say what?

yesterday in class with the 1st years I had a couple minutes where I was having them ask me different questions using "do you play / do you like?"

so one of the students proceedes to ask me "do you like pornography?" i start trying to stifle laughter and ask him to repeat it which he does. he was saying it a little weird and I knew he was trying to say "porno-graffiti", a popular japanese rock band.

my co-teacher looked like she was going to have a heart-attack for a couple seconds there. bwahah.

lol

mom and pete are home now, i think. I hope all is well, they were a bit behind schedule due to missing the connection in Chicago.

back to school, weather is nice today.

you can read up and catch pix on mom's blog she did. Besides, i think it'll be nice to have a fresh view of japan talking about it. ;)

i'm really only updating becuase of this diary entry from a student today:

I like English.
But I can't English.
I am hard!
Do you like English very much?

that is all.

bwahah

I know I know. still been a couple of weeks.

Mom and pete come tomorrow! Wah! I'm so excited!

I'm checking diaries at school, check out this entry:

How are you today? I was tired. Today I was weed. At playground. Do you like weed? I don't like weed...

obviously the kid was talking about weeding. but still. lulz.

this last weekend i went out for nepalese food and bowling and saturday with friends. it was a great time, and i got to meet new people.

sunday I went up to meet friends again and cooked mexican food. nom nom nom.

Today is day 9 of my 'lemonade detox'. I'm not following it to the letter (as you're only supposed to drink the lemonade the entire time, but i can't get outta school lunch.)

it's been going quite well! i feel lots healthier and have even lost some weight! it's great! :)

friday i went out for yakiniku (japanese bbq) with one of my students dad. he insisted to pay, and we got all you can eat / drink which was fantastic. it was sooo good. we went to karaoke afterwards too, and i had made sure to do plenty of drinking to get through the karaoke as this guy just assumes that i know every english song. :P

'do you know the carpenters?'
'no'
'do you know this song by the carpenters?'
'i don't know the carpenters.'
'lets sing this song by the carpenters.....why aren't you singing?'

i also went to school on saturday as i had volunteered to use it as leverage to let mom and pete come to elem on the 19th. unfortunately i had to miss the party up in nagano then. boo. oh well.

久しぶり

Hey everyone-
I know it's been a really long time since I've done a blog update. Yeah yeah, i know.
Anyway, maybe I'll try and be a little better about it. OK, so, i'll just bullet-point the rundown of everything that's been going on.

- mom and pete are coming in just under two weeks!

-i got them rail passes so we'll get to bullet train around quite a bit.

-dad's coming in july! crazy!

-the new school year is going well, but I'm still feeling like I'm not particularly fond of this new 'make my own schedule thing'

- i went to Korea a couple weeks ago, May 9-17. It was fantastic to see bethany. We had a spectacular time and saw tons of great places. here's a little bit i typed up about korea:

oh, and the last things i wanted to mention were some of the lasting impressions i had of korea; these are just the impressions i had from being there a week, they aren't supposed to be a definitive 'this is the way things are' by any means:

korea comes across as a mix between japan and china in many ways. from the literal (the language sounds like both to my ears) to the more abstract. on one hand, technologically korea is just as/more advanced than japan at the proliferation of technology. everyone has cell phones (more seniors in korea than in japan it seems), the whole country is wired, and it's cheaper than japan.

korea is also much dirtier. not as bad as china (especially in pollution) but it's still pretty bad. i often smelled raw sewage which has never happened here in japan. lots of the public transit / works are nearly identical to japan (the yellow blind paths etc) but just dirtier.

to my western notions of what is 'proper' public ettiquete, koreans come off as more rude than japanese but not as rude as chinese. but this is of course a cultural thing.

koreans also seem much more fiercely nationalistic, and come off as having a 'short-man' of asia syndrome. which is unfortunate, korea is, i think, the 3rd largest economy in asia and 13th in the world, which is remarkable, but many koreans always seem to be trying to prove the value of the country.

people trying to interject things like 'miso soup comes from korea. japanese is just another korean dialect, etc.' stuff came up several times. and while korea has every right to be pissed at japan, it just came off as kinda odd

also, i'm so jealous how cheap public transit in korea is.

that's really all i have time to ramble about; but it was a great time

pix are up on bethany's FB, you've probalby all seen them by now. :P





-i've been picking up manga's to read in japanese as a way to work on my japnese / catch up on ones i was reading in the states. it's tough but fun. it's also pretty funny how much faster the action / fighting manga goes when compared to the comedy one (due to much more writing.)

