February: Running, Spoons, and Awful Candy

February began with our school's annual Marathon Day.  For those who don't remember or didn't read my post on last year's event, the first and second year students have to run a 6km course in 50 minutes.  Those who can't complete it in time have to do it again on the day for absent students.  I asked my supervisor what happens to the kids who do it again and still can't complete it in time, but she didn't actually know.  Either way, it's not a good time.  For the kids.  I had a blast, but my job is to stand there for a couple hours (the boys and girls run separately, so I'm out there for two 50-minute circuits) and cheer them on.  No pressure for me!

Before this, back at the end of January (and something I forgot to write about, which happens often) the second year kids had another run that they had to complete.  I have no idea how long it was, or what time they had to do it in, but they got fed at the end.  I was invited along with some other teachers to help make the soup that the kids would get to help warm them up.  It was my first time making authentic Japanese food, so that was awesome.  We made tonjiru, which is a basic pork soup in miso broth.  I'll be honest, there were some things the other teachers were cutting up that I have absolutely no idea what they were, but all in all it made a pretty good soup!  (I was given a bowl to "test" before we served the students.)

So, yeah.  My school runs a lot.  So weird.

I can't remember if I mentioned this or not, but way back when we had the exchange students from Australia, I introduced the game SPOONS to my conversation students.  My family's played this before, and we really enjoyed, and I have a scar from a rather intense game with friends in high school (rules to live by: 1. Never play with rings on. 2. Never play with long nails. 3. Never use plastic spoons).  Anyway, so I taught them this game, using erasers instead of spoons because obviously we don't have a bunch of spoons laying about in a language lab, but I made my own decks of cards rather than using a traditional deck.  It would have been too easy for the students to collect numbered cards, plus they wouldn't be learning or practicing anything since the game doesn't require speaking, so instead I made decks that required them to collect four tenses of the same verb (write-writing-wrote-written).  They really enjoyed it, so when I was stuck for lesson plans for my first years, I decided to introduce the game to my first years as well.  However, as lovely as some of my first years are, most of them are really, really bad at English and the verb tense cards would have been too difficult for them.  Instead, I made cards with different sets of four words that either we learned this year or they would have learned in middle school (animals, school subjects, colours, etc).  They LOVED it.  One class in particular even requested that we play it again at the end of the year, so I brought it back as their exam review lesson.

I also had a Valentine's Day lesson this year, since I wasn't following any kind of textbook or specific content guide.  I decided to introduce my students to Sweethearts, those awful conversation candies for Valentine's that taste like chalk that no one actually enjoys.  They thought my description was hilarious.
Me: So, we have these candies for Valentine's Day that are very traditional, and are a popular gift, especially when you have to give candies to a large number of people, like a whole class.  But no one actually likes them.
Class:  Eeeeh?!
Me:  Yeah.  You know how conpeto (a Japanese candy) just kind of tastes like sugar and not much else?
Class: *all nodding*
Me: Okay, so imagine that taste, but the feeling of eating it is like eating a piece of chalk.
Class: EEEEEEH?!?!
Sadly, you can only get them at specialty stores in very few places (Ros did find some in Tokyo) and they'll be in tiny packages that cost way too much for what they are, so I couldn't actually inflict them upon my kids.  What I did instead was made pages with hearts on them with actual messages that you can find on the real candy.  For my first years, they got a paper with four easy ones, and had to write at least one sentence for each of the words or phrases.  For my conversation class, each page only had one heart with a word or phrase, but some of them were more difficult, and they had to write a five-line dialogue using that word or phrase.  I got some pretty creative ones!

One of the last things I did this school year, just with a couple classes who ended up with more lessons than the other classes, was a "pub quiz" style lesson.  I had three rounds with the themes 'Grammar and Sentences', 'Vocabulary', and 'Dictation', plus a bonus round with general knowledge, questions about me and Canada, stuff like that.  They really enjoyed that activity, too, but it's definitely only something that you can do at the end of the year, otherwise you wouldn't have enough material to work from.

That's all for February (that I can remember right now)!  Not sure how much there will be to tell about March.  March is the "I get paid to click around the internet" month because there's nothing for me to work on for classes until we get the new staff and class assignments after April 1st.  Yay.

January, AKA Why is it snowing? This is why I left Canada!

Look at me, attempting to get better about posting.  I feel so accomplished!  (That'll last about half a week.)

After finishing up my holidays at home, I headed back to Japan, which was something of a nightmare.  I had my window seat, as always, but next to me was a rather broad man who couldn't help but constantly encroach on my space.  For thirteen hours.  And the Air Canada movie choices kinda really sucked, so I didn't have much to do.  Joy.  My flight was scheduled to get in just after 5, so I'd have time to head into the city, grab food at the station, and then make my way home on the shinkansen.  For reasons I don't understand (since we took off on time) we were a half hour late getting into Tokyo, and then I had to wait almost an hour for my luggage.  Then after customs & immigration, it was another 20-ish minutes for me to ship one of my suitcases to my apartment.  Slow walkers in front of me meant that I reached the platform just in time for the doors of my train into the city to close in front of me.  I waited the four minutes for the next one, and headed to Shinagawa.  I had to wait in line while four trains I could have taken left without me, because apparently they don't actually believe in keeping the office fully staffed until the last train in Tokyo.  Three service desks closed up while I was in line, leaving only three open to service all of the people in front of me.  I got a ticket on the last train I could possibly have taken into Nagoya to make it back to my place in time, and had to hasten, Princess Diaries-style, for the platform to catch my train.

