Catch Up!

Cruising on my "hog"

So it’s time for a catch up after a few weeks of woeful blogging neglect.  I have covered sports day in my other entry but more has been going in than that. We have had a holiday in Nara, I have bought an amazing new camera, we have added more stuff to our flat, we have been to the Boston exhibit, we have had the world’s largest meat supply delivered and we have also been to Universal Studios Japan!

So let us begin with how teaching is getting along. Well I am settled in my JHS now. I have made possibly some of the most awesome worksheets to grace the Japanese education system (my Microsoft Office and Adobe experience has found some use). The kids at my school range from shy but intelligent types to badly behaved boys who want to disrupt lessons or sleep.  I am only really teaching one grade of Junior High School (the second grade – age 13-14) which means I am in most of the English lessons for that grade. Normally the ALT would have each class for one of its three weekly English lessons and use that time to create fun lessons to reinforce the current grammar point and encourage international understanding etc. As a result my role swings from making and leading activities around certain grammar points in “my” lessons to me reading aloud from the textbook and keeping the peace in my teacher’s lessons.  I don’t mind this too much, as I hope that the increased exposure to spoken English will draw the kids away from the bad pronunciation they pick up from “katakana” English. Katakana is one of the Japanese alphabets and is the one used for foreign words. The problem is that each character equates to a slightly different sound to our English letters, for example “and” is made up of the characters with the sounds “ah”, “n” and “doh”. Alas a lot of time is spent encouraging the loss of the superfluous sounds that get added onto words.  There are few other quirks to the classroom here that take some getting used to.

Outside the classroom the school has gradually become warmer and warmer and I am beginning to feel more and more welcome. There are a good few members of staff who enjoy speaking English with me and I try to chat to them when the opportunity arises. The teacher who sits next to me in the staff room speaks to me every day despite very limited English. We have developed a bond over computer games and coffee. We have bother entered into a kind of competition collecting the free toy cars that come with the little cans of ice coffee here.  Alas, the teachers here work insane hours and are constantly busy so the main social interactions only occur at the occasional parties after big school events.

Elementary school is a slightly different kettle of fish. I am only there once a week so I do not know the staff as well. The children there are exhaustingly energetic and excited to see me, which I love. Teaching there is great fun and the kids are so cute. You do feel completely sapped of energy as soon as you leave the place though. Last week the children even prepared a lesson for me on Japanese culture. I was shown how to do calligraphy, Japanese chess and some Japanese children’s games. It was great fun and it was great seeing them figuring out ways to communicate with me considering my extremely rudimentary Japanese.

At lunchtimes some of the students don their miniature lab coats, face masks and hair nets and fetch the food from the kitchen to the classroom for lunch. Each individual desk has its own table cloth (most pokemon ones) and then a tray is laid out with the days fare. I always join the students for food and have a school lunch. They are generally very healthy if not a bit heavy on the carbs. The drink served with lunch is always a pint of full fat milk which makes me cringe to drink. Alas you have to clear your plate and drink your drink otherwise you are setting a bad example. This was fine until the day whole fish were on the menu and Luke Teacher got extras as he is a grown up.  I did manage to set a good example and I also managed to avoid vomiting profusely on a class of small children.

At the end of September we enjoyed a long weekend off following the Junior High School sports day. We spent this time exploring Nara, a place only about one and half hours from Kobe by train. We found a great little hostel to stay in which bought us a lot more time to explore the area fully. We spent our days exploring ancient shrines and temples and feeding the tame deer that roam the area. Nara used to be the capital of Japan back in the 700s so it has an incredible amount of history. On our second day there we rented bikes and met up with our New Zealand friends for a bike ride around the parks and temples and then a hike up the mountain. The view from the top was breath-taking. We didn’t sample any particularly local cuisine, but we did try some horse sushi, it wasn’t anything special.

These deer think they are zebra

For a while now I have wanted to get into amateur photography so I have been researching a number of digital SLRs. Our trip really drove home the need to have a really good camera to capture Japan as well as possible. After a trip to a giant camera shop in Osaka I made my final decision on a Canon kiss x4 DSLR. I made my purchase on Amazon Japan and saved myself a cool £250 from the UK version. Now I am reading books on photography during my lunchtimes (on my laptop) and looking forward to our next trip into the countryside. I fear if I keep taking pictures of Rachel to test my camera she will attack me.  I shall try and find a good way of posting the photos online without losing too much of the overall quality. The pictures posted on the blog are massively compressed and I think it shows.

My new camera has the power to make people fly

We have recently had an exhibit of Japanese wood block prints dating back from before the 16^th century. This exhibit was on loan from the Boston (USA) art gallery. The collection was incredible. The level of detail carved into the blocks is incredible. The pictures feature all kinds of intricate patterns on clothing and other items in the pictures. It was great to see some artwork so detached from traditional European artworks. It is also great to think that good art can be “mass produced”. If you had £70 to spare you could easily buy a reproduction of one of the images, made faithfully using the same techniques.

The next day we got up at 6:45 (ON A SUNDAY!!!!!) to go to Universal Studios Japan. From what I can tell, having never been to the US version, the park is faithful reproduction of its parent.  The rides involved all manner of 3D imaging and live action fireballs and moving sets. We had a great time getting soaked on the Jurassic Park ride and playing along with the actors on the Jaws ride. The Back to the Future ride was particularly amusing, as the actors had all been redubbed in Japanese. We spent the entire day (arriving before 9am and leaving after 9pm) adventuring and going on nearly every ride. For food we went to an American-Irish themed restaurant, and I enjoyed an entire onion fried up in batter in the form on an oniony explosion. We even saw the twilight parade, featuring all kinds of themed floats and dancers covered in lights. I would certainly recommend it to anyone adventuring in Japan.

The furnishing of the flat had continued with the purchase of a Kotatsu. This is a fancy Japanese coffee table which has a heater underneath. In the winter the top lifts off and a blanket is spread over the table to keep the heat in, you then replace the table top to keep the blanket in place. Your legs can then be put under the blanket to keep them warm. We look forward to trying it out when the weather turns on us. Currently the weather still hasn’t dropped below 25 degrees and we have had limited showers. Alas, the kotatsu also provides our only table space until we track down a dining table and chairs. We have also purchased an electric frying pan. This comes with a griddle top, a flat top and a takonyaki top (spherical pancakes). It makes a great cooking space and can also be put in the centre of a table for Korean style BBQ. We have already tried this with the thin slices of boar we got as part of our massive meat delivery.

We stocked our cupboards this month with two suitably large online orders. One was from “flying pig” which offers Costco products with home delivery. We bought a few essentials in this order and also 2kg of jellybeans to make up some of our 5 a day. The other order was from “the meat man”. This is a American fellow who has setup a website selling meat in japan. We bought some ostrich, kangaroo and also a 3kg bag of mystery meat. The mystery meat contained chicken, British style sausages (most over here are hotdog wieners), sliced boar meat, a bacon joint, some bacon and a boar rib joint. We now have the kind of meat-crammed-freezer any self-respecting carnivore could be proud of!

Well that is a brief lowdown of what has been going on in our lives of late. I have made a resolution to study more Japanese and do more blogging. We have started taking private lessons for the Japanese, so hopefully this blog is the start of more frequent entries.