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.

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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