Almost 2 Months

Almost two months have passed now since I arrived in Japan at the beginning of April. Some mornings I wake up and still have to remind myself that I am here. The sports festival here in Japan is beginning for the Junior High School students, so they have been busy practicing for the upcoming tournaments. On Saturday and Sunday, each sports team plays in a tournament against other schools around the city. On these days, I get paid to go around the city and watch them play and cheer them on. I plan on going to watch tennis, table tennis, judo, and soccer.

Also on Saturday, I am supposed to receive my first paycheck, with which I will be purchasing a new camera. The weekend after the sports festival I am travelling to Tokyo for the first time. I will be taking the night bus down Friday night, because it is cheaper than the shinkansen and allows you to avoid paying for a hotel. The trip to Tokyo is 6 hours by bus from Sendai, where I will be catching the bus.

In other news, I ate at my first sushi restaurant and tried sushi for the first time. I was more than a bit skeptical at first, but I thought I should at least give it a try. There are types of sushi restaurants here called kaitan sushi which serve sushi on conveyor belts that run around the store. You sit in a booth and take what you want from the conveyor belt as it passes by. You can also order specific things from a touch screen at the booths and they will send it to you on a miniature shinkansen that runs above the conveyor belt. It was a great experience and I tried the shrimp and salmon sushi. Both were delicious.

I have also finished learning hiragana and katakana, although I will still need plenty of practice with them. Today I started learning kanji, but I fear that it could be a lifelong endeavor.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

This week has been so exhausting because I have had a new Elementary school to go to everyday. Monday was Iwadeyama Elementary, which is the counterpart of my Junior High School and has around 300 students. Tuesday was Nishioosaki Elementary school, which has only 60 students. Wednesday was Kaminome Elementary school, which has 56 students. Thursday was Mayama Elementary school, and I counted about 33 students at the morning assembly. The elementary school children are cute beyond belief. Some of the schools were so small that when the day was over, the children don their little yellow hats and walk home in lines. They live so close to their schools that they don't have a school bus! I felt kind of like a travelling salesman this week going from school to school. The product I am selling is America and the English language. At some of the schools, I think I have more of a grasp of Japanese language than some of the English teachers do of the English language.
Today, at Mayama Elementary school, the highlight of my day was when I got to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a group of 1st and 2nd graders, complete with acting out of the story with a stuffed caterpillar. I identify with the very hungry caterpillar, because no matter how much I eat, I am still hungry. Except I do not turn into a butterfly, no matter how much I eat.
At one point in the day two little 1st grade girls came to the teacher's room holding up a book that was bigger than they were, and pointed at letters in the alphabet and asked me in Japanese what it was. After I told them a few, they said "thank you" in Japanese and left. I have never moved so fast in my life as when singing "head, shoulders, knees and toes" with these children and I have had to sing so many different versions of the alphabet that I could sing them backwards. I can't believe I am getting paid to have this much fun.
Tomorrow, I will finally go back to my Junior High School and resume some semblance of a normal schedule for a few weeks until I go to a new Elementary school.

First Day at Elementary School

During the past weekend I spent my time in search of the Elementary schools that I have to go to in the next couple of weeks. I have five Elementary schools in total, so it was quite an adventure finding all of them using nothing but a map and my limited knowledge of the area.

On Monday morning I went to my first Elementary school in Iwadeyama. The school was not as large as my Junior High School, but it was quaint and had some nice playground equipment. The weather was absolutely wonderful on this day and the sun came out early and stayed out all day long. My first impression of the Elementary school was much different than my impression of the Junior High School. Everyone here seemed more relaxed and lighthearted, but they also spoke less English. However, the children were so cute it is hard to explain. I looked outside from my desk in the teacher's room to see a large playground with sand on the ground and tiny children in circles around teachers, who were standing up. The children were wearing their "athletic uniforms", which were tiny blue shorts with two stripes down each side, a white t-shirt with a blue collar colored on, and a little reversible hat with one side red and the other white, strapped on their little heads. The teachers informed me that they were having some sort of sports assembly and we all went outside in the scorching hot sun on the playground. Just when I thought they couldn't get any more adorable, the little tykes lined up by grade, 1st through 6th, and started marching in step and then sang a little song. Half of them had their hats on the red side and half of them had them on the white side, with the red on the left and the white on the right. They marched around the playground holding flags and swinging their little arms and legs up in the air. It was so gosh darn cute that I couldn't help laughing out loud at a few points. One kid lost his place in line because he kept staring at me and one of the teachers had to place him back in line.

I had four classes at the school and they were all just me introducing myself to the children and answering questions about myself and America. The classes were over at 3pm, and I went on back to the Junior High School and then on home after I found out that they were not having any club activities this evening. The Junior High kids are going to Tokyo this week while I am working at Elementary schools, and they leave tomorrow.