When I got into Nagoya, I could wait and take a series of trains that were the last ones for the night, meaning I would have to make all of my transfers perfectly, or I could pay more money and get a seat on the faster, fancier limited express trains.  Given how everything else had gone that evening, I elected to pay the extra for the reserved seat.  My one lucky break was that I found the bag of cookies my mom had given me to put in my carry-on that I'd forgotten about, so that kind of made up for not having time to get food?  I guess?  In any case, the sugar improved my mood slightly.  I got home at 11:45 at night, and then tried to wind down as fast as possible, since I had to go to work the next day.  Moral of the story?  Never fly back the evening before you have to work unless your flight actually flies into where you need to be.

The beginning of the next week was our annual ALT Skills Development Conference, which is exactly as boring as it sounds.  Probably 80% of it just involves me trying to stay awake.  Also, it decided to snow a lot, and was generally cold and miserable outside.  The cool part was that on the evening of the first conference day, our AJET group had planned a Pub Quiz, and I was invited to join a team.  The even cooler part is that we won, thus proving that we knew more useless information than everyone else in the room.  That's....something to be proud of, right?  We won Mie JET hoodies/shirts (whichever one we wanted; I chose hoodie) and a bottle of wine, which we shared with snacks in the park after the second conference day because that's legal in Japan and we're classy like that.

That Saturday, Mary and I celebrated her birthday by traipsing about Nagoya and eating all of the food.  Seriously.  So much food.  We also apparently did a lot of impulse shopping, since the phrase, "Oh yeah, I forgot I bought that..." was used more than once.  We got Turkish food for lunch, bought some small snack bags of some really great chocolate & orange flavoured popcorn, hummus (!!) at a Halal grocery store, English books (!!!!) at a rather large secondhand store, and then hit up an American-style sports bar for dinner.  The last part was especially awesome for me, because I'd been craving a quesedilla since 4:30AM, and they had that on the menu.  I will definitely be going back there.  We also stopped in at this super tiny and adorable Alice in Wonderland shop that I had no idea existed but was thoroughly awesome.  It's so tiny you have to wait in line because the store holds so few people at once!

I think the only other thing of interest this month was finally getting to play the Zombie Outbreak game that Ros and I designed in September.  Those of you who have played the game Mafia or Werewolf (I think it's got another name or two as well...) will recognize elements, as will anyone who's ever played Wink Murder.  It's like those, but also really not, and with learning objectives!  We spent an entire day developing this thing over text messages at work (I had no lessons, Ros was bored), and I'm pretty proud of the outcome.  (So many times I'd start typing out "official" rules, and then have to text, "Wait.  What if such and such situation happens?"  And then we'd have to redo part of the game again.)  The kids really seemed to enjoy it, though I think it needs a bit of tweaking, numbers-wise.  My initial instructions made for too many doctors and not enough zombies when we actually played.  For those interested, here's the initial instructions (numbers to be adjusted for different class sizes as necessary).  For those not interested, skip over the red text.

Zombie Outbreak!

There has been a virus outbreak!  Some people are only a little bit sick, but other people have been turned into zombies!

The goal is to quarantine (“out”) all of the zombies!

 

Each student is given a card.  There are 3 doctor cards and 3 zombie cards to start.  Everyone else has a symptom and a temperature on their card.  Everyone should look at their card secretly.

 

Doctors should sit at the back of the room (their “offices”). 

 

Other students will walk around the room and speak to each other.  After greeting each other with “Hello,” the pair will play “rock, paper, scissors.”  The loser must ask the winner, “How are you?” and the winner will answer.

-       If the winner is sick, they should say “I have          “. 

Ø  If there is a doctor available, the loser should answer, “You should see a doctor.” 

Ø  If the doctors are all busy, the loser should answer, “You should get some rest.” (If the loser is a zombie, they should always say this answer.)

-       If the winner is a zombie, they should say, “I’m a zombie!”

Ø  The loser should bring the zombie to the Check Point (ALT).

²  The pair will be given a pop quiz from the ALT.  If the zombie gets more points, the other student is given a zombie card (unless they are “immune”) and both are released.  If the other student wins, the zombie is quarantined (out of the game), and the other student goes back to the game.

Ø  If the loser is also a zombie, they can say “Me too!” and end the conversation.  A zombie should not bring another zombie to the Check Point.

-       If the winner has been cured by a doctor already, they should say, “I’m fine, thanks.”

*******The conversation should only go one way.  Students should NOT use “And you?” or ask how the other person is feeling. ********

If a student goes to see the doctor, they have this conversation:

Doctor: What’s the matter?

Student: I have             .

Doctor: I see.  What’s your temperature now?

Student:         .

Doctor: OK, I’ll give you a prescription.

After this conversation, the doctor will hold out a set of cards (“prescription”) to the student.  The student will choose one and look at it.  The card will either say “Medicine” (not sick anymore) or “Immunity” (not sick anymore AND can’t be turned into a zombie even if they lose at the Check Point).  The student gives their illness card to the doctor and keeps the new card.

The game ends when either all the zombies are caught (the remaining students win) or there are three more zombies left in the game than students (zombies win).

Pop Quiz!

-       ALT will point to a body part.

-       Student has 5 seconds to say the name of that part.

Ø  If they get it right, they get a point.

Ø  If they get it wrong, or don’t answer in time, they don’t get a point.

-       Each student will be asked three questions.

-       In case of a tie, each student should cut a deck of cards.  The higher cut wins.

