the castle that you didn't need to pay to get into - the castle you need to pay 300 yen and I've been there a bunch of times, plus they weren't doing anything inside for the festival thing - so I took that. You get a pretty nice view of the back of the castle and the little... housey thing that's really old. But behind that, there was a little path leading downwards, and it piqued my curiosity. 

It didn't look like it was in too sad a state - or well, it looked as if it had been maintained somewhat, so my brain reasoned that clearly, this meant this was a path that went Somewhere. I'll just check it out, since I want to know where this path goes, I thought. I won't be walking for too long. This was my reasoning for not walking back about 100 meters to get my water bottle refilled. 

The path, to start with, was wooden stairs that disappeared into the forest. Leaves - probably from the winter and fall, now that I think about it - were around the path, but someone had clearly swept them away from the center of the steps. Earlier I had seen a sign that had the kanji I so often see with "no smoking" signs... and I wasn't sure if that was a "don't smoke here" sign or if "this path is forbidden" sign. I'm going with no smoking. Yeaaaaah. Probably was that.

The path eventually led to a small bridge, that led to a small clearing. Ever curious, I decide to follow it "just a little bit further" and then turn back. From the clearing, I went up a bunch of steps that twisted and turned like a snake before finding myself before a small sign that indicated that indeed, these paths went places with Things to See. The signs were the standard ones they had in the city that indicate in both English and Japanese the Destination as well as how far away they are. So I figured that this was definitely a legit path, and continued on my way to what I thought was another part of the castle ruins. Actually, they were kinda that, but it was just kind of a clearing with stone markers. The site for where the ruins would be of the castle, and also, a little further down, a suspension bridge! 

Oh, I passed another man who was really surprised to see another person walking along the paths, and he warned me that there were poisonous snakes in this area. Thank god I've played video games in Japanese! They taught me the word for poison hahaha. But the guy was like "uhhh... be careful."

When I saw that there was a suspension bridge from the signs, it was like, "well, I'm going to walk to at least the suspension bridge, since omg what, there's a suspension bridge behind my house in the mountains?!"

There was indeed a suspension bridge! It was green, and on both ends there was this cage with two sets of doors... I guess since the mountains have monkeys and they don't want the monkeys on the bridge? 

On the other side was a nice concrete path... so that piqued my curiosity even more (plus I had slipped a little on the sand on the way to the bridge, so I was trying to find a way back that didn't involve going back up that). It even had rope dividers between the two sides... so instead of turning back across the suspension bridge (since my original "plan" was only to go to the bridge) I went up the path. Wee~

I ran into another, equally startled, man who said something about a parking lot and a shuttle bus, so I went off to find said parking lot. And I found it (plus a sign with warning about monkeys). There was one car. No sign of shuttle times or anything. Reaaaaaally didn't know where I was, though there was a map. I did puzzle out that I was in a place whose kanji I couldn't pronounce, and that the city was about... 4.2 km away, and the castle was a good 1.2 km away. Eventually, this old man in a truck also came to the parking lot, so I asked him about where I was and where the paved road went, and how far away the city was - just in case. 

Turns out that the road was 4.2 km, and it led to a place called Narai (...town?) that was a bit inland from Takahashi. Yeaaaaaaah. We concluded that it would be better to just return on the same path I took and go back to the castle. The old man also helped me find a nice walking stick, since he too warned me about the same type of poisonous snake, called mamushi in Japanese (and apparently in English too, though there are two types: the Japanese mamushi and Tsushima mamushi, which only lives on tsushima island in between korea and Japan). He was giving me advice on what to do if I see a monkey, and so I asked him what to do if I saw a snake. His advice was to run away haha, but also that I should try to scare it away with a long walking stick. Then it came to his attention that I didn't have one, so we went into the forest, found a stick laying around that looked about the right height, and made it into a walking stick (though due to its suspicious length, I think it was a walking stick someone already made and then left behind). 

Walking stick: acquired. 

Thankfully, I didn't run into any snakes on my way back (tons of bugs though, and blue tailed skinks) and while I didn't see any monkeys... I definitely heard a bunch.

All in all though, my adventure took somewhere around three hours, so by the time I made my way back home, exhausted, it had been a four hour trip! That was with taking the shuttle bus back down, since my legs were reaching that point where they really needed a rest. I did walk/jog the rest of the way down, and saw one of my third year students working at his part time! That was a fun little interaction. Going out took way longer than I thought, but way more interesting as well. Also, racked up TONS of steps on my 3DS hahaha. The 3DS has a built in pedometer, so I was using that to kind of keep track of how far I walked. (Apparently, it was about 13,868 steps) 

I should really explore Takahashi more often! I'm constantly finding amazing and beautiful things. :) I'm really going to miss it here. 

Oh yeah, speaking of amazing things, I went to the Naruto whirlpools with one of my JET friends. They were pretty cool to see, even if I was slightly disappointed at first (since they are definitely not the permanent, end of the world, ship destroying whirlpools I thought they were). But it was fun. We went on a boat into them! That was even more fun. I miss being on a boat. Maybe I'll write a proper entry about that later with pictures. :) 

Eeny Meeny Miney Moe~

Catch a tiger by his toe
If he hollers let him go
Eenie meeny miney moe~

What do we even call these things? Counting rhymes? Today in English club we had a fun kind of cultural exchange. The students were talking about counting/deciding rhymes from their hometowns - more on that in a bit - and they asked the other teacher if she knew any, which allowed me to ask them what the heck they were talking about (I thought they were talking about tongue twisters or something). Then they explained what it was and I was like "aaahhhhhhhhhhhh got it" which led to them asking me, which in turn led to me teaching them (and I'll admit, a small bit of showing off how fast I could say the rhyme) how to say the first half of the rhyme.

It was actually a lot of fun! I suppose that's what English club is really about - having fun using English.

I learned something too though. According to my students, each of the areas (generally separated by junior high school) had a different rhyme. Or well, the first half is the same, but the second half is different. I was super surprised! I mean, most of the people in the states I know use some variation of Eenie Meeny miney moe (most commonly the one above, followed by "my mother said to pick the very best one and it is not you" though I know there are more variations on that) but I've never quite heard of it so separated by region like what I heard from my students today!

It really makes me wonder why that happened. Perhaps it had to do with how originally, each of these small junior high school areas were a different village and different region, and how they wanted to differentiate themselves from each other. Why this manifested itself as a counting rhyme... I'm not sure, but Japan sure does like to differentiate each of its regions from each other, what with regional specialties, regional food, regional souveniers and so on. I suppose the US does that a little bit... with the food at least, but I feel like it's not to the same extent as here in Japan.

