Happy Thanksgiving!

The last week has been very busy for me! We had a Skills and Development Conference (SDC) on Monday and Tuesday that was mandatory for all Fukuoka prefecture JET ALTs. Many Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs) came as well. They came from all around the prefecture, but no teachers from either of my schools came. I didn't learn a whole lot, the conference was directed much more towards the JTEs, but it was nice to be with JETs from all around Fukuoka. The only downside was the distance. It was pretty far away from Kitakyushu, the commute by train was well over an hour and the building we were in was about a 25 minute walk from the closest train station. I stayed with a friend over night in Fukuoka city so the the commute would be easier the first morning. Juha and Dan stayed over with the same friend and it was nice to go as a group. Almost all the Kitakyushu ALTs made it to the conference on time, sign in started at 9:30 and the conference started at 10:00, but unfortunately one girl over slept. She was almost two hours late and in Japan tardiness is a huge faux pas. Our supervisor had to write a formal apology and the girl has to turn in a report on why she was late by the end of the week.

The Kitakyushu Board of Education was also supposed to let our schools know we would be away on the Monday and Tuesday. However, most of us got calls during lunch asking if we were sick and why we weren't at school. It turns out our supervisor wrote letters to our schools, but never faxed them. There was a lot of confusion, but thankfully every is sorted out now.

Despite the few hiccups, SDC wasn't as bad as I originally thought it would be. The previous JETs had warned us that SDC was the biggest, most boring waste of two days that you could possibly think of. I didn't find many seminars to be useful and spent a lot of my time playing games with David, but I was inspired by a few and got a lot of great project and lesson ideas I'm hoping to start next week! I even won a raffle for a gift certificate to a kabab restaurant in Fukuoka city that I hear is pretty good.

After SDC my main focus was Thanksgiving! Being one of the only two American Kitakyushu JETs, I volunteered to host it. I wasn't sure many people would come since Leah is the only other person to celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday, but I had a really great turn out! Eight of my friends came over and we had the closest thing we could get to a traditionally Thanksgiving. Leah made green beans and broccoli, Patrick made salad, Caol made mashed potatoes, David and Fumiko made chicken and pork, and I made stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pudding, and cranberry cookies. The obvious thing missing here is the turkey. I tried to find turkey, but I had started looking too late. Some places told me they could order it, but it wouldn't be in for another week. The stuffing was courtesy of home, Mom sent me a care package full of Thanksgiving necessities. Stuffing mix, pumpkin pie filling, cranberries, and chocolate turkeys were a few of the Thanksgiving essentials I got from home.

I also got some Hanukkah things in the care package. I took the small menorah and dreidels to school to tell my students about Hanukkah. They were also great as a game while we were waiting for everyone to get to my apartment. We lit the menorah and everyone insisted on learning the Hanukkah prayer. (We had already been speaking in English, Japanese, Irish, Spanish, and Finnish. We thought adding Hebrew was only fair.) The gelt was also a big hit. Kyoko won most of it during dreidel, but shared with everyone. Fumiko took some home to show her mom during New Years, no one had ever seen chocolate coins before.

All in all I had an amazing Thanksgiving. Juha and Kyoko brought what was recently rated the second best 梅酒 (umeshu, plum wine) in Kyushu that we had with dessert and everyone said it was the best Thanksgiving they'd ever had. Granted Leah is the only other person to celebrate Thanksgiving before, but I still think it went really well. They are already asking me to do it again next year.

I have to help prepare for a tea ceremony my students are putting on. I don't have too much planned in the upcoming weeks; I'm saving up my money for Tokyo and another travel destination that is TBA. Happy (late) Thanksgiving and Happy Hanukkah!

Illuminations and a Mountain

This week was pretty uneventful. I did go over to Leah's for a small dinner party, which was fun, but I was mostly looking forward to Illuminations on Friday. Illuminations, or 光の祭典 (hikari no saiten, festival of lights), has been slowly set up in Kitakyushu for the past few weeks. Christmas trees made of lights started appearing, lights were hanging from more and more trees, and a foot bridge was slowly covered. Friday was when they finally turned on all the thousands of lights.