Obviously this was something we were doing at the end of their unit on injury and illness.  It was a bit chaotic, but like I said, they seemed to enjoy it, and it was a good way to incorporate all the parts of the unit.  I still feel indebted to the Australian teachers who were here with the exchange group back in September/October, because I coerced them into reading the instructions to make sure they made sense to people other than Ros and I.

And that's about it.  It's still snowing at least once a week, which I thoroughly do NOT enjoy.  I'll have a post about some February stuff soon (ish).

Two Months, One Post

Hisashiburi.  (That means 'long time, no see' in Japanese.) 

So, once again I've neglected this thing in favor of reading and Netflix (but I'm really enjoying NPH in A Series of Unfortunate Events!).  Where were we?  November?  November.

I can remember three things that happened in November, so that's what I'm going to blather on about.  First was Ros' mom coming to visit.  She was here for a couple weeks, bopping around the country with Ros, and I was able to meet up with them for a day in Arashiyama (the place with the bamboo forest near Kyoto that I went to back in April).  The weather was gorgeous, so we got to walk around without being rained on or getting super gross and sweaty (I'm Canadian; it happens here even in November).  We saw the bamboo forest, did some shopping along the streets, and had some pretty good food.  In the evening, we took the scenic train ride around some of the mountain area, which was illuminated at night so that we could view the fall leaves.

Yeah, fall leaf viewing.  That's a thing.  See, Japan has a lot of trees that stay green and keep their leaves year-round, and not just conifers like at home.  We've got palm trees over here.  Not many in my area, but they do exist.  So the leaves changing colour is a thing of beauty that people actually take time to go see in specific places that have large quantities of Japanese maples.  This blew my mind when I found out that it was a thing.  My supervisor was like, "Mel, where do you view the fall leaves in Canada?"  And I'm like, "....Uh....my front lawn?"  I had to explain that the majority of our leaves change colour and fall to the ground in Canada, and that no one really cares except the people who have to rake them or children who want to jump in large piles of them.

The second thing I remember was one of my lessons.  At the end of November, I taught what I refer to as my "Princess Bride" lesson.

 

For exactly the reason you see in that image.  There are a lot of loan words that are used incorrectly in Japanese, for a number of reasons.  So I decided to do a lesson on it, just to show my kids some of my confusion in Japan as an English-speaking foreigner (and also loan words was a section in their textbook; I wasn't just pulling this out of nowhere). 

 

First we went through the activity in the textbook, where they had to match the actual English with a picture of the loan word and the Japanese-written loan word.  So they matched "super" with "supermarket," and "key holder" with "key ring" (which I explained we also call "key chain").  But after that, I got into the really crazy ones.  Some of my favorites:



Consent - In Japan, this is the word they use for a power outlet.  Apparently it comes from "concentric plug," a phrase I have never before heard in my life.
Mansion - In Japan, probably the vast majority of people live in apartments.  Many of those apartments are in small buildings, like mine.  "Mansion" in Japan refers to the huge apartment complexes.
Stove - In Japan, it's a large gas space heater.  So a foreigner might complain about how cold their apartment is, and a Japanese person might respond, "Don't you have a stove?"  And we're all thinking about a cooking range, so that would get really confusing.
And my all-time favorite:
Viking - So, we all know what a Viking really is.  Big dude, horns on helmet, likes Thor (stereotypes, I has them).  In Japan, "viking" means "all-you-can-eat buffet."  ....I can just feel the looks you're giving that sentence.  Right?!  Research tells me that this is because the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo was the first to offer this kind of dining, and they called it a "viking smorgasbord" after the Kirk Douglas movie "The Vikings".  And it just kind of snowballed from there.

And that was my lesson.  I really enjoyed the reactions to some of these.  You could just see it in their faces.  "Why the heck do we use this word for this?!?!"  Of course, after that I had to throw in one of the reverse.  I showed them what English-speakers who don't know about Japan think "futon" means.  Because for most of the people I know, a futon is this:

But really, "futon" just refers to the mattress part of it.  A traditional futon actually looks like this:

The last thing that happened in November was that once again I ran in the teachers' relay at the end of the month.  This year, though, my high school was the one to approach me first, so I ran with them.  That was a lot more intimidating to me, because we were only running the longer course, and I'm at a sports-centric school where 5/7 of the relay team is comprised of gym teachers.  And they gave me the anchor position, because it was the shortest run (700m).  Oh god.  On top of that, there were no English-speaking teachers on the team, and I was getting a ride with one of the gym teachers who lives near me, so I had to really rely on my (practically non-existent) Japanese skills.  It went fine, though.  I actually felt really good when the winning team's anchor crossed the finish line before the sixth runner from our team had even come back to me.  All the pressure was off, and I just had to focus on not being last (which we weren't; we were in the top half of the competitors).  One of the Home Ec teachers had come to observe, and brought steamed pork buns and pork miso soup for us all to eat after the race, so we got to enjoy some hot food in the park before heading home.

At the beginning of December, I got loaned out to another special needs school that's about 45 minutes' walk away from where I live.  I'm still not completely sure why, but whatever.  It was really interesting to me, because it's so different from my regular special needs school.  My regular school is kind of an interim school for kids receiving treatment in the hospital next door (and is also responsible for the inpatient kids at the university hospital in the city centre), so while they're attending lessons with me at this particular school, they're still considered students of whatever school they've taken the exams for and been admitted to.  The one I went to in December is for permanent special needs kids, and it's more of what we would think of in Western countries as special needs.  A lot of these kids are wheelchair-bound, non-verbal, or things like that.  There's a huge number of staff there, basically no more than two students to one teacher, and those teachers will accompany those students through their lessons, regardless of whether or not it's their lesson.  I'm not sure I explained that right, but it's the best I can do.  Anyway, it was really interesting to see the kinds of support these kids get versus what they would get back home.

