Kanreki

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還暦 Kanreki

I recently learned about the Japanese tradition of Kanreki. I found it very interesting, and love learning new things like this!

65 is the big number for Americans, right? Well, in Japan its 60. You can read all about why it is "60" on the site I linked above (Kanreki).

But it is traditional to have a party on the special day. On this day, all the party attendees must come bearing 'Red Gifts'.

The gifts are red because Kanreki is for celebrating a "re-birth" or "being a baby again" or just starting fresh. Babies in Japan are all nicknamed "赤ちゃん " or Aka-chan which can mean "cute little red thing".

I'm sure looking forward to retiring myself! Maybe I can pretend I'm Japanese and retire early, and get a bunch of red stuff. :)

Red is my favorite color.

MY MOM'S BIRTHDAY!!!

TODAY (MAY 19TH IN AMERICA!) IS MY MOM'S BIRTHDAY!! I KNOW THAT SOME OF HER CO-WORKER READ THIS. SO TELL HER HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

I love you mom.

More Misc.

Here is the teacher's room of my base school. This day was particularly animated, because it was deep cleaning/desk moving day. Remember that the teacher's room in Japan is the main base for every teacher, because the teachers move classes....the students have one classroom they stay in, and the teachers come to them.

Its even more of a base for me, since the most classes I have on any given day is: FOUR. I know. My life is so hard. :) But I'm always sitting there at my desk grading, lesson planning, etc. I'm glad the chair is relatively comfortable.

Here, the dog on the right side is a cell-phone charm! Every Japanese person has a cell-phone charm. Most Japanese people have cell-phone charmS!

I refuse to get one, just to be weird. One day, I am just going to convert, and go buy this ridiculous dog!

This is the freakiest real dog in Hofu. Even when it is looking right at you, you can't really find its face. ...

My English club girls were very good at egg-decorating !!

Easter Dinner

Aren't those the cutest things you've ever seen in your life!? I'm totally 100% making those next year! They are the white part of a boiled egg on the bottom. The body is rice, mixed with a little of the cooked yolk to give it color. The nose is straight yolk. The eyes are seaweed. It was the most awesome thing I've ever seen! And tasted.

Since I couldn't be with my family, I attended a church event for my Easter celebrations. There were a lot of people there!

It was potluck style, so I made a vat of pretty deluxe spaghetti. Well I think. It all got eaten, so that is good.

This was not all of the food, I jumped the gun on my picture taking.. But you can see that we had a lot of good things to choose from.

Lasagna! In Japan! It wasn't my mom's lasagna or anything, but it was pretty good. :)

Haha, when I was trying to take a picture of a dessert, this guy stuck his hand in, and jokingly told me to make his hand an "International Hand" because he knows that I keep this blog/diary. Little did he know, that his hand is now, actually, an International Hand!

So of course its a church event, so the great food and socializing was accompanied with an Easter Video, which entailed lots of tears.

But also! My friend Nozomi got her mission calling that night! She opened the package in front of everyone, and it was a suspenseful moment! I wish she go her calling in California...hehe, but no.

Nozomi used to go to one of the High Schools that I teach at. She was in the Choir there, so I decided to ask the music teacher there if he remembered her from years ago. He freaked out, and right away, pulled out this CD from in his desk, and played me one of her solo performances. He just keeps it right there in his desk! I think she was the best singer that school ever had. :)

She leaves soon, and will be in my thoughts and prayers!

Hofu Nights

Just wanted to throw out there that Hofu house parties are awesome! Mr. F below was visiting his daughter and grandchildren here in Japan, so we had a celebration! These semi-casual get togethers are what makes life here fun!

Guess fun is the same everywhere! This cute cute night reminded me of some good 'ole days back home, only with more Japanese being spoken here. :)

I'm really happy that I've made so many friends over the past few months. But its going to make it really tough to come home next year!