There are lights everywhere! Lights are hanging from trees, scaling buildings, and covering bridges. There are lights at Kokura station decorating pillars and hanging from the overhang. Lights are in the shape of different animals, even our Kitakyushu mascot is made out in lights in front of a multicolored Christmas tree. The bridge has benches in the middle with lights arching overhead and even the river banks are lit up.

I had plans to meet some friends by Riverwalk to see all the lights, but I got so excited I couldn't wait. I went an hour early to check it out myself. I'm glad I did because there was a live performance going on that I would have missed otherwise. A Japanese group was singing English Christmas songs. I would normally say it is way too early for Christmas songs, but with all the lights and happy people the music fit pretty well. I walked around for a bit before meeting my friends, who told me as Christmas gets closer even more things will add to the lights that are already out.

 

 

The next day I went out with Juha, Kyoko, and Caol to climb Mt. Nuki. We left a little late and didn't end up getting to the train station until 1:30. We also underestimated how long it would take to walk from the train station to the mountain trail. We had to walk to a lake from the train station, which took us about twenty minutes. We passed beautiful temple on the way, but didn't stop for fear of losing time. We also passed a group of お祖父さん (ojiisan, grandfathers) on the way. We asked them about how long it would take to make it up to the top of the mountain and they sort of laughed at us and told us we wouldn't make it.

We continued anyway and soon made it to the lake. We had to walk around the lake in order to start our hike up the mountain and found a path through a bamboo forest. The path seemed a bit overgrown in places, but we continued anyway. When we got to the other side and met back up with a road we found this sign facing away from us:

It says, 「あぶないからはいってはいけません！」(abunai kara haitte wa ikemasen, Do no go in because it is dangerous!) We still are not sure why the path wasn't blocked from the side we came in on, but apparently we were not supposed to take that path up. It did save us some time, though, and we continued now that we were back on the road.

We soon reached another forest path, one that was definitely not closed. We started to climb, but we were worried about losing the sun since it was starting to go down. The trails we were taking were in the middle of the woods and we would have a very hard time getting back if the sun set and we lost our light. We hiked for about another hour, but were still about an hour away from the top. We stopped on a smaller peak of the mountain and had a picnic dinner (we had brought bento with us) before turning back. We were sad not to make it all the way up, but the sun was almost behind the mountains and it was dark by the time we reached the train station.

We did quickly stop at the temple we had seen before because we wanted to check it out. There was a fortune machine there and we all got fortunes. My fortune was the best luck, so I kept it with me.
We headed back to Kokura, where Caol and I met Dave for dinner. He showed us a really nice little street full of restaurants I hadn't seen before and the food was amazing. After dinner we went to karaoke before heading home for some much needed sleep.

Next weekend I'm helping out at an elementary school to teach the students about Thanksgiving. It should be a lot of fun!

Mike's Visit!

This week I was very excited to have Mike come and visit me! I had work, but we still managed to get out and do a lot of things!

Mike arrived in Fukuoka Airport on Monday, November 4^th around 10 P.M. I left Kitakyushu after dinner to meet him at the airport. He’d been on two planes traveling for almost eighteen hours, but we still had to take the subway to Hakata station and then a train back to Kitakyushu. We got back to my apartment a little after midnight and almost immediately fell asleep.

On Tuesday my school had the day off as a substitution day for Saturday, when I went to school during culture festival, so I took Mike around the city. We started by walking along the monorail to Kokura station, then walked though Uemachi (an arcade next to Kokura station with many shops, restaurants, and game stations) to get to Kokura Castle and Riverwalk. We had lunch at Riverwalk and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring Riverwalk and Uemachi. We had dinner at Booties with Caol and Patrick where Mike triedふぐ (fugu, puffer fish) for the first time.

Wednesday I had work, but it was a BoE meeting day. On meeting days I leave work early to head over to my Board of Education in Kitakyushu. Since last week I was at Shinozaki (my closer school), I had enough time to meet Mike for lunch before heading to my meeting. I was really excited about this meeting because we finally got our business cards! After the meeting I met back up with Mike and we went to Habit, a burger place many of us go after our BoE meetings. We were joined by Patrick, Leah, and Juha at the restaurant and afterwards went back to Juha’s apartment to play board games.

