Leavers

Its that time of year. Almost a year ago today, I embarked on a journey across the world! And then decided to stay... There are many other people who were either "termed out" or just decided to go home. And I will miss them so much!!! I really really will.

We had a beachside BBQ up in Hagi to celebrate our time here, and say goodbye!

I was one of the three people that just stuck to BBQ'ing the whole time. I wasn't going to swim, after the whole jellyfish incident a few weeks back!

The BBQ was great, and I want to thank everyone who helped organize it!

Hagi is a beautiful city, and it was my first time there. It is very out of the way for most people in Yamaguchi, so I'm glad I had a reason to force myself to make the trip.

We had end of the year awards. We voted for people in categories such as "The Alcoholic" and "The Slacker" and "Worst Japanese". Luckily, I was voted "Most Dedicated"!!! I was actually very happy! But next year, I will be hugging Mike for "Biggest Nerd!" Its not a category yet, but I'm going to start lobbying for it to be, soon.

Fireworks on the beach were awesome.

Of course, no ALT gathering would be complete without an ambulance! During a game of Dodgeball, two of our bravest went down. One even got a surgery out of it! (hand surgery) Luckily, I was nowhere near that ball-o-death.

The after-party involved some Brittney, Michael Jackson, M.I.A., etc. :D

Monica, Brooke, Whitney, Callie, Matt, Sophie, Mathieu, Mack!, Cyndi, Tiff, Alex, Charles, Tim and just freaking everyone that will not be here soon..... Farewell! I will miss you!

Burned

I've been getting better in my old age at putting on sunblock everyday. Its just hard when this is the biggest sized bottle of sunblock I can find here in Japan, and its like 10 million dollars. ;) Oh, how I miss Costco, how I miss Costco.

Next up--getting better at wearing bug repellant. urg.

Star Festival!

Here is a post I'm pretty excited about! I don't know why I'm so excited, I just am! :) Well, I learned about something new yesterday and today, that I've never heard of before. Its of a Chinese holiday, that is also celebrated here in Japan.

I want to tell you about it, the way it was told to me, so don't necessarily trust everything I say. Here is something about it (that I'm not reading) from Wikipedia. click. But I want to tell you the best I can based on what my students taught me.

So yesterday was a holiday called: tanabata The students in-class assignment was to brainstorm on everything they knew about the holiday, and then teach me about it, the best they can in English, with gestures, and with drawings.

So a long long time ago, the god of the Milky Way, (or as I learned: 天の川 translating directly to heaven/sky river) was this dad, who was kind of possessive... but probably only wanted the best for his daughter Orihime (actually the star VEGA!!) She was a master 'weaver' (or something like that...they couldn't explain this part well). She spent all her time making beautiful cloth---pure perfection! But since she spent all her time in her endeavors, she didn't have time to find a husband. Then this "Cowboy" came along (YES the best way they could describe the word in English was Cowboy!!) They got married and fell deeply in love. Oh, by the way, his name is Hikoboshi (otherwise known as the star ALTAIR).

pic source

They were so happy spending all of their time together that Orihime no longer spent any time weaving. She spent all her days and nights "playing" with Hikoboshi. So the grumpy father separated them. She must weave, and never see her husband at length again. :(

They were separated on opposite sides of the Milky Way, and can never pass. (Just as Vega and Altair are are separated by the Milky Way.

There is only one day out of the year that they can see each-other, and that is July 7th--Tanabata! So it is a really important celebration, for love! The suckie catch is, is that they only get to meet on Tanabata if the skies are clear. But this is rainy season!! The skies are rarely clear! So On July 7th, everyone wishes for clear skies, so the separated lovers can meet once again.

There are many other things that go along with this holiday. Of course, I'm not sure why. But there is a special kind of bamboo called Sasa or: 笹. People are suppose to write their wishes on long strips of origami paper, and tie them to the Sasa.

For at least a month now, the main mall here in Hofu has been FILLED with Sasa, and beautiful strips of paper. I had no idea why. Now I know! I tried to ask both my classes that had this lesson if they only get their wishes fufilled if the sky is not cloudy, and Orihime and Hikoboshi can meet. No one knew. You know how traditions go. There are so many traditions that we don't even know why we do them.

I know -below- isn't right because they are not hung on Sasa, nor are they strips, but for the purpose of English class, they wrote their wishes in English here...

Other things about this holiday---there are special foods to eat. Cold soman noodles. Also some kind of pudding/Jelly with three different layers, and the middle layer being white, representing the Milky Way.