Then Mary and I ran around USJ, because I wanted to get some shopping done there, and also because I wanted to see the magical Harry Potter Christmas tree (which was actually kind of disappointing in real life).  I made us scarves for our houses, which I'm super proud of, especially because I finished mine on the train ride there.  (Why yes, I am a procrastinator, why do you ask?)  I've talked about USJ before, so I'll just add that the Christmas stuff that we could see (some of it sadly had technical difficulties that day) was really cool, and the seasonal food was delicious.  Some of the Christmas music choices were a bit odd, though.  I still hate Michael Buble.

After exams I had one round of lessons left with the first year kids, and one conversation class out of my three (the other two ended up being scheduled for when I was lent out to the other school).  So I started out doing the same thing with all of them: teaching them The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Dear lord, there are a lot of birds in that song!  It's ridiculous.  And one of the teachers kept trying to take it seriously and I had to be like, "Dude.  No one gets these presents for real.  It's not a thing.  And I can't tell you the meaning behind it because no one knows for sure."  But the kids enjoyed it, probably because I had pictures on the board for each of the lines, and the last verses of the song had me running around the front like a madwoman.  Since my conversation class is a double period, I used the second period to introduce them to A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Snoopy and Woodstock are really popular here because they're cute, and the Peanuts characters exist at USJ, but the students don't really get that there's actually a source material for this.  They actually come from somewhere.  The characters in the cartoon talk kind of fast sometimes, so I made a small sheet with fairly basic questions about things that they could see, or that were very clearly said, like:
How much does it cost for Lucy's help?
What three animals does Lucy ask Snoopy to be in the play?
What colour tree is Charlie Brown told to get?
And so on.  The students really seemed to enjoy it, so that made me happy.  Plus I got to watch Charlie Brown. 

I can't really recall anything else of interest that happened before I left to spend the holidays back in Canada, so I'll end there.  Happy New Year, everyone!

Boo! and Other Autumn Utterances

Apparently I forgot to do this again.  I start thinking about what I want to say about things as they happen, but then I forget to actually type it out in the "really" world.  Kind of like texting people back...

So Halloween and its associated events were fabulous.  My trip to Tokyo was amazing, starting with my usual foray to the Tokyo Disney Resort.  I decided to follow the incredibly popular trend here and do some Disney bounding.  It involved a couple trips to the thrift stores beforehand, but it was well worth it.

For Disneyland, I dressed like Rapunzel, and the Cast Members, especially in Fantasyland, thought I was adorable (and that's why I do it, really - so that complete strangers will tell me how cute I look :D).

I was also by myself this day, which was interesting.  It's the first time I've done a Tokyo park by myself, and the first time in 4 years to do any Disney park alone.  It was super dead, though, so I got to wander around taking pictures of all the Halloween decorations without getting in anyone's way, and ride pretty much everything.  I skipped the really lame rides (Tomorrowland Speedway), the rides that are awkward to do solo (Mad Tea Party), and Splash Mountain (the flowers in my braid were paper, so that would have ended badly).  I got to eat some fun seasonal foods, do some shopping, and just generally laze about the park, soaking up the atmosphere.

At Disney Sea, I had my trusty Ros by my side as we dressed in clothes inspired by The Little Mermaid, and had Ros's first experience with a character who can actually talk (we met Mickey and Minnie in Hong Kong 4 years ago, and that was her first character experience ever)!  Being a grown adult and not having done this in her childhood, she was completely thrown and couldn't entirely wrap her mind around it.  I fielded most of the Ariel conversation and then had a good laugh at Ros's expense afterwards, because I'm an awesome friend like that.  We did some new rides (new for us, not new for the park - and they were the kiddie rides in Mermaid Lagoon that we usually avoid for the obvious reason that we are not accompanied by a child [physically - my mental age doesn't count]), I got to see a show that I've only ever seen in passing before, and we ate at the fancy ship restaurant to celebrate Ros's birthday. 

We also got to see the Villains show on the lagoon, which was all kinds of awesome and full of fabulous costumes that I want in my closet and the phrase "tentacular spectacular" yelled out by Ursula, which had Ros and I cracking up for a good couple minutes.

The real reason I was in Tokyo, though, was because Ros found a concert for us to attend: The Music of Danny Elfman from the Films of Tim Burton.  Awesome!  She'd sent me a picture of the poster and was like, "Wanna go?"  To which I replied, "Um, obviously." 

I love Danny Elfman's music, especially the creepy Tim Burton stuff (Sleepy Hollow being my favourite, as much as I love The Nightmare Before Christmas).  So Ros got the tickets, we kind of vaguely looked at the website to try to figure out what to wear - on one hand, it's the Tokyo Philharmonic, and on the other, they were having a costume contest, so we weren't really sure - but that was it.  Didn't really look to closely.  Then, about a week or two before the event, Ros finds a blurb about it in an English Tokyo magazine that says actual Danny Elfman will actually be on the stage for the concert and actually singing The Nightmare Before Christmas songs like he does in the actual movie.  Needless to say, I flipped.  Mentally, not out loud, because I was at work when she texted me the picture of the blurb and that would have been really awkward to try to explain.  So off we went, amongst people dressed in some pretty freakin' cool costumes, and sat through an absolutely phenomenal concert.  There were so many times I had goosebumps!  The concert ended with the Nightmare set, and there he was, Danny Elfman, singing and rocking out to the music in a way that really reminded me of Elton John, to be honest.  But he was so cool!  He came out for an encore and performed Oogie Boogie's Song (for anyone wondering what it would sound like if Jack Skellington sang that song, the answer is "odd"), with the conductor playing the part of Santa, while wearing the hat.  So, so awesome.

