Last Week Before Vacation!

This last week before summer vacation is kind of boring at school, but very exciting outside! My school has half days all week and even though the students get to leave at lunch time I have to stay until 4:15. Normally I don`t mind staying, but because vacation is coming up I don`t have any more lessons to prepair, so it can be hard to find things to do. I`ve been going to lots of clubs, but even they end before 4:15. Friday will just be a closing ceremony and I`m hoping my school lets me go home early since there will be no classes and not even school lunch.

Despite my time in school going very slowly, I`m very busy outside of school! I`ve started packing for my trip and leave a week from today (7/15/14). I`m trying to have dinners and nights out with my friends here before I leave and next weekend will be packed with festivals before I head to the airport. I`m going to Gion, a big festival with lots of taiko drums and floats, in Kurosaki on Friday and Kokura on Saturday. I`m so excited!!

I`m also trying to spend a lot of time with my friend Vixay, a Canadian JET. He`s going home for good this year. I will see him again when I come back to Japan after visiting America, but he will only be around a few more days, so I want to get a lot of time with him now! We went out with a few of our friends last weekend and had a great time! Because Gion is coming up many people were practicing tiako drumming in the streets and we could here drums wherever we went, it was great! We went to 飲み放題 (nomihoudai, all you can drink), the ferris wheel and arcade in Cha Cha Town, and even tried out a new place called ロックアップ (Lock Up).

The Lock Up is a chain, but it only opened up in Kokura this month. It`s very gimmicky and I was worried it would be overpriced with subpar food and drinks, but I was wrong and it was really fun! It`s a prison/horror themed restauarant. The greeters all wear guard uniforms, the servers wear inmate uniforms, and the tables are all in different cells. The drinks and food also look like their out of a movie. Many drinks have syringes (just the plunger, no needle attached) to mix the drinks and some come in test tubes and beakers. The food was shaped like spiders, crosses, skulls, and more. My favorite food was sushi ruolette. We had five people, so we got a plate with five pieces of sushi. One of the peices of sushi had a ton of wasabi in it, but you couldn`t tell by looking them which one it was. Everyone picked one piece of sushi to eat. We each ate the whole piece of sushi at the same time and one person, Juha in this case, ends up with a mouth full of wasabi. It`s a lot of fun, especially since I did`t get the wasabi! There were many different types of ruolette foods, I hope I can try more of them! (I also hope my luck holds and I never get the spicy one!)

Remember how I said the tables were each in their own cells? That`s important, because the doors of the cells were always closed (not locked of course) and there were signs warning you to keep the door closed in case monsters were in the halls. The signs were in English and at first we thought that they just put up any warning signs to close the doors and the monsters thing was just a misunderstaing of English, but we were wrong. Thirty to fourty minutes after we sat down all the lights went off and sirens started blaring. We could hear other cells doors being slammed open and pretty soon a monster came, slammed open our door, and came into our cell. There were probably ten or fifteen people overall dress up in creepy costumes and masks walking around. The monsters obviously don`t touch you or anything, just come in and try to scare you. One person did come over the top of our cell and she looked like the girl from The Ring, that one did actually scare me! After a few minutes the lights came back on and the monsters went away. It was pretty bizarre, but made for a fun and memorable evening!

Vixay`s goodbye party with the board of education is tomorrow night at a restaurant called 青山 (Aoyama). It`s a really nice Japanese steakhouse and I`m very excited to go! I`ve only been there once before and it was on Mike`s birthday a few months ago. It`ll be a great place to have a nice dinner and his final enkai.

This week I`m so excited to wear my new 浴衣 (yukata, a cotton kimono for summer) to the festivals this weekend and hang out with all my friends. I`m making sure I have everything I need for visiting America and that everything is ready for English camp when I get back. I`m also excited for my Phuket trip in August after English camp and Patrick and I are already planning ahead for more trips next winter!

Infrequent Updates

Hello! I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get this up. I've had some computer trouble and will not have a reliable computer until July 22nd when I'm back in the States. Therefore I will be updating via my cell phone. This means posts will probably be shorter and it`s also a lot harder for me to edit, so please forgive any spelling and grammar mistakes. It`s only for a few weeks so please bare with me! I`m also not sure how pictures will work. My phone has trouble uploading them and the school computers are unreliable, so if there are no pictures now I will go back and add them after I get back to the States.

I've had two great weekends since my last update. Two weekends ago I spent a lot of time with my friend Kikumi. We had two dinner parties in a row watching both Japanese and English movies. She taught me how to make ギョザ (gyoza), 春巻き (harumaki, spring rolls), and タコ焼き (takoyaki, fried dough and octopus). It was so much fun! We had a great time hanging out with her and even made some new friends! I will see her agiain tomorrow and probably at least once more before I leave for the US!

I also went to my first 女子会 (joshikai) or a girls-only gathering. Although I was at Ishimine the past two weeks, the teachers at Shinozaki called me and invited me out for a joshikai! That week the students were doing testing for three days, so we went out to celebrate the end of the tests. We went to a really small restaurant behind the Kokura trian station and had a blast. The English teachers all ended sitting on the opposite side of the room as me (seating is always random to make sure no one feels left out), but I was still able to be part of the converstaions all night! I know it`s been a year and I shouldn`t be surprised anymore by things like that, but I still always feel very accomplished when I can go out, especially when drinking, and still speak and understand everything that`s going on. It was a great first joshikai and I hope to go on another again soon!

Although I have had a great time on the weekends, my weekdays of the past two weeks have mostly been spend at Ishimine. I`ve been grading tons of tests and teaching five classes a day. On top of that I`ve been staying late to go to the chorus club after school. It`s been a lot of work, but I love so much of it! I updated the ALT board in the hallways to talk about summer vacation and included some worksheets the students could take if they were interested. It`s nothing too difficult, just a word search, connect the dots using numbers instead of letters, and a writing practice activity. I had done this for the previous board, but not many students took them. This time, though, as soon as I announced there was a new board up with new activities almost all the students went out and grabbed papers after class! I even had to make more copies before the week was over! I put a lot of work into the ALT board, didn`t expect many students to pay attention to it, so I`m really excited!

The chorus club has also been great. Even though I ended up staying two hours late after school everyday, I`ve never missed a rehursal since I first started going. The students are always so excited to see me and I`ve even taught them a few warm-ups in English. I`ve started learning a lot of vocal words, i.e. breath support and round your vowels, and it really cheers me up if I`ve had a bad day at school. The chorus teacher, Mr. Teshima, bought sheet music for All I Want For Christmas Is You (probably the most popular Christmas song in Japan) and wants me to teach it to the students after the summer break. I`m so excited!

Finally, this weekend I had a great time with a new friend. Mika, a new teacher just out of university this year, is an aide in Ishimine. She majored in international affiars and wants to become an English teacher. She is really nice and always wants to hang out, but I`d always been busy. This weekend we finally got the chance! We started with dinner at 鉄なべ (Tetsunabe) before meeting some friends for karaoke. We sang out hearts out for two hours then moved to a small bar for a few more drinks befor heading home. It was a great night and I even ended up seeing Mika the next day. We went to a chorus concert together where we heard students chiors (including a few of my Ishimine studuents) as well as professional Japanese opera singers. It was really cool!

That brings it up to today. I`m back in Shinozaki for my last two weeks of school before vacation. I have a lot of lowkey plans to hang out with everyone before I leave for the summer and I`m so excited to be back stateside for a visit. I can`t belive I`ll be getting on a plane for home in a little over two weeks! Only two more weeks of school (maybe less if the typhone that`s predicted come in on Wednesday) and I`ll be on my way!