Hmmmm... Did I miss anything that they told me? Maybe...but cheers! And fathers--don't punish your daughters for finding love! I know if it were my dad, he'd just sit down and do the sewing for me, while I "played" with my love. <3>

(point of reference---every Japanese student tries to translate this one verb to 'played' when they really mean "hang out"!!!! No matter how many times I try to tell them, I will still get 90% of my high school seniors telling me that after school they will play with their friends at the mall).

Lesson Idea:

Here is what I was trying to describe to my students:

And here is an example of the outcome!!

Can you call this dictation? Whatever it was, it was a really fun warm up exercise for English class!

:)

I love all my friends in Japan!!!!

(Of course this is in no way a represenation

of all my friends in Japan,...

I just had this picture in my queue to blog about!)

But I miss all my friends in America!!!!

(of course, this is not a representation of

all my friends in America, I just grabbed a pic!)

And I hecka miss Vietnam!!!

(Hi EAP peeps!)

So where should my next adventure be? My mind keeps floating towards Buenos Aires...

San In Beach Party

This year was the last year that Tottori Prefecture would host the relatively famous "San In Beach Party." I was going to go with JET, but it would have cost me an arm and a leg, so when I was invited by some friends that were going to drive--I thought, YaH!

We left around 7:30p.m. We all had to work, so we couldn't really go any earlier. The drive was scheduled to take around 5-6 hours. So its really great we left late, because we took the toll roads. Usually the price one way on that toll road is $70!! But because we exited the toll road after midnight, it was only $10! It was pretty funny, because we had to pull over and wait it out. Heck yeah, I'm all about stopping on the side of the road for 20 minutes so that the clock will hit midnight!

Here, the girls are planning our trip out at the first rest stop we came across. I'm in love with Japanese rest stops. No sleezy looking characters. Free tea. Free maps. This trip planner (the machine they are on) that was suppose to get us where we needed to go easily.

As I would find out a few hours later, the machine was just about as good as Mapquest. Darn you Mapquest! Darn you Japanese map-machines!

We got pretty lost. The whole area we were in was pretty countryside. So there were barely any roadsigns, no streetlights, no gas-stations, no McDonalds. :) No one to help us if we didn't find our way. I think the being lost took away about 2 hours. Not too bad, right?

We finally made it to the beachside campsite at 3:30a.m. Step one-bring in the tent, and set it up. We had to wind our way through people that were dancing, laughing, and others that could barely walk. But we managed to get the tent up!

We ended up having a party in the back of the car, because even though ALL three of us brought in ONLY a tent on our first entry, no one happened to tell us that any form of liquid would only be allowed in on that first entry. Not even water! But we met many cool people out in the parking lot that encountered the same problem as us. No one was aware of this "first entry only" policy.

After trying to get some sleep (the dance music was on all night!) we got some "sun" (it was a very gloomy weekend), made some more friends, and got stung by Jellyfish!!! Ohhhh I want to say that this was the first Jellyfish sting of my life, but I can't really remember. I knew exactly what was happening to me, but was kind of powerless to stop it! It was a terrible terrible sting! The color on my legs there, is just iodine. But a closer picture would show a terrible, bubbly rash, that freaked me out! (and hurt)

Here was the view from our tent. The beach was really nice. I want to guess there were only about 600 people there this year. Don't know why it was the last year, but its really a shame, because its awesome. Here is some info from a previous year, if you want to get a feel for what went down. click click.

Goodbye Kozumi Beach!

Laser Disc

Apparently these "Laser Discs" were much more popular in Japan, than they ever were in America. I had never before seen one in my life, before this trip to Hard Off.

Hard Off by the way is a secondhand Hardware store. Japan also has: Book Off, and Hobby Off. And something else "off" where I like to find secondhand clothing, cause thats how I roll.

Yamaguchi's famous 5 story Pagoda

I just love trees. Today, each time I walked under a tree, I stopped and looked up. Think I freaked out all the people that were of course staring at me (the staring happens regardless of the random stops/skyward looks).

Yamaguchi City has some pretty beautiful sights like this. I still think Hofu is the best place though....

Hiroshima-ken

Last month, my friend Masato had a business trip to Japan, and was able to squeeze out some time for me! Yay! He was a JET in Hiroshima-ken (Prefecture) a few years ago. I'm in Yamaguchi-ken which is right next to Hiroshima-ken, so he was able to visit all his old buddies, and see me. One stone, you see? :D

Masato stayed here in Yamaguchi for a few days, and then we went up to Hiroshima for a few days. The picture above is dinner in Hiroshima city, with lots of new friends, and lots of Japanese language..... I can almost hold my own over a long dinner nowadays. I'm sure I talk worse than a small child, but at least I can get my points across. I think.