I mean, I'm from Concord and Berkeley. I have no idea what food we'd be famous for. Berkeley is famous for... I guess Vegan food? Or ethnic food? But that's not quite the same as how Takahashi's food is Yubeshi (and more recently tomato yakisoba or something), or even how Osaka is known for deepfrying stuff on sticks (among other things). I think Walnut Creek was probably famous for Walnuts. Gilroy does garlic. But seriously, that's it. Am I not paying attention or something back at home because I'm used to being there? The students here seem to know their foods though, even if they're from the countryside.

Anyways though, counting rhymes and tongue twisters and English club. We have five new members! ONE OF THEM IS A BOY. HOOORAY. One boy, fourteen or fifteen girls. Yikes. But I'm so happy we have so many members now! When I first got here there were like... not many. Maybe six or something. I forget. It was small though.

Granted, some of the girls in English club... I wonder why they're there, other than because they want to have parties all the time. It was like pulling teeth to get some of them to speak English! I mean, not even hard English. We asked them just to say one thing that they like - and these are third years, so I know they know how to say chocolate and candy. But they didn't want to! Me and the other teacher were like "... this is English club.... ne? NE? NE?!?!?!?!"

Sigh.

That's only some girls though. Others are a little less resistant to it, and some of them even want to speak it more! :) Yay! I've been trying to focus on doing cultural things though, and now that my Japanese is a bit better, it's not so bad. Before though, when I had no idea what they were saying, English club was suuuuuuuper boring because the girls would just chatter away in Japanese.

I'm trying to remember what our high schools do in Japanese club, other than watching anime. I don't think Northgate had a Japanese club. We had an anime club.... but yeah, we watched anime in that. Plus I don't want this to just turn into a movie watching club, though sometimes, certainly, it's fiiiiine.
Actually, my mom gave me this Easter themed movie she thought I could show my students, which was sweet. The movie didn't have Japanese subtitles though... so unfortunately, over half of the students would be completely lost. I thought about showing it to them anyways... but personally, having watched animes and dramas and movies without the subtitles and only a mediocre understanding level, things are kinda like... eh. Not as enjoyable, since you're constantly like, "wtf is going on."

Maybe some day though. Maybe. : )

Fatty Bumblebee

So this isn't anything like... actual, but that bumblebee I thought was dead?

Nope. Still alive.

Meaning I haven't been able to do my laundry for two days, and I currently can't get into the bathroom or take out my contacts since I shut the bee in that room. Seriously, that thing is huge.

I did a google search for what it could possibly be, and you know what came up? Something about how it was a queen bee, probably. But then I looked at the link... and actually, it was a description for a killer bee in Pathfinder, which is the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

Yeaaaaaah. Further proof that this bee in my house is a monster. AUGH.

I feel kind of sorry for it though, which is part of the reason why I can't kill it. The other, more rational part of me says that if I kill it in its current location, it will drop down behind my washing machine and be impossible to retrieve. But I mean, all it really wants is to get out I think, otherwise it wouldn't be obsessed with the window. Poor thing. Shame I can't actually like... touch it. I'm hoping that it either finds the way out or dies of natural causes so I can stop having a heart attack any time I'm near the bathroom. Sigh.

Day of Rest

Today was supposed to be my day of rest... and well, I guess it was my day of rest. But by "day of rest" - when I thought about it on saturday - was supposed to be more like "day of productiveness and doing things like laundry and school prep and stuff."

Thanks to a giant huge (and still at large) bumblebee (yes I know they're mostly harmless) and this drama series called My Boss My Hero, yeah, that didn't really happen today. Oops. The drama at least is practicing my Japanese a little (I'm determined to get better and pass the N3 level JLPT! For the sake of enrolling at Stanford, sheesh, I need to pass this test since I told them that I had taken the test and I dunno, it'd be kind of shameful if I got there and was like "well yeah, actually I didn't pass the test..." so I'm going to try my hardest).

The bee though. The bee was one of those fatty ones, with the huge bodies like pompoms. I think it was about the size of my thumb up to the knuckle - the body. Like the size of my whole thumb. It was a big mofo! I actually shut the doors and ran to hide from it in my room for a while haha. Eventually, when I had to use the bathroom (it was trapped in the bathroom area) I went back to see if it was still there and found that it had kinda like... crash landed next to my laundry soap.

So yeah, no laundry got done today. Sigh.

Actually, shamefully, I didn't really go outside much. I just aired out my futon a little bit, which is a shame because today was actually really nice. I really should have gone outside! Sigh. Somehow it's nine pm, and while I did study a little bit on my Japanese, there were a bunch of things I didn't do. Saaaaaaaaaaaa.

Yesterday though, was fun.

I went in to Okayama for a cherry blossom viewing party, called "hamami." I also saw one of my former students at the train station. She asked if I remember her, and I told her もちろん - or, "of course!" since she was one of the really loud cheerful students in my home ec girls class. Really thankful though that she didn't ask me what her name was because yeaaaaaaah I wouldn't have actually known. I'm so bad with names!

The hanami party was really fun though. My friend Maeve organized it, and a bunch of us went down to the river area and sat under the cherry blossoms, drank, and had a grand old time. Hanami - which literally translates into something like "flower look" - is where you go for a picnic with friends or family in a place with cherry blossoms and enjoy both the beautiful flowers and the good company. Often times as well, people will bring portable BBQs -- or in the case that it's near a famous place, they'll have a place where you can rent one. Usually too, people will drink alcohol as well as they watch the cherry blossoms fall. It's kind of like a giant excuse to drink during the day.

It was especially fun though, because it was like a big group BBQ, so I got to see a lot of people whom I haven't seen in ages! That's why I really enjoy going to the AJET events and big group stuff, though my closer friends are also fun to hang out with. Even if there are going to be people there I'm not really fond of (and at times want to punch lol, but let's be honest, my bark is way bigger than my bite), the fact that I can see a bunch of other people as well make me look forward to going to more of these things.

So yesterday was basically a day of enjoying good company, a good view of flowers, and a tiny bit of daytime drinking to make the lights a little shinier hahaha. It's times like those that I feel like - despite being in the company of a bunch of foreigners - I'm truly in Japan.

Now that the winter doldrums have disappeared (mostly) spring and flowers and greenery (and bugs -- boo I'm such a downer!) have returned, and I've come to realize that I live in a very very beautiful place. In August, most people know (since I've been on a smallish bragging streak lol), but I'm leaving Takahashi to come back to California for graduate school at Stanford studying East Asian Studies, or basically, Japan and Japanese. I'm even getting paid for it! Actually, I've been trying hard not to brag, but every time someone says it inside me has a reaction like this:

I apologize if it's seemed like I was bragging. I'm trying not to. Sometimes when I'm alone though I giggle gleefully because oh my god Stanford is giving me money. 

Also, the slightly immature part of me that has a bunch of family and friends who are Cal alums and also got rejected from UC Berkeley want to say something like, suck it Cal, since omg, stanford, full ride. 

But that would be immature. Hee.