-last week we had 'Undou no hi' or sport's festival day. It was a ton of fun; i snapped quite a few cool pics of students giving it there all, and I also competed with the teachers against the students in a big relay. AWESOME.

-i've practically been burning cash since I came back from korea on bills, but I'm doing a great job of finally nailing down my excell expenses sheet so I can figure out where my $$ is going. YAY.

-i'm making MOONSHINE! Well, technically i'm making a summer fruit sochu. When i was at the liquor store last week, I noticed that they had a bag of liquor that looked really similar to the white peak i normally buy.

TANGENT: in japan, it's really common to offer refills of liquids in bags that are much cheaper than buying the real deal. this goes for shampoo to household cleaners to salt to apparently liquor.

So! i picked up the regular stuff i drink to bring to the party i was going too (MORE ON THAT LATER) and asked the shop owner about the other stuff. she explained that yeah, you just make it at home and you can make all different kinds of stuff using the mix and different fruits. then she gave me an instruction manual / recipie guide for it.

so i asked her, where can i buy glass bins to make it? she pointed to the store across the street, but then was like...'wait a minute!' and came back with a bin and let me have it for free! woo! so anyway, i'm in the process of making a strawberry flavored one right now.

-the first year students are awesome here. 1/2 of them know me from last year at elem where i could be a lot wilder, and so they act really goofy with me. my teachers get confused when it happens.

-i didn't used my heater / ac at all last month since the weather's been perfect, my electricity bill dropped by over half.

-somehow there is still snow on the peaks of the mountains. i hope it lasts until mom and pete visit.

-back to cutting my lawn. using a weedwacker on a whole lawn is a bit rough on the back.

-i got to stand on North Korean soil at the DMZ. Also, the ROK soldiers are freaking awesome.

-Last weekend i went and visited some friends from orientation last summer. I drove about 4 hours or so, but it was a fantastic time. Hopefully we'll be meeting up again in Tokyo when Dad is visiting. :-)

-after i came back from korea i gave my neighbor Yuka some souvenier's, i had a huge bag of korean candies and gave her a lot becuase i knew i couldn't finish them all. she was like, 'wah! this bag is soo full!' like twice. i don't care if she finishes them or not. :P

-we implemented a new network at school, my computer now can't print and the internet sucks too. i'm still hoping to get it fixed, ugh.

-i finally filed my govt. stimulus package yesterday. $120 coming my way! Yee-haw!

-as part of mandatory english study for elem. students (5th and 6th graders) we're actually using a lesson plan at them now. although i found out on monday that i'm in charge of leading the lessons on my own from now on again, but at least i have an idea of what i'm supposed to be doing. i'm just curious if they'll be changing the jr. high books too, because a lot of the stuff i'm teaching is stuff they learn in their first year at jr. high too. hrm...

-for the first lesson at the small elem, there was a mixup and i didn't have the printed story to read to them i was supposed to have, and the teacher asked me if i could just do one on the fly in english. i ended up doing 3-little-pigs and with pictures and gestures they actually got it! it was awesome. the best part was the dramatic knocking on the door for the first two houses, and then for the 3rd house, i wound up to do this huge knock and instead did a doorbell and everyone (including the principal) lost it. that was awesome. :)

-tomorrow night i'm making mexican food with some friends from up north and having one of the english teachers come by. i hope she can handle our gaijin-ness

-friday i'm meeting up with a group of people form the PTA / teachers to have curry after we promised that we would at the spring enkai. who boy it'll be interesting.

-i learned a sweet new work today: huurinkazan or 風林火山 the kanji are wind,forest,fire,mountain and it was some battle cry by an old nagano samurai. AWESOME! i wanna do a calligraphy of it and hang it up in my apt. :D

- i was asked to write two different stories for 2nd and 3rd years. i had to do some tweaking to the 3rd year's one, where i wrote about going to istanbul. i also loved that i followed what i was told and only used what they had studied, but still had one of the teacher's dumb it down because it was too hard. she then also wrote a new one following the model that the book had, nearly identical to the books one, and then had me check the students papers. of course all the studnets ones were nearly identical to hers, and i'd like to see her's because there were so many common mistakes that i'm sure her example sheet had problems on it too. whoops :P

here's my 2nd year one that no one has said anything to me about yet. we'll see if that lasts.