The "Izakaya" (umm...translation, translation,.... beer house with lots of food, but mostly business-men go there to get drunk?) that we ate at was pretty interesting. Each of us got to "Junkan" (Rock, Paper, Scissors) with the server. If the server won, then nothing happened, but if we won, we got a FREE beer. I was not drinking though, and they wouldn't Junkan for a free Grapefruit juice...no fair.

Also, we got as many Edamame as we could grab with one hand at one time. You can see that I take my edamame seriously. All the little games were fun, and it gave the Izakaya a lot of character.

Above: Submarines!! Real live submarines! This is a picture from Kure city, in Hiroshima-Ken. Kure was such a beautiful beautiful city. It reminded me a lot of San Clemente, CA.

Happy June, people. See ya!

How do you say "MESS" in Japanese?

So.... My desk is not a mess!!! :) During this term, every two weeks I assigned an English essay to all of my students. That's 160 essays, being turned in, on a rolling basis, every two weeks. I can be away from my desk for 5 minutes, and find 10 new essays on my desk.

In addition to that, I made 16 individual bingo cards for 40 different students. You can see some of those on the left side. The envelopes in the middle are for a different lesson going on. There are headphones, for assessing the viability of using American songs in class. (Most songs don't actually work for the kind of listening activities I want to create). There is coffee so I can stay alive. Ummm. There are always about 5 things going on at my desk at any given time.

I think I am a kick-butt ALT (assistant language teacher). That is all. :D

Oh, and my supervisors desk is right to the left of mine, and as you can see, we have very similar personalities.

blah

A month ago was Towel Day which you can read about here: CLICK

It was actually a really bad day for me, as evidenced by the horrible picture. Perhaps my towel was not big enough.

Next time, bigger towel, and hopefully less mess to wipe up. Cheers!

Chopsticks

Yoko, Jennie and I went on an adventure sometime long ago (early May?) and it was a great day! First we went to see the famous 5-story pagoda in Yamaguchi City...because I'd never seen it before. We were killing time until our appointment with some chopsticks. :) My awesome supervisor, that I have mentioned before (O-sensei), told me about how I could make chopsticks, since I'm always looking for new stuff to do.

We just happened to run into a couple of other friends when we were at the Pagoda, and invited them along. It was all very serendipitous.

It was relaxing and fun. Mostly. One of the lacquers that we had to use can be poisonous. A couple of us got some one our skin, and the instructor started freaking out. Still not sure if one of us is infected, and spreading the chopstick paint disease all over Yamaguchi...

My set is for my mom. I sent them off to her a few days ago, hopefully they don't snap in the mail!

Afterwards, we went to this famous restaurant. We got there 20 minutes before it opened, and the parking lot was full...with waiters going from car window to car window to basically give them a number. Our number only had us waiting for about an hour and a half...

Its all you can eat...meat. And veggies. Anything that could be deep fried, is brought to us raw on skewers. We dip it in the batter, and then in the tempura powder stuff, then plop it into that deep frier that you can see there, right in the middle of the table.

Everyone leaves smelling of oil and feeling sick. :) But I'm glad I got to experience it.

Blood is thicker than water

picture source

Just a quick tidbit on some more Japanese culture...

You know how Americans use zodiac signs? I'm sure most people actually don't believe in that stuff... but it is widely known about, and I'll still get excited to find out someone is an Aries (like me!)

Well, in Japan, it seems that the equivalent is blood type. Everyone here knows their blood type. I'm sure that I'm suppose to know my blood type? If my parents both have the same type, I should too right? Well I don't really know, and that makes anyone who asks me my blood type here gape in horror.

Here are some recent self-intro essays that were turned into me:

"I like curry and rice. don't like a
liver. My favorite subjects is the fine arts. I am very weak in P.E.
I have type A blood. My birthday is ..."

and

"my name is .... My blood is A type. My hobby is talking with my
friends and playing with my friends and singing songs and so on

and

"my name is ... my birthday is ... I am seventeen ears old. My blood
type is O. I am member of the volleyball team."

I just think its funny...I can't imagine ever introducing myself with my blood type! But I guess I can see how I might put "Aries" in my introduction, so its the same, right? :D

Of course I don't know what characteristics are associated with each blood type....yet. But I am slowly turning Japanese (learning little by little), so maybe later I shall share.

Walk to Mt. School

Flower Time