I digress. Since I'm leaving though, I've come to realize that I actually really really like Okayama and Takahashi, and not just -as when I first came here - "the scenery is beautiful" (which, really, it is). I've come to love the people here, the atmosphere, the students, the not-big-city feel, and of course, the scenery. And while I do prefer city atmospheres like Kobe and Seoul and San Diego (Tokyo and Osaka are a little too big for me) there's just a certain charm about Okayama that makes me happy to be here. Perhaps that's what rubbed me the wrong way about certain people in our prefecture, and some of the Interact ALTs here in Takahashi. They would count down the number of days before they were released from their hellish existence here, or would say things like that Okayama was ridiculously backwater and that the whole country thinks of it as a hicktown and how much they couldn't wait to escape. I guess this is how people from the midwest/south feel when us city folk poke fun at countryside places. I'd like to claim that it's different, but honestly, it probably isn't. 

I'm not going to lie - I really look forward to returning to burritos and cheddar cheese and chipotle. At the same time though, I'm sad that I'll be leaving my bug-infested second home. I really do love the people here. Everyone is so kind -- even the Chinese and Korean foreigners here, as much as I want to shake my fist at them for driving so damn fast and close next to me on my bike. Really, I've found so many small places here, and actually, I can get pretty much everything I need at Polka, albeit for a little bit more sometimes than I can obtain elsewhere. And Izumi is far, and there's no gym. And that I really probably would prefer to live in a city or suburb like Kurashiki or Okayama.

But still. I really do like Takahashi and Okayama Prefecture (and Niimi too!). The friendliness of the people and students and other teachers has made my experience wonderful and memorable, and I'm truly thankful for the opportunity to have lived here for my tenure on JET. I even like commuting now, up and down to Niimi, for all that means that a social life on Friday is impossible. Though maybe I'm biased since like, honestly the kyudo students make Niimi a thousand times more amazing. That's my favorite part about going to school, is getting to participate in kyudo and interact with students in that setting.

That's not even including all the wonderful foreigners I've met over here -- my fellow JETs, as well as the Japanese people I've met as well!

I won't miss the work though hahaha. I'm not super fond of lesson planning and it's kind of tiring to be this organized all the time with my classes, so I don't think I'll miss that very much. Maybe a little, after I leave and stop doing it. But what I'll miss the most I think, are the friendships and connections with people here. Those kinds of things though, I suppose, are the kinds of things that - given a little effort - can span over distance though, it's not quite the same as being here in person.

Ahhhh I'm getting so sentimental! Still have three more months! Guess we gotta make the most of it then, hm?

Creative minds

So somehow I ended up with a bunch of papers to correct at 10 pm on Monday night (the fact that I didn't do any work this weekend probably had something to do with it). A lot of my classes are doing "how to" projects/presentations where they have to write about how to do something or make something and then (most of them) present it to the class.

This was supposed to be with a recipe unit, but we decided to open it up and let them choose whatever they wanted to (especially at the schools where students actually have electronic dictionaries, or even Japanese/English dictionaries). Personally, I think food is the easiest, which is what we suggested to most students, and why I've had to read through a bajillion different "how to make curry/omurice/hamburg" papers, since I swear, those are two of the simplest things to make in the Japanese student repertoire (and in general). We set a rule forbidding them anything that was already written in the book, which thankfully meant that we didn't have to tell them that "How to make instant noodles/ramen" or "how to make spaghetti" were off limits. We did have to clarify to them, however, that "Tamago kake gohan" or, as my brother calls it, "Egg gohan" or as my students call it, "TKG" was way way too easy. TKG, if you haven't seen it before, is a raw egg, soy sauce, and white rice mixed together. So were rice balls. Sorry kids, too easy.

Some of them have been pretty good. One group wrote how to do this Chinese dish that I don't remember the name for, and another did freaking pescatore pasta. That was pretty impressive. Then again, that kid is one of the ones whom I'm pretty sure has a secret love for English (or at least, really genuinely tries in class, which I really appreciate. He's such a sweet kid too. Kinda a brown-noser - like I'm pretty sure he's on the student council, but he's really polite. And really like.... embodies the country boy feeling lol. I'm not saying that to be mean either! But I mean, seriously, any kid who makes their group look up all the words for the seafood in pescatore... yeah. I'm going to miss having him in class next year.) Someone also did how to do a jump shot in basketball, which I thought was pretty clever.

Others have been more... interesting. Not necessarily in a bad way. Among the interesting ones, there's "how to please a person with a dog" and "how to be a bad kid." We also had a entry for "survivor curry" - which I'm pretty sure was the group (which has another pretty smart kid in it) just kind of dicking around. Their curry included ingredients such as parrot (wtf?), potatoes, pork, and alligator. I don't even know.

We also let them have free reign at drawing pictures to go along with their recipes. Once again, the Design students have exceeded my expectations. Their drawings... most of them are really good or really cute. The hamburg one had a gloomy bear with a (human?) hamburger steak. Another had this really... interesting... comic almost with this guy and a human-faced steak in it. I'll have to see if I can get a picture of that, because that was really really interesting haha.

The first years this year are really really interesting though. I'm definitely going to miss them when they move to second year. I think the boys in the electronics class were genuinely really really disappointed we weren't doing valentines day, because I'm pretty sure they all were like "CHOCOLATE FROM JESSICA?!?!?!?!!!!!???!??!" since in Japan, V-day is a girls giving guys chocolate day. Silly silly boys. I'm giving everyone chocolate next week, hahaha, since it's the last class and a kind of belated v-day. I really like this group of first years. :)

Oh, that kind of reminds me of something else I noticed in class. So there's this Brazilian kid whose English is actually really decent and even - dare I say it - good. Probably the best pronunciation in class. He started off the year as a kind of wild and loud kid who didn't always come to class, but recently I think he's changed. He's still loud, sure, but he actually gets the other kids to shut up, unlike the really loud kid in the back of the room who's just constantly shouting things about sex out (though I'm not entirely convinced he knows what he's saying). At least the Brazilian kid is polite when he talks to me, and actually does the work and stuff. So when my JTE - who is amazing - noted that the Brazilian kid was going to be absent and commented on how the class was actually going to maybe be quiet today since he wasn't going to be there and how we might actually get stuff done, I was kind of shocked and defended the student a bit by pointing out that this other kid was even louder so our class was not going to change. The fact that it's been done several times when this kid is absent makes me wonder if the kid just made a really bad first impression, or if it was actually because he wasn't full Japanese or even Japanese looking. I know he's actually pretty smart and probably understand most of what I say. I'm pretty sure he's pretending that he doesn't always. But whatever. He doesn't draw penises (boys are pretty much the same everywhere I guess) on the fogged up window and actually tells the other kids to shut up when others are presenting, so I don't care. It's just kind of unfortunate that he carries this kind of image with the teachers though, cause I'm pretty sure if he were in an American high school, he either be on the honors track, or he'd be one of those really smart slacker boys.