I don't know how to salsa. At all. So I stayed in charge

of the camera-phone, and watching the table. hehe

Pretty pretty

I may have mentioned before, that all the Sakura or Cherry Blossoms are all gone now. MAYBE this is one of the main causes of "Go-Gatsu Byo" which I learned about from my friend's blog. I have since found out that it is very well known by Japanese people. It means "May Sickness".

Other reasons for May Sickness include: We sort of just used up all of our national holidays, so don't have any special days off for a while. And its the start of the school and financial year.

I will keep looking at all the pretty pretty things, though! I will not fall victim to the Go-Gatsu Byo! In fact, today is the most beautiful day of 2010 yet! :)

English Club

I brought hard-boiled eggs and all the egg-dying necessities to each one of my schools. All the students had a fun time dying eggs for the first time!! One of my schools, I had to do egg-dying time during English club twice, because the first time I brought 20 eggs, and all but 6 of them broke, and there were 8 girls at club that day. That was the most annoying day of my life, let me tell you!! :)

At this school, after we dyed eggs and talked about Easter, we did some advertising for our club, since all 4 of my girls are in their Senior Year. After the advertising, we ended up getting 2 new freshman. And then the next meeting was my Mexican Party, where over 35 kids and the principal showed up! So I don't know if any of those 35 will stick around... :)

Don't my girls make such cute signs?

Yes! Lets Enjoy English! Means lets enjoy watching Steffanie speak because we still don't want to talk! hehhehe.

And for the grand finale....

Hahaha! Did you guys notice that its "Engish Club" and not "English Club?" None of us did, until after we posted it! Reminds me of one of my favorite websites: Engrish.com which you should check out if you want some chuckles.

Misc.

Back in March my base school had their Career Day. Since I teach at a Commercial High School, many of the students will go straight into jobs...great jobs. I teach at a very high level Commercial High School. For instance, we are home to the Number One abacus user in Japan. :) You know, the calculator before calculators. She's a genius. Also we have the 2nd fastest typer in Japan. Or so I hear. I never seem to understand anything correctly. :)

Nonetheless, all my kids at this school are really super smart and friendly. But I wanted to attend one the the presentations where I wouldn't be needing to understand any hard Japanese. Thus, I painted nails! I really like those nails (above), and am considering quitting JET to be a nail artist. hehe.

Btw, getting a manicure or pedicure here is almost impossible. Have I talked about this before? I could go get a manicure for $100 here, and it wouldn't be nearly as good as a $12 one in the United States. The beauty school that hosted this Career Day Seminar was from Fukuoka, where there are a few more nail places. But really-nothing like the amazingness of back home in the U.S.

I really miss my tri-weekly pedicure.....

This picture is from one of our assembly/ceremony days! I offered to help set up. I helped put down all the mats (the floor is wood...not that greenish color). I helped set up the chairs.

And then!...and then I tried to start lining up the chairs, so they were nice and orderly. I kept being shooed away. I was really confused. The chairs were not lined up at all, and ....this is a Japanese ceremony!! Why weren't they lining up the chairs?

Then I realized it was because the measuring tape had not been brought in yet. Every single chair had to be PERFECTLY measured. I wrote down the exact parameters for their chair set-up...but I don't know where I put that paper. Nonetheless, setting up these chairs was an exact science.

Lastly, me and my friend Whitney were trying to kill some time a little bit ago. So we wandered into this awesome game center in my city mall (SATY), which somehow I never knew existed! I must have known about it, but it never clicked, or something. It was a really fun place! Like Chuck-E-Cheeses for kids & twenty-something time-killers!

There was this one game that we played on Pogo-sticks. Is that what you call it? Bounce, bounce, bounce. It was like those motorcycle arcade games, but involved jumping on a Pogo-stick, and wobbling all over the place.

Our favorite was, of course, air-hockey! We started playing, and all was normal. Well, there was a big window in-between the two sides, which was odd to me. But everything was pretty normal. Then about 2 points in, this mechanism that I hadn't noticed pops out another puck. And then a few seconds later-another. It spit out up to 5 pucks at a time on us! I've never had such a stressful experience in my life! Oh, yes, I forgot that it wasn't quite normal in the beginning because we had 2 of the white "blocker" things that you hold. 2 each. So if you can please take a few seconds to imagine.....Us.....both hands flying all over the place to block oncoming attacks, with 5 pucks. Air-hockey Extreme, for sure.