Back at school, we had our Halloween lessons!  The first years were forced into a Halloween tongue twister contest (Hoot owls hoot howls of horror in haunted Halloween houses), and got to do a word search.  Fun, but kind of bland.  Not my best lesson ever.  The conversation class, though.  That was a whole other kettle of fish.  For the first period of class, we played a game I found online called Bump, which they enjoyed even though they're really bad at actually listening to what the other teams say and miss out on what would otherwise be easy points.  The part I'm most proud of, though, was the second period.  I read them a simplified version of Hairy Toe, and the JTE gave a bit of a translation.  The students had to be paying attention, and making notes of the translation that was given for my reading, because then they had to work in groups to retell the story as a comic!  They had a lot of fun with this, and I got some really great comics!

I assigned a different comic-type activity for my first years, where they were practicing compliments by drawing different scenarios I'd given them.  What did I learn?  Some of my kids are cannibals:

And you should never look to this kid for compliments:

Visitors From Abroad

Alrighty!  So the last week of September saw the arrival of our exchange students from Australia and two of their teachers.  They were here for two weeks and it was awesome.  It was a small group, only six students this year (last year they sent eleven, and I think that was too many).  They were an absolute blast.  A couple of the girls (we had four girls and two boys) were fairly reserved in the beginning, but they got over that fast enough.  One of the boys, though, was a character from day one.  He definitely got the most out of this trip, I think.  He was enthusiastic about everything they were doing, and he had a sense of humour that was by turns ridiculous and smart-ass (but never in a mean-spirited way).  The best thing about this kid, though, is that he got my kids to talk.

You know I’ve bemoaned my conversation classes before.  The third years are noisy and like to talk to each other all the time in Japanese but won’t talk much in English, my second year class with Morita-sensei has a couple loud-mouths and about twenty kids who stare blankly at me and wait for Morita-sensei to translate my instructions into Japanese because they can’t be bothered to even try to understand my basic English, and my conversation class with Tanimura-sensei is so quiet you could hear a pin drop.  And that classroom has carpeting.  So when the exchange kids come, we set up their schedules so that they all come to our conversation classes, and then we set them up in groups and have them rotate around to the different groups and each time they rotate they’re given a different conversation topic and a time limit.  Last year this went well, but last year I only had one conversation class, and they were a lot… I don’t want to say better, but… they were better.  So I was worried.  And there were still a couple (mostly one in particular in Tanimura-sensei’s class and I don’t even know why she’s taking the class in the first place, and for the first couple months I would have sworn she was actually mute) that didn’t say much and it was like pulling teeth, but for the most part my kids were excited and eager to talk to the Australian kids.  The teachers came to my third year class as well, and the kids loved that.  Trying to run a legit class with them was a whole other story, because Morita-sensei kept throwing things into the mix (sometimes by interrupting while I was trying to do what my lesson plan said), but even that went off fairly well.  But anyway.  Yeah, the class where they just had to talk to each other was awesome.  

We had the farewell party for them on Friday after school, and there were a lot of tears from the students (even the ones who were still going to see them later because they were hosting the kids and they weren’t actually leaving until the next day).  One of the girls came up to me, thanked me, and basically told me I was so pretty and so awesome and that she basically wants to be me when she’s older.  That was possibly the biggest ego boost I’ve ever gotten in my life.  She was so sweet. 

So yeah, basically the last two weeks have just been a series of awesome experiences.  I got along well with the teachers, too, and we had some good laughs.  I was also invited (read: Morita-sensei said, “Mel, you should come to this!  Please come!”) along with them to check out the kyudo (Japanese archery) club.  Things you need to know:

1. I took a 10-week archery class when I was in Grade 6.

2. While I’m not the most awful person to hold a bow ever, I’m really not good.

     2b. I hit three bullseyes during that 10-week class.  On the target next to the one I was aiming for.            Two of those were in the same night.
3. An unbent Japanese bow is more than two meters tall.  I am decidedly not tall enough to properly draw this bow.

All of these things worked together to ensure I was probably the worst archer to ever step foot inside that club.  If the objective was to hit the lawn, I performed admirably.  The objective was not to hit the lawn.

After they left, I got to meet up with a friend of mine who’s visiting Japan with a couple of her friends.  This was especially exciting for me because it was our first time meeting in person (I started editing her Kingdom Hearts fan fiction nine years ago, back in university, because we’re nerds).  There was squealing and hugging and excited fast-talking, and then we headed out to explore Osaka! 