Either way, I'm going to miss everyone I've met this past year when I leave Japan.

It's so weird to think about only having about six months left. D:

Reminders

Today, after sitting on my butt for a good two... three... quite possibly four hours (and by sitting, I mean laying in bed) I decided that I needed to get out of the house and do some walking, since this whole "walking" thing wasn't something I had done in-

Wait. Waitaminute. I walked on Friday. On Friday I was at my special needs school with the elementary school kids, year six. Every friday, they have ”やまあるき” or "mountain walking." Since the place is pretty much built into the mountains, there's ample space to go walking up there. It had been a while since I had last walked, so I was actually pretty excited to go up.

Little did I know what awaited for me. We did our usual route at first, which took us past the cowshed and chicken coops, past the kiwi groves (how random is that), then down to where the golf course and the information... cabin thing is. Inside they have a mini map of the area, information on wildlife, and, more importantly, restrooms. So we usually walk to there, and then turn around and walk back since I mean, these are elementary school kids we're talking about.

Today though, since I was with the older kids (last time I was with the first years, a boy in a wheelchair and a small but very very very energetic little girl) I got to go in group one. Group one, since it was only ten o'clock (we started around 9:30) when we got to the cabin (must have walked too fast) was going to do the "marusaku course" and I didn't really think much about the name at first.

Turns out that means "the course where you walk up a giant-ass hill." I mean like, this was no small hill. I think we walked around the circumference of the golf course, because when we got back we were pretty much 100m away from the cabin we started at. We kept losing kids along the way as well, since some of them got tired (it was a really really long walk with a good half of it uphill) so they'd refuse to move, so one teacher would kind of hang behind and coax the kid (or wait for the kid to give up). Eventually, we would be rejoined by that kid, and then some other kid would fall behind.... We even got rejoined by this one kid whom we had left at school, only to lose him again when he too, got tired... Major props to the four kids who managed to stay with the group the whole time.

There was also some leftover snow (from Monday) around the grounds when we were walking. That was fun. That also meant it was COLD, no matter what the temperature was. If it was cold enough to keep snow for a while... yeah, cold.

Anyways though, we got back to the school some time around 11ish. A good solid hour and a half of walking, some of that being hills. I was actually kind of tired.

Saturday, I actually walked back to my place with people rather than ride my bike.

So I dunno what I was thinking when I said I haven't walked in a while. It's not like I'm in the States right now. Yeesh.

But anyways, today, in light of having absolutely nothing to do (...like not study Japanese and not work on correcting papers) I decided to take a little walk before video chatting with my parents (with my brother as a surprise guest). I've been meaning to start doing like... routine walks up the giant hill/mountain behind my house, for at least like, 30 minutes or something since it's probably the most outside working out I'll do apart from my daily commute. Plus it's really pretty.

So I started up the giant hill, with the intention of going and seeing the pretty area along the route to the mountain castle... but then I decided to see if the baseball kids were practicing or something (despite it being Sunday, the day when most shops aren't open here, including this adorable cafe I found that is one of my new favorite places in Takahashi).

As I walked up towards the fields, I came across these really cool looking moss covered stairs, and thought "hm, where do these go?" Since it's winter, there is a significant decrease in the chances of encountering one of the dreaded huge black and yellow spiders (or any spider for that matter) and bugs in general. This makes me much much much more inclined to explore places I haven't been to in the mountains, since I actually think it's pretty interesting. Up the stairs I went! I thought I was going to slip and fall, but it was alright, and at the top there was this kind of little grove and something that may or may not have been a path and a bunch of bamboo. I decided to go back down.

It wasn't long though before I reached this little park area that had a little uhhh, not pagoda, but it has one of those roof things, shoot, I swear I know the word, but I just can't... remember it. Terrace? No. It looks like a small hut and it's roundish but more polygonal with straight edges... I want to say bungalow but that's not it either. Anyways. One of those. In this little clearing area with a pond that screamed out "MOSQUITO BREEDING PLACE." So glad it was winter. But there were some stairs there as well, so I figured, why not. I was really curious to find out where those stairs went.

The entire stairway and path to the stairs were completely covered in dead leaves and mulch, as if nobody had been there for a long long while. The first thing I worried about was, "what if there are bugs and slugs and even worse, mukade, hiding underneath these leaves?" So I resolved to look down as little as possible, and made my way up the stairs. About midway, I could see that they led to this kind of clearing looking thing, so despite my misgivings about running into snakes or giant centipedes, I walked up to the clearing.

It turned out that in the clearing area, the path continued up along the edge of the hill/mountain that I could see. Along the path, green knee-high weeds had sprung up, making me slightly wary about finding spiders and spider webs. But so far, nothing.

This continued, with me going another twenty feet before stopping and looking at the path before me and wondering if I should continue down it. By this point, I had traveled pretty far. I could see the baseball field... off in the distance. I wasn't really eager to make my way down the (damp) leaf strewn stairs, and I really wanted to find out where the path went. I mean, it had to go somewhere, right? I thought originally, it went to a clearing or something, but as it turns out, it actually led to a space above the baseball field, another dirt field with this abandoned looking... fountain or something, along with a fenced in set of benches that looked like an observation spot. I was kind of tired from climbing, so I wandered over towards the raised spot where the benches were and as I got closer, I noticed that there was actually more stairs, as well as an actual path with railings and everything.

This piqued my curiosity even more, and I found myself once more wandering down the path until I got to this watchtower thing, and then to a map thing that I had absolutely no idea about. It turns out I thought I was on the wrong end. I thought it was showing that I was at the end, but I guess I was at the beginning of it? There were stairs down, so I figured "why not just follow the stairs? As long as I keep going to the left and downwards... I'll probably end up somewhere closer to my house."

I passed a bunch of paths that looked closed because of I have no idea, and these observation decks... or something. It said that it was the university park or something? The paths looked like they were somewhat maintained (as opposed to the leafy path I had taken earlier) so I figured hey... they must go somewhere! This was an area of Takahashi that I hadn't actually explored though, so every time I looked out, I had absolutely no idea where I was.

Eventually, after going down stairs for what felt like twenty minutes, and passing by this really interesting shrine with a bunch of stone figurines, I found myself in someone's backyard area, where they had a garden. Thankfully, there was a stone path towards an actual kind of road thing, which led to, finally, a familiar place, about 200m from where my house was. My legs were not so happy with me, from having to go up, then down, all those stairs. But they were more than willing to walk me the rest of the way home so that I could sit down and drink some tea.

On my journey though, I realized that I had forgotten how freaking gorgeous it is around my place. If I was in the States, I never ever would have been able to just wander off like that and get lost in the woods for forty minutes before wandering back home again. I live in a pretty awesome place. The woods were really pretty (and even better, I hadn't run into bugs). The shrines were old, and screamed out that kind of rural Japan that just made me shake my head in wonder. I mean, you see them and just go "...damn, I'm totally in Japan aren't I."