Thursday I was at work again, but Mike had some fun exploring Kokura a little more. He went to Cha Cha Town (so named because the Kitakyushu accent often puts “cha” at the end of sentences) and had sushi for lunch. He also went to Aru Aru City, a big mall behind Kokura station designated to everything anime. After work, Mike and I rode the monorail to Kokura station. I needed to meet Patrick to finalize our trip to Tokyo for Christmas and Mike wanted to look at all the stalls set up in the station selling lots of different food and even some clothes and jewelry. Going to the travel agency with Patrick didn’t take long, so Mike and I met up with Juha and Kyoko at 鉄なべ (tetsunabe), one of my favorite restaurants in Kitakyushu.

Friday, again I had work. Mike said he didn’t go out much, I think he slept most of the day since he didn’t get much of a chance to sleep off his jet lag when he first arrived. He did go out to Tanga market. Tanga market is a street full of fish shops one stop down on the monorail (or about a fifteen minute walk) from my apartment. Mike got some delicious たこ焼 (takoyaki, fried octopus) there for lunch. He also brought some fish and vegetables home, which we made for dinner when I got home from work.

Friday night we went out since Mike had never seen the Kokura nightlife before. We met Leah and Caol for drinks, then we all headed to karaoke. Leah and Caol went home after karaoke, but my friend Vixay was DJing at Orange Door for the night and I had said we’d stop by to see him. At Orange Door, Mike and I ran into Juha and Kyoko who were also there to see Vixay. We sat with Juha and Kyoko for a while before heading home.

Saturday we had a very quiet day. We mostly stayed in and played games. We did treat ourselves to a fancy dinner at a restaurant Juha had suggested the night before. I’m not sure of the name (Juha didn’t know the name either, just gave us vague directions), but it was a very nice焼肉 (yakiniku) restaurant. Yakiniku is kind of like BBQ, you get various meats, seafood, and vegetables that you grill at your table. The place we went was small, but the food was incredible!

Sunday we ventured outside of Kitakyushu. We first went up to Shimonoseki for its famous Karato Ichiba fish market. This market is huge and has almost any kind of fish you could want. Puffer fish is the specialty in Shimonoseki, so almost ever stand had it. We tried as many kind of fish as we could! My favorite was トロ (toro, fatty tuna/tuna belly). I see it a lot on American sushi menus, but with limited availably and I’ve never seen it actually available. It is considered by many one of the best sushi ingredients, but there is not much toro on each tuna, so it can be hard to come by. I can’t wait to go back sometime to have more!

We walked down the wharf after leaving the market, but it started to rain so we hopped on a bus and headed back towards the train station. We decided to head into Fukuoka since Mike didn’t get a chance to see it other than through his plane window. We walked around Hakata for a while looking at the shops.
Eventually we headed to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. They have an exhibit going on until January of Studio Ghibli cells and layout designs. There were even some TVs set up next to the layouts showing you exactly how the transition from layout to film occurred. At the end of the exhibit everyone was given a little circle sticker and a black pen. We were told to draw anything we wanted and stick it on the wall. Everything about the exhibit was amazing!

We walked back to the train station after the museum, stopping at a few shrines along the way. We got ramen for dinner and then headed up to the 8^th floor of Amu Plaza in the train station to find the Pokémon Center. We had a lot of fun playing the games and looking around. There was a big event going on because a new pack of cards had just been released, so we picked up a few packs as souvenirs. We shopped around a bit more in the mall before heading home.

Mike got on a plane Monday morning that left at 7:20 A.M. and he’s back in New York. I hope he can visit again soon!

Futajima Culture Festival

As I said previously, last weekend was my school's (Futajima's) culture festival. We had spent a very busy week getting ready, especially with the first year students. All the first year students wrote a short paragraph in English describing a friend or family member. I had to read over all of their paragraphs and correct them every time they wrote a new draft. A few needed to be corrected on the final draft (with sticky notes so it wouldn't mess up their nice papers) as well. So that's somewhere between 130 and 140 paragraphs I read and re-read. Then on Friday we grouped all the paragraphs by class and taped them to giant pieces of paper, which we hung in the gym for parents and other students to see during the festival.