I’ve been to Osaka before (my first time there was with last year’s exchange kids, when I was asked to accompany their field trip), but I haven’t really seen a whole lot.  Mostly I go there because there’s a wax salon run by a lady who was trained in England, so I don’t have to worry about things being miscommunicated.  And I went to USJ for my birthday, you may recall.  But I’ve never really done Osaka before, so this was a new experience for me, too!  We started out by heading over to Expo City (leftover from the 1970 Osaka Expo) to hit up the Pokemon Expo Gym.  I figured it would just be me wandering while they looked at all of the things since I'm not super into Pokemon, but I actually picked up this really cute tin that had coffee cookies in it (that will later house my loose teabags, because I always seem to have some of those lying around).  We checked out the mall at Expo City, and then headed back into the city center to check out Osaka Castle.  I’ve been through that park before (it’s a nice walk, and there’s a Domino’s Pizza nearby), but didn’t go inside the castle.  We decided to bypass the ridiculous line for the elevator and hike up to the 8^th floor lookout via the stairs.  That…was a lot of stairs, but it was worth it.  It was gorgeous afternoon weather, and the lookout area is actually outdoors, so that was fantastic.  There was a craft beer festival with some food tents in the park right by the station, so we stopped there for some grub and the guys got some craft beer.  I'm not actually sure what Katy and I ate.  It was meat from an undetermined part of a cow in some kind of tomato sauce and served over a white puree that we have absolutely zero idea what it was.  I'm going with beans.  Pureed kidney beans.  The last part of our day involved going up in the HEP Five ferris wheel near Osaka station for another great view of the city (but pictures taken from inside don't turn out well).  I headed back to their hotel to pick up the bags of Reese's Katy was kind enough to bring over for me (I'm aware that I have a peanut butter problem; I like to think it gives me character), before catching the train back home.

Now I'm back to work for the last week before midterms.  But because it's the last week of classes before midterms, all of my first year classes have been cancelled so that the teachers can make sure everyone's learned all of the necessary grammar.  And my conversation classes have their in-class midterm.  So I'm sitting here, typing this.  But I took off the actual exam week to go back to Disneyland like the uber-nerd I am, and also to hear the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra with Ros.  So excited!!!!

Culture Festival, Year Two

It's that time of year again!  You may recall my post last year about the school culture festival.  Well, we started off this year's festival on Wednesday with the guest performance.  We all made our way to the cultural center in the city to see an A Capella group who are apparently kind of a big deal.  Like, they've won competitions and stuff.  Or so I'm told.  I couldn't read the information sheet we were given about them, nor could I understand them when they introduced themselves onstage.  But they were pretty cool anyway!  Here's one of their Youtube videos, which is nowhere near the quality of seeing them live:

Thursday was the student performances, but they didn't start until noon.  The schedule was full from noon right until the end of the day at 4:15, so a really early lunch was required.  I got a lift to the cultural center with one of my JTEs, and we had a really nice lunch at a cafe in the center with the Home Ec teacher.  I had a fabulous fried chicken breast that was stuffed with plum (ume) and a Japanese leafy green called shiso, as well as my first taste of natto!  Normally foreigners hate natto because it's really smelly and has a strange sticky texture; this was very unusually prepared natto, as it was neither of those things, and it was actually pretty good.  It kind of reminds me of chickpeas, I think?

The performances were pretty good.  The brass band was awesome as always, the Japanese harp club played a medley of The Mickey Mouse Club March and It's a Small World that was stuck in my head for at least 40 minutes after, and all of the first year girls did a dance together that was kind of cool.  One of the homeroom classes did a Romeo and Juliet performance where all the dudes were played by girls and all the girls were played by dudes; weird, yet mildly entertaining. 

Saturday was the main event, which meant it was a working day and I had to be at work all day.  But "work" here means "following the Japanese teacher who sits across from me (Matsui-sensei) around while she takes pictures of everything for the school newspaper" and "eat food and play games."  So the way bunkasai works at my school is thus: the third year homerooms each run some kind of food tent in the courtyard, and the first and second years do random stuff; some did performances like I said before, others run game rooms, haunted houses...  Basically anything that they can pull together in the timeframe they have (which I don't actually know).  Naturally, I had takoyaki for lunch from one of the tents because it's my favorite (I love these kids, even the ones I don't actually teach but still say hi and bye to me every day, but that wasn't really good takoyaki).  The homeroom teacher for one of the classes decided that Matsui-sensei and I deserved free food, so we got hashbrown patties that were pretty good. 

The first classroom we went to had carnival-style games.  Scooping goldfish is a very traditional Japanese festival game, so they had set up one of those games.  There was no way I was going to try that; I have a hard enough time trying to catch my fish when I have a normal net, never mind the flat paper scoops they use in this game.  Matsui-sensei went for it, though!  She managed to get one fish before her net became too saturated and broke. 

They also had a shooting game, with different value targets set up along the wall that you had to shoot a rubber band to knock down using a gun made from chopsticks and other rubber bands.  Matsui-sensei managed to knock down one of the #3 targets (#1 being the big prize and #4 being the smallest prize and therefore the largest size target).  I... got consolation candy.  I hit a #3 target on my first shot, but it didn't fall down. 

Another class (which we visited but didn't participate in) had turned the entire room into a giant board game, complete with cardboard box dice that you had to roll.  I'm not really sure what all the different spaces were, because the only one I could read was "start", but it looked really cool!

We stopped by the tea ceremony club and had tea.  It wasn't busy in there at all (there were only three people in there apart from us), so when we were done, the teacher who runs the club convinced me to go up and learn how to traditionally serve Japanese tea in a ceremony.  It was...nerve-wracking and exceedingly difficult.  You'd think, "Serving tea.  Anyone can do that, right?"  WRONG.  There are so many steps and certain ways to hold your hands and there's this cloth you have at your belt that you use to hold the kettle and you have to fold it a certain way that I could not for the life of me figure out.  My hands just don't move that way! 

I served the tea to one of the tea club members, who told me it was very good, but there's a high chance she was politely lying through her teeth.  Matsui-sensei took pictures for me, and then as we're leaving after, she says, "I was in the tea ceremony all through high school and university."  Greeeeeat.  So there was another person who was legitimately qualified to judge me.  (Not that she did.  She's super sweet and we had fun together all day, but still.)

After we'd visited all of the different activities in the classes, we hid in the air conditioning of the staff room until we had to go back out so that she could take photos of the dance performance at the end of the day (the same performance they did at the cultural center, but out in the school courtyard instead of on the stage).