I love having those moments, even though I've been here for a year and a half, almost. Takahashi, really, is an amazing place to live, now that I've taken the time to explore it and have found restaurants I actually like. The hours suck, sure, but still. I really do love it here. I guess deciding to leave has really... made me appreciate the things I have here more.

Conversations

Wednesdays are my ridiculously busy days, but one of my most enjoyable ones. Usually anyways. All my first year classes are on wednesdays, and I usually really enjoy teaching my first year home economic girls. They're just so... energetic. All the time. But they're always alive so they're always pretty fun to teach. The others... sometimes they're kind of dead. Sigh.

After school though is cooking club. Normally, it makes me really happy to join cooking club; even after a bad day with cooking club (and food) things are okay.

So I dunno what was up with today. Maybe it had something to do with how my teacher said she had to stand in the back of class in order to discipline the kids - which I get, but it makes it really hard to attempt to do team teaching. She's been leaving a lot of things sometimes up to me... and sometimes she doesn't listen when I talk so I ended up repeating myself... three times in class today. Sigh. What're you going to do about it though. Nothing.

Today's recipe was butter corn and cheese in hamburg(er). Hamburg(er) (or hambagu) here in Japan is only the hamburger patty, no bun. No nothing. It's usually eaten with corn. When I heard that I was excited. But the girls who I'm on the cooking team with... one of them is an awesome second year, and one is a sweet girl who's a first year. The third girl... I don't know. I don't think she likes English. Or me. Sucks for her though.

The task they gave me was cooking the butter corn, which was hardly a task at all. You dump the corn into the buttered frying pan and add a pinch of salt and a shake or two of pepper. Then you warm the corn up. The end. Seriously it's ridiculously hard to screw up unless you're not paying attention and you burn all your corn. I'm probably making mountains out of molehills but it was like "seriously, you're going to give me THIS task?"

I felt like I was just the potwasher or something. I asked if I should mix the ingredients for the hamburger, and then they told me that they wanted to wait for the onions to finish... and then one of the girls ended up mixing the hamburger while the onions were cooling anyways. I was kind of like... arg. I might not be able to speak Japanese, but that doesn't mean I can't cook. For the love of christ, please give me something to do other than the dishes. I don't mind doing the dishes. But when that's all I'm doing... I don't care if I'm getting tasty food out of it, eventually it becomes kinda annoying if that's the only contribution I'm making, especially in a club about cooking food.

*

In class today we did analogies. I was under the impression that they had done similes as junior high school students, yet the review activity we had intended on doing for only a little bit of time ended up taking up most of the class. I'm not sure how. And for some of them, it was like they had never seen it, while others understood relatively okay.

I had a hard time explaining why, when we use "like" in our analogies, we don't normally use adjectives.

Consider a simile that is trying to convey "she is pretty"

She's like Marilyn Monroe.

...that's a proper simile... right? I feel like we would also say "she's like Marilyn Monroe - a timeless beauty." (would we?) The question though, is do we say:

She's pretty like Marilyn Monroe.

According to the example we had on the worksheet, and my initial response, I told my teacher no, and so she wanted to know why not. I told her that it was because that's the nature of a simile; you should be able to tell from the noun what she's like, otherwise it's not a very good analogy! Yet, I realized later that we do elaborate on the analogy after the noun sometimes, like "Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know which one you're going to get" or whatever. That doesn't mean it's a bad analogy per say, but I couldn't think of how to convey this. I guess I should say something like "sometimes you're not trying to only use an adjective to compare things"? Or, "that's what "as...as..." is there for?

I don't know though. Maybe most of this is just hot air I've been blowing.

Festivals festivals festivals!

This weekend is a festival weekend, for some reason. I'm going to (or will try to go to, at least) not one, not two, but THREE festivals in only two days.

Three festivals in two days?

Challenge accepted.

This first festival was today. It was my Takahashi technical high school's open festival day (there are also performances and stuff but that is usually on a weekday). They had stalls and cares and a haunted house and displays and crafts or things the students made that you could buy. 

And so. Much. Food.

Once again, I purchased more food tickets than my stomach had room for, because it is so freaking hard to say no to students you actually like (and want to like you). Thankfully for my waistline, the portions were all Japanese sized (that is to say, tiny) so having two cookies and some juice meant having a small cup of milk tea (like teacup size... A small tea cup) and two cookies about the size of half dollars.

Basically, I ate my way through the whole festival, since I lack the desire to not be able to sleep at night (no おばけやすい, haunted house, for me). I could probably be coerced into that if I had a copious amount of alcohol in my system. But I was at school, so I didn't. 

So what kind of food did they have at the festival? There were a lot of repeats from the other festivals...

Yuzu ice cream daifuku (ice cream wrapped in mochi)
Yuzu pound cake
Two country ma'am cookies (country ma'am is a popular cookie brand here, like nabisco)
Oden (I got set A which had daikon, or Japanese radish, konnyaku noodles, and a cabbage roll, which is just cabbage wrapped around meat. The cabbage rolls are pretty tasty. But. It had no chikuwa (fish paste) or the other things I don't like in oden! It also came with this Yuzu flavored pepper paste stuff that was AMAZING.)
Curry and rice
Milk tea
Black tea
Cold green tea
Chocolate churro
Plain churro
Kinako dango (mochi balls rolled in this peanut-y powder)
Azuki dango (red bean paste mochi balls)
Mitarashi dango (mochi flavored with a thick soy sauce and sugar sauce)
Chicken yakisoba

I ate the dango and yakisoba after I got home. But I also bought bread they had made (how could I not!) and an apple pound cake. I'm saving those for later. The bread has cheese and BACON in it. I'm excited.

Other foods they had but I didn't eat:
Frankfurter and juice (despite this being sold by one of my favorite classes, I really don't like the frankfurters here. I really want to... But every time I buy one it just turns out to be a disappointment since the casing is usually ridiculously thick).
Caramel popcorn
Zaizen (I think,that's what it's called... It's mochi in red bean soup. Not the biggest fan of red beans)
Udon
...these pancake things with custard or chocolate or red bean paste in them
And
Deep fried takoyaki (takoyaki are balls of dough with pieces of octopus in them. You should google them if you don't know what they are. But these were deep fried and the line was always at least 30 minutes... So I bought a ticket but ended up giving it to my team teaching partner instead cause I wanted to go home and work on my grad school app)

I also missed out on eating at one of the cafes. THERE WERE THREE CAFES. WHY WERE THERE THREE CAFES?! Seriously... I think they were all run by the design classes. There was one themed around Christmas (there were a lot of christmas themed things... It made me kind of sad...) run by the third years, and the second year's was called Hayabusa, after the... Space thing. They built a model of the satellite and had the movie running. It was pretty.