Additional Birthday-time photos

This post is just a few additions to my original birthday post. Above: The actual day of my birthday, I was luckily at my base school! I don't think I would've gotten a cake if I wasn't! :) It was a total surprise that my co-workers remembered my birthday. I almost went out to lunch early, but I'm really glad I stayed, because out of nowhere, the whole teachers room broke out into the "Happy Birthday" song. I think I did cry. Or got really close. It was just so unexpected and sweet. Those are two of the JTEs that I work with (Japanese Teachers of English).

Above is a pic from our walk to Tokiwa park--the place we went the day after my joint birthday party with Brent. It was actually part of Whitney and Brooke's joint birthday party, but I'm still putting it up, because it was right around my birthday too! But yes, officially, not for me :) . So many April birthdays!!

Above-- I miss Hanami/Sakura season :( It was really like a dream,

or like I was on the set of Avatar or something!

Tokiwa park was not only full of Sakura blossom trees, but also many modern sculptures and other works of art.

And the next two are pictures taken from the ferris wheel that I rode with Monica and Mike. I got too cocky in it, saying "I'm not afraid of heights" because it got a bit scary up there, in the rusted compartment!

You can see the sea! As I read in one of my students essays today: "Yamaguchi prefecture is a big and international town that is Sea Southside and Mountain Northside. Yamaguchi it all has!!!"

(P.S. I think the "big and international town" is hilarious....because they took that right off of my example about a REAL big city, Fukuoka. Calling anywhere in Yamaguchi a "big and international" place is like saying Las Vegas is boring, unloved, and unfrequented. But kinda opposite. lol)

Strange Foods :/

Above-- Can you guess what that is? It's Chicken Sashimi. Meaning raw chicken. Topped with raw egg. Excuse me, would you like some raw chicken, with raw egg?

Left--a cute 7 year old girl that was there (the party was about 20 people, all there to celebrate "March birthdays"). She kept scarfing down on the Chicken Sashimi. She liked it so much that it was difficult for my friend Jennie to get a hold of a little to taste.

British Jennie said it was delicious. So now I can't trust Japanese children, or British women. ... hehehe (jk)

This, on the other hand, even less people would try!

Whatever it was, it did look even weirder than it does in this picture to the right.....but at least it was cooked! It very well could have been some kind of animal male part. But I was able to eat it. See. As long as I know that its not whale, dog, or raw, I can try anything!

Left--- Hey, I said I'd try anything.... I didn't say that I'd make a nice face while trying!

いただきます！！！！

Teeth!

Today, I thought I'd teach my non-Japanese friends about a little piece of Japanese culture. Can you guess which piece? :)

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Americans, and many places around the world have the "tooth fairy" or something of sort. Where the tooth is placed under the pillow, and in the morning, the child finds some money there. Yay! But what do they do in Japan, you ask?

In Japan, if the tooth is a bottom tooth, it is thrown over the roof of the house. And if it is a top tooth, it is buried underneath the house. There is a little variation depending on who I asked. I was told sometimes that the bottom tooth needs to be thrown over the Japanese style rafters inside the house, and sometimes I was told that it needs to fly all the way over the actual outside roof. Same with the top teeth. Top teeth I was told need to be thrown down into the Japanese style basement thing, and others said top teeth actually need to be buried.

You can learn a bit more here and here.

I find it funny that when I brought it up to each of my Foreign friends that are married to Japanese locals, they generally had no idea what I was talking about. They all have children under 3, so how would they know? Its just interesting to me, the types of cultural differences and new customs that you can learn all the time. We don't know what we don't know, until we have a reason to know it. :) They will all find out when their children lose their first teeth, and their Japanese husbands or wives start working out their arm muscles. :)