The entire school became a display case for student work, not just the gym. Most of the classrooms and hallways were decorated with work the students had done. There was a huge variety of work ranging from science projects to stitch work patterns to ikebana (flower arranging). There were painting and calligraphy projects hung up and small ceramic desserts the students had made in art class. The special class did a short research project on recycling and made tote bags out of newspaper for other students to take. The third year students made books describing a school trip they had taken to Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. The set up took a long time, but seeing it all during the festival was well worth it.

The festival itself started at 8:45 A.M. on Saturday. Students, parents, and teachers all gathered in the auditorium and our principal started opening ceremony. Pretty much everything in Japan has an opening (and closing) ceremony. My school day starts with an opening ceremony, which consists of the head teacher saying good morning and giving out any announcements. The principal and vice principal sometimes give out announcements as well. The opening ceremony for culture festival was led by the principal of Futajima. She thanked everyone for coming and talked about how hard all of the students had worked to prepare. Then three of the students who participated in speech contest came up and did their speeches for everyone. There was a projector displaying both the English as the students spoke and the Japanese translation so everyone could follow along.

After the speeches, the special classes had the stage. They sang two songs and each student had a chime with a different pitch. They rung their chimes in an order so that it accompanied the song they were singing. The first years went next and they also sang a few songs. They also did a dramatic reading of a story I didn't quite understand, but there were pictures accompanying it. The students would take turns telling the story and everyone would say certain parts in unison. The second years were up next and they also started with some songs. The second song they did was "When the Saints Go Marching In." It was very fun! It is a very repetitive song, but they did a different little dance each time they repeated it and even had props. The second years did a reading as well and then it was the third years' turn.

The third year students all did skits. There were four skits in total, one done by each class. The first two classes did their skits and they were very fun! The plots were sometimes a bit strange to me, but both stories had the message of coming of age, finding friendship, and growing into their own selves. Some of the key plot points from these first two skits were magic stones and teacher/magicians. The students had a really great time putting on these plays and everyone seemed to enjoy them.

After the first two skits we took a break for a few hours to let parents and students walk around the school and see all of the work the students had done. I really liked this time because I had a chance to walk around as well and not only see all the work, but spend some time with the students. We had lunch after we were finished looking around and headed back to the auditorium. We started back up with a great performance by the choral club, then back into the third year skits. The other two third year class' skits had pretty much the same messages at the first two, but this time the plots had more to do with runaway students and puzzles that could summon demons and witches. These second skits also had considerably more cross dressing than the first two. After the skits, all the third year students got up and sang a song together. They were then joined by the other two grades, so all the students were up on stage. They all sang the school song and then it was the teachers' turn. I went up with all the teachers and we sang a song together before closing ceremonies.

I went out with the teachers to an enkai (work party) that night and had a great time! I even went to nijikai at karaoke and sang some Japanese songs with my coworkers. I came back to Kokura fairly early, though, because I had plans on Sunday. My JTE Sugiyama invited me to an English concert in Kokura. I met her at Riverwalk the next day and the concert was really enjoyable! The opening was a high school band in Kokura that was very talented! One of the songs they even managed to dance to despite all having instruments that in some cases were bigger than them!

The main act was called "Voice of Virginia." A preforming arts college in Virginia sends it's top students ages 24-27 to Kitakyushu every few years to preform popular English music. Virginia to Kitakyushu may seem a little random, but Norfolk, VA is Kitakyushu's sister city. The songs they preformed were a huge range, from disco to Motown to a three song Adele set. They all sang and danced and even brought a live band with them for their music. The whole concert only lasted about an hour and a half, but it was really fun. It was also really nice to spend time with my teachers outside of school.

After the concert we went downstairs to Starbucks for a coffee. Riverwalk is getting all decked out for Christmas already with a giant Christmas tree made entirely of Christmas lights. Even Starbucks was selling exclusively Christmas mugs and take home coffee.

Sugiyama and I sat outside and drank our coffee and chatted for a while before we had to go home. It was a great end to a great weekend! And coming soon on Nov. 15th is Illuminations, when the entire city starts all their Christmas lights up!