The one run by the first years had one of the male students (whose english is pretty okay) in a dress and long brown wig. The poor thing looked MISERABLE. Some male students wear drag and girls clothing proudly and seem to be even more excited about wearing a skit and a wig than they do in their own clothes... But this kid was a poster child for unhappiness and embarrassment. I wonder if he lost a bet or dare or rock paper scissors... Or was being punished. But their theme was a manga cafe, so they had a bunch of people,dressed up in cosplay. It was really cute.

Yeah, the design kids usually have amazing things. They also had a life sized model of the wolf from princess mononoke- the one that she rode. Like, you could ride the model if you were a small Japanese person. It was really really good.

Oh I should make a note, that here, juice is sometimes used the same way 'soft drinks' or 'pop' is used or 'cold beverage.' IE, orange juice, soda, cider, calpis, and  sometimes tea are all included in this category. It still throws me off sometimes.

But yeah. That was my school festival. A lot of fun. I think the students were happy I came? They seemed excited... Especially when it came to selling me things lol. 

But now I am off to an all night karaoke... For charity! ALL YOU CAN KARAOKE FOR THR CHILDREN. And tomorrow there are two festivals I will attempt... Providing I can catch the first train back, get at least an hour of sleep at the karaoke place or McD's, change, and get out the house again. One festival is on the way to the station and the other is out in Yakage. Weeeee. Full weekend go! I guess it's a good thing I basically have a holiday on Monday... I still have to go to school, but I have no c,asses. And it's my base school. So yeah. Excellent.

And I mean, I'm doing cultural things, so like... That's a good thing to be out all weekend for, yeah?

Class Types

I love my students in the agricultural classes. :) I don't know why but all three of the agricultural classes I teach in Niimi are full of just the nicest kids. They're english isn't the greatest (it might actually be the worst out of all my classes) but the at least usually make some effort in classes (even if it's all in Japanese) and most importantly, they don't look so dead in class. 

Those classes, in my opinion, are the worst. Worse than the classes with the rowdy kids (who have all tended to be boys, with the exception of two of my home ec classes). Like, they might be loud and some might be hard to control, but at least the class is alive and full of energy. We might not get through all the material, but I know that in my loud classes, I can usually count on the really loud kids to try and answer thing (even, or especially when they don't know the answer). I actually enjoy the loud classes now, mostly because I get such a good response from them. It's frustrating sometimes, but it's really nice to have students who actually want to answer things, even if it means them screaming your full name at the top of their lungs (my third year home ec girls do that, much to my dismay). 

The quiet classes on the other hand... The quiet classes, you sit there waiting for someone, anyone to answer. Even when you call on a student, in the class I had today they would just sit and stare at their desk, not speaking a word, not even in Japanese. At least some of the other classes would answer in Japanese. But no... These girls would just sit there and stare with this awkward silence that you would have to endure unless you picked someone else... And then the whole cycle would repeat over again.

It's not like that class wasn't smart; on the contrary, they got the best English score. And I know some of them knew the answers. But everything we did, from the activity to the worksheet to the questions... A brick wall of awkward silence. I've only seen them really alive when we play karuta, the card game where you have to slap the correct flash card on the table first. Otherwise... Silence. I'm kind of curious if we could get them to move more by having more activities that force them to stand or to do some kind of action or something. Who knows. You can lead a horse to water... but you can't make it drink.

Some of my other classes are like that too, some of my academic ones. So silent. Quieter than one of the Silent Sisters. Generally this is after gym or something, but sometimes it's not and you're just like, jeeze people, work with me here. The weird thing though, is that they're perfectly glad to talk to me outside of class... but inside class, they're quiet as clams. 

*

One of my schools is doing their culture festival this weekend, and it is, by far the festival that has had the most money spent on it, the performance stage actually has extensions, and the sound system... is no joke. They've got two massive speakers on either side of the stage, sophisticated sound control for all outputs, and a ton of mics. 

And then, there's the lighting. Most of my schools (ie, all the others) use spotlights that need to be manned by a student or someone and have an external disk they can rotate to change the color of the light. Jounan, the school with the amazing sound system, has full sets of lights on either side of the stage. I think there were like, twelve lamps in each set? The lights are controlled remotely, allowing for really gorgeous color changes. At the back of the stage is another long lamp that changes the color of the background. In the foreground, across the gym from the stage was another set of spotlights that had enough power to turn the gym into a brightly lit arena with the three lamps alone. It was AMAZING. I mean, it looked like they were going to put on a small production or something. These lights were nicer than the lights at the concert venue I went to. 

I am super extra sad that I can't see their stage performances. From what I saw from the preview, they looked kind of amazing. I'm super excited for their culture festival though. I'm going Saturday morning. Last year... Was nothing short of amazing. They can build ridiculous things out of cardboard, tape, box cutters, and paint alone... So combine that with access to things like proper wood and stuff and real tools (since they're a technical school) and holy lumberjack batman. 

For their sports day festival, as a banner, the third year design students made a dragon. A freaking dragon. It was AMAZING. The second year design students made models of Thomas the tank engine... That could be worn by people. They were probably larger than some of the students who made it. Those were also amazing (and a little creepy too - I mean, Thomas' face without the engine behind it is just WEIRD). 

This, combined with how some of the students will actually talk to me (even if it's in Japanese with bits of English thrown in) is why I've come to really like my technical schools, even if their English isn't supposed to be as good. Whatever; some students use more English outside the class and speak it more than my academic kids. Maybe it's because they're not expected to be so great so they're not as embarrassed to try and make mistakes. 

They're also not afraid to, in word association games, go from sunny to summer to sea to bikinis to SEXY hahaha. Though I have the suspicion that's not limited to just them.

Cats

I'm not doing too well at this whole remembering to blog every day thing so far. While technically, I have already missed a day, it's not *really* the next day until the screen flashes to "DAWN OF THE SECOND DAY" right? Or at least, until I go to bed. So really, I'm not behind...

The Pooh-san Premium Parfait
aka, one way trip to diabetes

Today a group of us ALTs (and one Japanese lady) destroyed a parfait (and were destroyed in the process). This was no ordinary parfait. No. This was the premium parfait, the not in a glass, not in a bowl, not in a bucket, but in a godsbegood TUB.

I don't think the picture quite does it justice. It's just large enough so that I can just get my arms all the way around it. You also can't see it, since it burnt out, but there used to be sparklers coming out of there too. An apt way to celebrate Guy Fawkes day. Sparklers in ice cream. Yes please.

On a related sidenote, Winnie the pooh bear is actually called Pooh-san here in Japan. Us, having aged backwards since coming to Japan, giggled half the time about how Pooh was melting or how someone had started to dig into pooh (hee hee). Mature of us, I know. I think some of us were slightly delirious at that point.