I got up at four in the morning. I went to the bus stop. I rode the bus to Tokyo. I bought breakfast at a conbini in Roppongi. Inside the conbini, I saw President Obama. Obama said, “Dwight, can we go to America together?’’ I said, “YES WE CAN!’’ So, we went to Narita airport. We got on the plane. We flew over Tokyo and saw Godzilla! Godzilla was at Tokyo tower! Poor, poor, Tokyo tower. The plane was very fast. We got to Washington, D.C. at twelve. We ate lunch in the White House. It was very delicious. After lunch, Obama said, “Let’s find Naruto and Sasuke. They can fight Godzilla and save Tokyo!” I said, “This is boring. I live in Iijima and Godzilla is in Tokyo.” I watched TV on Air Force One for five hours. I got to Japan at seven in the evening. I went to bed at ten. Everyone in Tokyo died. The End

Fight: 戦う
Rode: 乗った
Poor: かわいいそう
Air Force One: アメリカ大統領の飛行機

ok, well, i think that pretty much does it for me. i'll try try try to keep up on this. i promise. :P

Sakura

So, the last couple of weeks have seen spring arrive in full, which has been nice.

The heater has been turned off, the windows opened, and the weather enjoyed. :)

The snow pack on the mountains is melting now too, so there's a constant stream of water going through the gutters that line all the streets, even though we haven't had rain in a couple weeks.

The rice paddies are being worked on in earnest now as well.

The sakura (cherry blossoms) have already come and gone. about a week ago they were coming out here at school, and today i noticed that several trees have lost all the blossoms. it has been really great to be outside when they are blooming to either see them or watch them fall. or even sweep them up. like light pink snowflakes.

i also went up to takato last weekend to see the sakura there. takato is suppoed to be one of the top 3 places in japan to see the sakura, and i hav eto admit it was darn good.
you can view takato photos by clicking here

and you can see iijima junior high schools by clicking here

the low point from the last week was hurting my back. last thursday i was doing something, no clue what set it off, by by the time i was leaving school it was getting bad, and all evening it got terrible. I was pretty much bed-ridden all night and had trouble moving. The next day i went in feeling decently better but still pretty bad. I was able to ask Kubota-sensei for some help in finding a chiro, and lucky me there was one right across street from school. I went there last thursday and it wasn't exactly as we'd think of a chiro in america, a lot less of the intense back-focusing exercises and stuff, but it helped. I have gone back again on monday, wednesday, and will go again tomorrow. I'm pretty close to 100%, and always feel better after i go.

also a bonus is that w/ my health insurance, it's pretty darn cheap to make the trips as well. Yesterday, i paid a total of $4.50 for my 45 minutes at the chiropractor. :D

also of note is that I'm stil having a terrible time remembering japanese names,a nd it just bugs me to NO FREAKIN' END that It's so hard :( I had the young english teacher promise to help me study them, and to recipricate I'm helping her study for her english teacher's exam this next summer. Which I did yesterday, and it was a pretty horrifying affair as I was having a terrible time helping her. For example, she took the practice test and checked her answers, but it just told her what was wrong, and not why it was wrong grammatically, so there were a couple that just left me boggled, and while I could theorize what was wrong, it was not only hard to explain, but seemed correct in the first place to me. that was a bad sign ahha.

I'm going to cook some mexican food tonight with friends, which I'm really really looking forward to. We had meant to do it last sunday but it had been pushed off due to bad scheduling on my part. (whoops!)

I found out i won't be heading to Iijima elem until nearly the end of May now because of, well, i really don't know why. No changes with Nanakubo though.

We're implementing some new curriculum for the elem's, as part of the new national endevor to drum up english study for the elem students, but I'm a little unsure about how it will work (read: completely unsure) and I'm a bit nervous.

i've booked my trip to korea to visit bethany (more like she booked it) and we're working on getting the hokkaido summer trip figured out as well. I booked dad's ticket to Japan last weekend too, which will be fun!

this last little tidbit is just for me, but after 9 seasons, I was finally able to take the perrenially terrible Idaho Vandals football team and turn them into National champtions. I started the dynasty with them last summer and it was pretty satisfying to make it to the top with them :')

Oops, my bad desu.

Yeah, So i've totally biffed and not been putting up lots of posts lately (it's been what, 3 weeks?) so i'll go ahead and drop a 'my bad' right here.

My last post mentioned the high schoolers taking their entrance exams. Since then, not too much has happened.

After the test, the school year was pretty much done, and the following week saw me with nothing to do at school and therefore i spent lots of time studying japanese and reading humor websites under the pretext of studying really hard.

We had closing ceremonies on the 18th of March, a long, serious event that I had a hard time getting much out of because I don't understand japanese. I caught bits n' pieces, but still.