And that was bunkasai 2016!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation (Partie Un)

Summer vacation started at my school officially on July 20th, but I started my vacation a bit early.  The week before that, I accomplished something I've wanted to do since my first trip here six years ago: I climbed Mt. Fuji.

It was a gruelling climb, and there were many moments where I honestly didn't think I would make it, but I did, and I'm super proud of myself.  Especially given the ridiculous handicap I had, which I'll explain in a minute.

When I decided that I was going to do this, I did some searching around, reading accounts of people who did it on their own.  It seemed really complicated, with the various paths you can take up the mountain, and in many places (especially the mountain huts) it seemed like fluency in Japanese would be required, so instead I did a slightly different search and found the tour package offered by Willer.  Definitely a good idea.  The package included transportation both ways between Tokyo and Fuji, a mountain guide (which actually turned into two mountain guides), an English-speaking guide (who was also a mountain guide, and our other mountain guides spoke English too, but this one was with us from pick-up to drop-off, not just on the mountain), meals, and a stay in a mountain hut so that our hike was properly timed for sunrise.  There were also add-on options to the package for equipment rental (which I did not purchase, and I regretted not purchasing it virtually the whole time) or a post-climb bath (which I also did not purchase, but that actually turned out to be a good thing, more on that later).

So the bus picks up in Tokyo (Shinjuku) at 7:30 in the morning.  I have two choices: a) get there the day before and pay for that transportation as well as a hostel for the night, or b) take the night bus, rolling the transportation and overnight shelter requirements into one cheap little package.  I went with option b.  Thing is, as I've detailed in my past adventures, I don't really sleep on the night bus.  Probably even less than I sleep on planes, which isn't really much.  So when we pulled into Shinjuku at 5:40AM that day, I was running on about one to one and a half hours of incredibly disjointed and not even remotely restful sleep.  Boom, handicap!  I have to climb a mountain on this.  I regret that decision as well. 

Anyway, the bus picks us up (there are 27 of us, not including the guide), and we take our ride from downtown Tokyo to the 5th station (of 10 total, with 10 being the summit) of the Subaru trail.  The people who bought the equipment rental package get their equipment, and we all have a ridiculously early lunch (like, before 11). 

We eat, get our stuff together, meet our other two guides, and just after noon we begin our trek up the mountain!  In this time, I've made friends with a lovely couple from Finland, a father-son pair from New York, a pair of undetermined relationship from Ottawa, and a girl from the Netherlands travelling solo.  We were a gay couple and a pair of irritating best friends away from casting a season of The Amazing Race, I swear.  Sarah (the Dutch girl) and I became climbing buddies, since we could chat while we climbed, and we seemed to have the same cautious excitement about this (you're really excited until you actually get there and look at it and you realize you can't even see the top of the mountain and then you kind of regret all of your life choices).

The climb up the Subaru trail basically looks like this: you start at the fifth station (where all the restaurants and shops are, because buses can actually go that far so many people take trips to Fuji and just spend the day there before going home), then comes the sixth station (the station the mountain safety team works out of), the seventh station (parts one through, I think, four), the real eighth station (with multiple parts as well), the old eighth station (which is where our mountain hut was), the ninth station, and then the summit.  Our guide took us at a slow pace, with breaks roughly every half hour to water ourselves and take deep breaths to adjust to the altitude.  Our goal was to do about six hours of climbing to reach the mountain hut, at which point we would have dinner and rest, and then get up and moving by 2AM the next day to make the one and a half/two hour-ish climb to the summit for sunrise.  The first few hours weren't bad.  Definitely hard work, and not something I should have been doing on as little sleep as I had, but I was doing fine.  I was definitely worse off when I did the half marathon at Disney two years ago.  Mostly the path was an incline of semi-packed dirt, with a few retaining steps around corners as you slolam your way up the mountain.  The steps were particularly difficult for me, being as short as I am.  Many of them came up to around my knee, so I have to keep lifting my knee to my chest and put a lot of energy into hoisting myself up these things.  And the guide gives us advice like, "Push your weight through your heel to keep the strain off your thighs," or, "Take baby steps to use less energy!"  And I take another look at these stairs and think, "Baby WHAT?!"  But yeah.  That was the first couple hours.  That was the easy part.

My feet at the sixth station.

After about two or so hours of that, our guide announces that we're coming up on a section of what he calls "steep rock," and we're going to be climbing that for about two hours.  He advises those who have been using those walking pole things to put them away, as we may need the use of our hands a bit.  Alright, that sounds... vaguely ominous, but sure.  Let's go!  So "steep rock" turns out to actually mean "irregularly shaped volcanic slag," and it's only JUST climb-able, with odd footholds, and again with the huge steps I have to take that practically shove my kneecap into my neck.  It's a tough climb.  After a gruelling amount of effort, extra personal breaks for a few seconds at a time, and draining at least one of my bottles of water, we reach the seventh station.  Hurray.  Only about another hour and a half of this rock nonsense, and then about another hour of dirt hill climbing after that to reach our destination.  Because we're only halfway through the day's climb at this point.  We take an extra-long break at the beginning of the seventh station before continuing our way up.

Rock.  So much steep rock.