Five of us had taken the hike up to the castle in the rain a couple hours prior. It was one helluva hike. I had forgotten how much... work it was, especially since we weren't hiking it in the sweltering disgusting heat. I actually did much better this time I think, though I still got to the top kind of gross and sweaty.

It was super gorgeous up there though. The clouds were just sitting on the mountainsides and sometimes fog would obscure the entire city as we looked down on the clouds from above. It makes me tired just thinking about it, that we were actually above the clouds for a good portion of our time. The leaves were in the process of changing too (some of them anyways).

(Another slightly related digression: after being told about how amazing autumn colors are, I've actually been kind of disappointed in the falls here, especially since it's been either ridiculously cold or ridiculously warm, and none of the trees are changing at the same time. I suppose that is one way to do it; stagger the leaves so things are just beautiful for like... a while.)

But yeah. No more sweets for me for a long while.

The best lessons

Blogger changed their layout; I got kind of distracted by this and thus forgot what I was going to post. I'm remembering in bits and pieces, but maaan I wish I just posted first off to begin with. There was a title that went with it and everything. Oh well. 仕方がない, or shikataga nai~ as they say. Can't really do anything about it. So forward I go.

Today was ridiculously warm; it's been like that for the last few days, actually. Last week seemed like something of a dream. Fall was teasing us, badly. I had the pleasure of biking to the station and actually feeling cold monday morning - like, "hm should I have brought my jacket?" kind of cold. It was wonderful.

Now it's hotter than sin, and I can't sit without sweating. It's kind of disgusting. Temperature wise, my school's temperature monitor clocked the temperature around 32.something-high degrees Celsius, which in Fahrenheit, translates to roughly 90 degrees. That's hot, even without the humidity. And then you add the humidity, and the never-ending moisture that exists on your arms and it's just like grooooooss. The last class I taught was absolutely dead, and I don't blame them. They had PE right before English (never a good idea), and I was ridiculously tired myself (knocking out early last night with my contacts still in and waking up at four to take them out and go back to sleep had nothing to do with that, probably). I can only imagine how they felt.

When the end of Monday came, I got a message that Tsukimi, or the moon viewing event, was happening in Korakuen, one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan. It was around 4:30, so I could get off work, but I had to bike home to get my korakuen pass (25 minutes), then take a train to Okayama (an hour) and then another 20 minutes to get to the gardens themselves (ish), so like, easily over three hours commute round trip. At that point in the day, when it was blazing hot, not attractive. Plus I was tired. I think I had started to whine to my teachers about how hot it was. Bless their souls for putting up with me.

Instead, I decided to head to Polka, the local... super...market department store? It's like a really small department store. It's only two floors, with a smallish supermarket, a couple of restaurants, and a bunch of other small stores (including a softbank and daiso/100 yen store). I mean, I wasn't hungry at that point, but I figured that if I wanted to, I could buy food to either cook or take back with me, and maybe find kakigori (shaved ice). At the very least, I could kill time and wait for the sun to set so that the bike home wouldn't be as awful hot. So, as a tentative "maybe-but-probably-not" I biked the short distance to Polka.

Despite the five minute or less ride, I was exhausted when I got in. I went to browse the super market area for pre-made foods I could take home with me, or sales on meat or other food products. The meat section was having this "three things for 1050 yen" special. Pretty rad. I like the days when they do this, because I'll stock up on stuff and put it in my freezer for later. They have decent things, like 250 g of cut beef stuff, which works well for things like gyuudon (beef bowl) or curry. They have (thinnish) pork cutlets for tonkatsu. They had chicken filets. But it was still early, so I decided, after walking through the place, that I wanted to get shaved ice before I biked back because I still felt disgusting. A quick survey found no shave ice on the first floor (or maybe I wasn't looking too hard), but one of the few restaurants did have soft serve ice cream, and it was one of the restaurants where a couple of the girls I made friends with work at. Plus the old people who run the restaurant are super nice. It was right next to the grocery place. So I decided to go there.

Neither of the girls (both Chinese) that I knew were in; they were probably at the university or like, not out in the sweltering heat, hopefully. But both the old people were. So I ordered soft cream and chatted a little with the old man who was running it.

The soft cream in Japan is kinda interesting, in that the machines are really different. In the states, soft serve ice cream - not that I've seen the behind the scenes machinery, but I'm pretty sure this is the case - has one big thing and comes in large batches that I'm guessing either make their own soft serve after you add in the right things, or they have a giant source that they pull the soft serve from. I dunno, I've never run one. But either way, when you want a soft serve, you pull the lever on the machine, and it comes out the nozzle and you have to attempt to get it all in the cup; some people can make this look prettier than others. Either way, you can add as much or as little as you want (or, in the case of restaurants, as much as the person serving feels like).

In Japan though, especially at smaller places, once you select your flavor, the staff pulls out this cylindrical block of ice cream in a cup thing. It looks kind of like the cup you use to freeze the cylinders of ice in. They look kind of like hockey pucks, but roughly with the diameter of your palm. They put this into the machine, and *then* they crank out your soft serve ice cream. You get as much as was in the hockey puck container.

Anyways, I got it and paid for my soft serve, with 20 yen off from the 240 yen price ($2.40ish for soft serve! T-T *weeps*), aka, "service". The first time I heard "service" being used, my mind went to uh, not so savory and polite places. I was like, seriously, service?! It sounds so... dirty. I suppose only as dirty as you make it though. But I've gotten used to it, using "service" as a way to signify when you get stuff for free or a discount or whatever.

...Actually, I can't think of what we'd say in English. Maybe "discount"? Oh wait, just kidding. We say "on the house." Major English fail.

So after I got my ice cream, I sat down and started to read/study Japanese. I happened to notice though, that the old man had finished the flower arrangement display he had been working on in the back, and was placing it on the main table.

It was absolutely gorgeous. I wish I had gotten a picture of it. The main body of the arrangement was composed of these dark, chocolate colored branches that twisted this way and that; there were three of them. The secondary flowers were some kind of fall-like flowers. Red maybe? And white? I don't remember all the way. But the small flowers opened up in a kind of spray towards the center of the display, with the whole thing shouting "FALL IS GORGEOUS" but in a much quieter, more subtle way. And once again, I started talking to the old man.

He commented on how these flowers, this arrangement was specifically for Fall (which led me to ask when fall was, since, as far as I and the weather are concerned, it's still summer). This in turn led to us talking about why they do ikebana displays in the first place, and what you're supposed to feel when you look at them. He told me that your heart is supposed to become quiet, that you're supposed to feel a kind of inner calm. 落ち着く、or "ochitsuku" translates into, "to harmonize" or "to calm down" or "to restore presence of mind" The seasonal displays, along with the specific seasonal foods, and the flower displays and everything, are done with the goal of just that - to quiet the heart and the mind, and to restore the soul. It's why Buddhists meditate, he told me.