We bid farewell to 5 teachers and the principal at the end of the year as well. Tradition in Asia sees teachers switching schools every 4-6 years (the principal was retiring). Kasuga was one of the teachers who was taking off (the head eng. teacher).

We had an enkai (drinking party) to celebrate the end of the year, which was lots of fun for me because i had 2 eng teachers at my table so I could actually carry on some decent conversation, as well as having fun speaking with one of the young history teachers who really likes english. Gotta love how the japanese use alcohol to grease the wheels of the social construct.

The party culminated with some pretty whacky things: including singing the iijima school song, then making a tunnel for the teachers who are leaving and singing a song to the tune of aud lane syne but with japanese lyrics. I sang with english lyrics.

Then, spontaneously, we decided to toss the kasuga into the air as a congragulations kinda thing. After tossing him, the teachers decided they wanted to throw the principal, who's cries of 'i have a bad back!' were met with laughter. The teachers opted to ignore the warnign and toss him anyway. That was sweet. Then they picked up the teeny secretary who's leaving and she got some serious hangtime.

I was laughing so hard and turned to the young english teacher and said 'man, i HAVE to tell people back home about this, because we never do this type of awesome stuff in america!' to which she replied 'yes, but you have to be careful! someone died from this just a couple days ago!' which made me laugh even harder and elicited an angry slap from my english teacher. 'that's not funny!', 'yes, it is!'

anyway, after some additional talking we figured out that i thought she meant they died mid-toss but she meant the drunk fools dropped the poor schmuck.

My initial plan was to be in Korea from March 27-April 5th (with classes startign the 6th) but i made the mistake of asking if I needed to fill out any forms or anything. Kasuga brought me back this mock sheet that the ALT before Jon made.

So i fill it out, say i'll be at school half the days, and in Korea the other half. the principal says that won't work (mind you, i'd run this by kasuga who said it wouldn't be a problem) because i needed to be there april 1st because of the new teachers rollin' in. so i was told that i was outta luck. particularly becuase the JET contract states that we have to be there on spring break like everyone else, and stare at a wall for the two week break. Awesome.

I was getting pretty exasperated while takling with kasuga about it. the convo went like this:

Me: Kasuga, the calendar I have here says that there's no school from the 18th until April 5th!

Kasuga: Well, that's a calendar for the PTA and Students...

Me: Oh, so is there a special calendar for teachers that I'm supposed to have instead?

K: well since we're civil servants we know that we'll have to be here on break...

Me: I DON'T KNOW THAT! >:(

so long story short, I'm spending my break at school, trying to look like I give a shit.

I had Daniel, a private eng teacher from Auz, stay with me for a few days after his contract was up and he had to move out but didn't have anywhere to go for a couple of days.

Two new english teachers, both women. 5 women teachers and me.

Awesome Day

So yesterday was the test day for high school entrance exams for the 3rd years. They're all back today and seem to be good. I'm happy for them. Two of my students came into my room on Monday and thanked me for all the fun they've had the last year. It was pretty awesome of them. :-)

So today, I find out for my 2nd class of the day we're watching Sister Act 2 (well, they'd started it). So at the beginning of class I say i'm happy we're watching the movie today (but the teacher was like, ah, not yet). So i wasn't sure if they knew or not, but anyway!

The teacher goes, 'I went to Tsutaya last night (the movie rental place) and got a movie!" students get excited, she starts to pull it out, I see the '2' on it and think, 'oh, Sister act 2' I think. The teacher then goes, 'I got TERMINATOR 2' and my face just LIGHTS UP. Since there were more boys than girls in the class, the votes for T2 won and we got to watch the first 50mins of it. AWESOME

Then it got better:
I go down to the break room and my teacher from the last class is in there
and she's talking with some other teachers about how she doesn't think she wants to watch T2 next class because it's so violent.
Then Ushiyama-sensei says outta the blue
'you should do the theme song at the beginning of class now!'
'diwght-sensei should start it, 'dun dun dah dun dun, dun dun dah dun dun' while Kubota-sensei, you can be crouched down and slowly rise up like the terminator!
At this point I just lost it. This was such a brilliant idea.
Then we ended up talking about movies for a bit, and Ushiyama-sensei said, 'you should watch robocop instead' LOL
Finally, as I'm leaving, that same teacher said something about how she's a vegetarian, and another teacher goes 'muri (impossible)' first teacher goes 'why? veggies are delicious!' 2nd teacher, 'i know, but so is meat!' as i was leaving the first teacher was saying something about BBQ sauce for veggies and i lost it again