This is where we start to lose people, and we learn the purpose of having multiple mountain guides.  It's so the rest of us can keep going while one guide takes the ones who can't make it back.  Thankfully, they don't have to go all the way back; there's space available along the seventh station mountain huts, so they can stay the night, potentially still see something of the sunrise, and then meet us back at the fifth station after the descent in the morning.  Every time we reach a new set of buildings after a tough bit of climbing I think, "Oh man, we must be almost there!  It's been forever!"  No.  It's just another section of the seventh station, we're still a ways away from our stop, and my body is starting to hate me.  I've lost my Dutch friend, so barring a couple conversations with the dad from New York (we lost his son as well) at the rest stops I've got no one to actually talk to on this climb anymore which means I have no distraction.  All I have is this climb.  Other people are starting to feel the altitude a bit, and I'm not sure if it's the altitude or just my lack of sleep finally catching up to me (my money is mostly on the latter), but my balance is starting to feel really off.  Not bad enough that I can't climb, but I definitely need to climb slower than everyone else.  So I'm at the back of the pack with the last guide.  It's embarassing, I feel incredibly out of shape, and so many times over these two hours I consider throwing in the towel and going back to the seventh station.  But there's something inside me that's determined to do this.  It's hard, and my limbs are protesting every step I take and every time I rise from a break I want to sit right back down, but something in me refuses to quit until I actually can't climb anymore (or I fall off the mountain).  So I kept going.

 

Everything you see is one station, but it'll take you forever to get through all of it.

It started raining about five minutes before we reached our mountain hut.  We'd been lucky enough to have gorgeous weather thus far in our climb, but up near the top of the mountain the weather can get unpredictable.  So we were pelted pretty hard, and it started coming down even worse when we got inside.  Even though it's close to our target arrival time (we actually made it fifteen minutes early), our supper won't be ready for a while, so we have some time to strip off our wet outer layers (and socks), and just relax and maybe nap a bit.  We're in a room to ourselves, and by "ourselves" I mean all 22 of us who made it this far, laid along the main floor and each of the bunk wings of the room six-across like a high school sleepover party gone weird.  Eventually we were called down to dinner (curried burger patty and rice), and then went back up to crash, with our instructions to be awake by 1:30 so that we could start our climb at 2:00.  A bunch of us set alarms, and we all settled into our futons.  The summit climb in the morning was completely optional (obviously), and I wasn't sure how sore I would be in the morning, so I was resigned to the fact that this may be as far as I made it.  Especially since, when the alarms started going off at dark o'clock in the morning, I hadn't really slept.  Again.

I was surprisingly good for the climb in the morning.  I mean, I was incredibly tired, obviously, but just sleep-tired.  My body didn't hurt at all.  I was equal parts shocked and thankful.  So I dressed in all my layers, removed anything extraneous from my bag to leave at the hut (we were coming back for breakfast after the summit), and headed out with my flashlight to join the herd.  It wasn't too busy heading up to the top (apparently there can be "traffic jams" sometimes that cause the climb to take more than two hours), and it wasn't any worse than anything we'd faced thus far coming up.  It was just a little scarier because of the dark (I had a handheld flashlight instead of the headlamp because I didn't rent the equipment; headlamp would have been loads easier, but I didn't trip and fall and die, so I'm considering it a win anyway), but physical exertion wise it was fun.  But let me tell you, the dark makes it a lot more boring, without anything to look at.  Add that to not really having anyone to talk to in order to distract me, and I was afraid this climb would actually drive me insane.  So I did what I usually do in these kinds of situations and retreated into my mind, only coming out to interact with people on breaks.  I can reliably inform you that, excluding the time we took for breaks, it takes almost exactly the length of Disney's Beauty and the Beast to reach the summit from the old eighth station.

The summit was all kinds of cold and wet.  Clouds had moved in, the wind was whipping every which way, and we couldn't really see anything.  Our guides had to make the call to cancel the walk around the volcanic crater, and our sunrise consisted entirely of the dark just becoming less dark.  Disappointing, but I made it to the top. 

The descent is where the intense regret at not renting the climbing equipment comes in.  There's a separate path for descent (presumably to help the flow of traffic and to reduce accidents), and it's entirely semi-packed/semi-loose dirt and rocks on a steep slant, slaloming down the mountainside. 

They recommend having the climbing sticks to take the stress off your knees.  Personally, I think they should make them mandatory.  I read that, and I was like, "Nah, it won't be that bad.  I can do without!"  And I mean, I did.  Obviously. I didn't have a choice.  Going down the mountain was kind of an imperative.  But it hurt.  A lot.  Basically you're walking down a steep, shifting hill for three hours.  But after a lot of effort, I made it all the way back to the fifth station to grab some omiyage for my coworkers.

I hadn't really planned on buying anything for myself, but I was feeling pretty nasty after a couple days without a shower or being able to brush my teeth, and wearing the same clothes that were pretty saturated in sweat by this point.  Like I said, I hadn't purchased the onsen option when I booked the package, but I was pretty sure I'd just be able to pay separately when we got there, since we were all stopping there anyway.  Apparently I'd had enough foresight to pack extra underthings, socks, and yoga pants, but not enough foresight to pack a clean shirt.  So I had to buy one.  I found one of the largest shirts I could find in green so that it would be super comfy and also long enough to wear with yoga pants and still be publically acceptable since I would be going into Tokyo after this.  Win.  We all got back fairly early, so the guide was able to have the bus brought around an hour early, which would give us more time at the baths.  When we got there, it turned out it was Ladies' Day, so my ticket actually cost ￥100 less than it would if I'd bought the package.  More win.  After a lovely soak, brushing my teeth twice, and bundling all my dirty things into plastic bags in my backpack, I got back on the bus and we made our way back to Tokyo!

(And a big thanks to Ros who did my mountain laundry while I passed out after I got back.  Tired Mel was tired.)