That's why I think Japanese culture is absolutely beautiful. Cause you know what? Looking at the display, taking in its beauty and its simplicity, my heart did exactly that. Where I was feeling grumpy and irritable and restless before (mostly due to the heat), the flower arrangement filled me with a serene sense of calm and peace, as corny as it sounds. That, and I was able to understand about 70-80% of what the old couple was saying (meaning counts for a lot, right?) probably helped too.

After finishing my ice cream, it was late enough to where it wouldn't be ridiculously hot on the ride back, so I packed up my things and said goodbye. I had the pleasure of discovering that my grocery store was now stocking frozen spinach again (it hadn't for a good two months or so), which also cheered me immensely. That, and I swear half of my third year home economics course was shopping in Polka. I saw so many of them! And they either said hello, or stopped to chat for a bit in the curry and canned goods aisle. One girl asked why they had seen me walking to work that morning, since usually, I ride my bike. For some reason, this made me feel pleased.

When I left, it was with a feeling like I could take on the world and all its heat, and that perhaps the bike ride back home wouldn't be so bad after all.

Culture and Sports Festivals

Two of the big, all school events at most Japanese high schools (that I've seen anyways) are Sports Day and the Culture Festival. By "Culture Festival" really, it means the school's culture. When I first got here i thought it meant learning about foreign cultures and stuff, but I was kind of wrong on that account.

All of my schools, and pretty much all of the other ALTs I talk to, have these two events. Sports day tends to be held in September, while the school culture festival can range anywhere from September around when classes start back (rendering any attempt at actual teaching relatively useless) to Octoberish. One of my other schools doesn't have theirs until later.

Culture festival is broken up into two parts at my schools. The first day, usually a week day, usually a friday, is dedicated to student performances as a whole class or block. Most of the time it's by class. Classes will put on skits, plays, sing songs, make videos... just about anything for this part. Unfortunately, I missed most of this because I was at other schools on every single day one of my schools was doing this first day.

The second part, usually a second day, is dedicated to a bazaar bit where students will sell food that they make and decorate their classrooms and have exhibits and stuff. The clubs, at least, the academic clubs, will often decorate a classroom and have something as well.

This year I helped out with the English classroom and I (kind of) did an ikebana display. By kind of, I mean that I made the poster for it and watched the teacher put in all the flowers. She gave me the last bunch, a handful of purple flowers, to place around the main flowers she had set in. So I did. And she made approving sounds so I hurried out afterwards to watch the students do their performances. That was not my happiest time. I still don't quite understand why I couldn't have done it after watching the students; it's not like the teacher wasn't there after. But whatever. It's the past.

Either way though, I got back to the classroom afterwards and the sensei was there carefully rearranging all the flowers I had put into the bowl. So I really really just don't understand ikebana. Oh well.

Anyways, the second day is all I'e been able to go to, but it's pretty fun to see what the students come up with. Today, I visited Niimi South Campus's culture festival ("Lightning"). They had a bunch of interesting things, including a ghost house (which I did not partake in) and a Tonari no Totoro maze room made for small people (that I partook in anyways). Thankfully, I went through with one of my students who already knew the way, so I didn't get lost. Almost got stuck, but at least I didn't get lost haha. It was really hot so I kept sticking to the plastic things they were using to decorate the inside of the maze. Really cute idea though, since Mei-chan goes through the mazes and stuff in Totoro too. The food was pretty awesome too. I think it's a rule that if you're selling some kind of consumable thing in the summer, shaved ice, or kakigori, must be one of them. They also had these really tasty (and probably unhealthy) rice balls that were flavored with either curry or tomato sauce/spaghetti sauce, then rolled in panko and deep fried. Sooo tasty. It was a lot of fun, and I saw a bunch of students whom I haven't seen in a while.

One of the students I saw, I'm proud to say I knew the name of haha. Mostly it's because last year for Halloween, I gave them candy, so after that he was always asking me for candy. Eventually, instead of saying "Please give me candy" he switched instead to shouting "I LOVE JESHIKA" whenever he saw me. Now, (I think/hope) it's become something of a joke between the two of us. We chat, usually in Japanese with English thrown in here and there, and he helped me learn his name by asking me every time I saw him if I remembered his name. Eventually, I did. When I saw him today, I guess he must have seen me earlier or something because he was selling tickets and was like "OHHHHHHH JESSHIKAAAA" and then showed me his shirt (one of the special ones they were wearing for festival). "I love ジェシカ" was written across part of it.

I think I just kind of laughed and asked him what he was selling. Fried potatoes, it turned out. Those were pretty tasty.

One of the more interesting foods they had there was 流しそうめん "nagashi somen" which is like "flowing somen" when they told me. Instead of just eating it straight from the bowl, they give you a cup filled with somen sauce and you stand by this big bamboo trough. At one end is a bucket with a thing to caulander kind of thing. The other end is elevated and starts in the kitchen. From that end, they put the noodles in the bamboo trough and then pour water down the trough. The water pushes the noodles down, and you have to pick it up with chopsticks and dump it into your cup. As it flows down. You can't miss, otherwise it'll keep flowing down into the bucket. The whole time I was doing that, I was like "aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" in my head because I was super worried about missing it completely. ._.

Last weekend was Takahashi's culture festival, and it was a little different. For one, I (shamefully) woke up late and didn't make it to school until 10 o'clock. No idea what happened either. They were selling kakigori, ice cream, curry, tapioca... and for some reason they had TWO haunted houses this year. I feel kinda bad, cause I didn't go into either of them. Our school has a tea ceremony club too, since there's a tea house in our school, so I had some tea, Japanese ceremony style. Last year it was ridiculously bitter, but this year... was actually tasty.

The cooking club also made gyuudon (beef bowl) again this year and it was suuuuper tasty.


One of my favorites though, was the "science is mystery" room. A couple of my favorite students were in charge of that room, including one student whom I'm doing interview practice with. It was really cute haha, he was like "JESSICA YOU MUST COME IN HERE" and showed me all the things they were doing. It's a bunch of stuff that like, I did as a kid that you can do with cool sceincey things. For example, the cornstarch thing, and another thing with dry ice. They put it in some film cases (though damn, film cases!) and left it covered, and after a while it exploded. They also had soapy water they dropped dry ice in. This made the soap bubble like... a lot. But the cool thing was, when you burst the bubbles, smoke came out~ It was super fun. :D

Little punks also shocked me through a chain though, lol.

Oh, another really cool thing they did was a demo of large scale calligraphy, by the calligraphy club. It was pretty sweet.


Sorry for the lack of pictures, especially on this. A lot of the pictures I took have my students in it (to the point of where you can really see their faces) so it felt a little weird putting those up. :) So you'll just have to take my word that it was a really awesome show. :3