A Day in Sendai City

On Saturday, I traveled to Sendai City and spent the entire day walking around, shopping, and sightseeing. I met an English speaker at Starbucks and kind of got a tour of the city. I went to the 31st floor of the tallest building in Sendai, where you can see the entire city and even the ocean.


I rode the Sendai loop tour bus and saw the site of the castle that was built by order of the one-eyed Samurai, Date Masamune in 1601. The castle was destroyed, but the castle walls were still standing and a statue of the Samurai on a horse was atop Aoba mountain. The view of the city from here was amazing.

I went to my first arcade, which was filled with people and really noisy. Then I stopped by some parks in the city that offered much needed rest and relaxation.

By the time I was finished walking around the city, it was getting dark, and I decided I had better get home. There is so much to do in Sendai that I will have to keep coming back on the weekends. And there are so many Starbucks!

Back to Work

I went back to work after the long Golden Week holiday on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, we had a sports test in lieu of classes. At first I did not think I had ever heard of such a thing, but when I saw the old wooden frame that tests how far you can stretch and saw the students doing sit ups as fast as they could for 20 seconds, it all came back to me. I went around with the 3rd and 2nd year students and participated in the sports test. It was a little unnerving because the students can get far too friendly at times, at my expense. However, I spent the entire day testing my grip, doing sit ups, seeing how far I can jump and how far I can throw a ball (did I mention that I love my job?). After school, I participated in sports club activities with the students outside because the weather was so nice. I played some soccer with the boys and then tagged along with the girls' basketball team on a warm up run, which I mistakenly thought would be a leisurely stroll. Turns out that they run all the way around the school, down three flights of stairs, and up the school driveway repeatedly until they are at the point of organ failure and body malfunction.

On Friday, there were only three classes and the students left to go home and the teachers went to a meeting in Furukawa. I, on the other hand, stayed in the teacher's room alone and watched Japanese soap operas, ate a big cup 'o curry noodles, surfed the web, and wrote this update. Also, today I have officially learned the complete Hiragana alphabet, which consists of 48 characters and some other less commonly used combinations. Too bad this is only one of the three alphabets that Japan uses. Maybe now I can learn the words for the food here so I can actually read menus and know what I am ordering.

There are two cultural differences here that I just want to point out. First, everyone here backs into their parking spaces. Not just a couple of people do this. Everyone does it. It's like a really uneventful episode of the Twilight Zone. When you are trying to find a parking space in a crowded lot, it is almost impossible to predict the movements of the tiny, compact little boxes that they call cars that turn and swivel their way into the spots. Another cultural difference is how they separate and discard of their trash. All garbage here is separated into burnables and non-burnables, or combustibles and non-combustibles. There are trash cans for plastic bottles, aluminum cans, glass, and uneaten food and they take their recycling extremely seriously, which is a great thing.

The Misadventures of Roger and the Unlucky

The festival at Yonezawa after sunset

Sunset at Yonezawa

On Monday I had to search high and low to find an apartment complex in Furukawa. My company made a mistake and gave me a car that has an inspection sticker that is going to expire before my year is up, so I had to find a car that is parked at an apartment complex in Furukawa to switch my car with. This sounds simple, but I had no directions, the apartments are spread out, the streets aren't named, and all the offices were closed because of the holidays. The first incident happened when we were pulling into McDonalds for breakfast and my tire busted. I had to quickly change it so we could get started with our day because we were also trying to make it to Yonezawa, a city that is three hours away, in order to see a Samurai battle at a festival where another English teacher lives that was in training with us. After changing the tire and eating, I located the apartment complex somehow with the help of Will, Nicole, and Tyler. The new car that I got is a tiny, gold, Nissan March that has no CD player but runs well. I named him Roger. I left my old car behind and we set off for our long drive to Yonezawa. Five hours later, we arrived in Yonezawa and we had missed the Samurai battle. Traffic was a nightmare due to the Golden Week holiday, but driving through the countryside was picturesque. At one point it was up to 27 degrees C!

Although we missed the Samurai battle, the festival was still lively and there were beautiful cherry trees and shrines and temples and copious amounts of festival food for sale. We met up with Justine and her friends who were also English teachers who have been in Japan for much longer than us. They seemed really well adjusted and had a much better mastery of the language than us. We ended up spending the evening in the park and spending the night in Yonezawa. Spending time around other English speakers was such a relief that it almost made the drive up worth it.
The next morning, however, I woke up to realize that I had misplaced my camera and all the pictures I had taken of the festival were lost, as was my camera. We made it back home by about 7pm on Tuesday and it was nice to relax.

Japanese Road Trip Adventure

Today was the second day of Golden Week and the other ALTs and I had big ambitions for the day. Will and I got up early and I was happy to feel the warmth of the sun again. We drove down to Furukawa and had breakfast at McDonalds. I have decided that, because portions here are so small, that I need to start eating for two people. So I ordered two combo sets: Two McGriddles, two hash browns, and two cups of orange juice.
From here we headed out to Matsushima, the coast that hosts one of Japan's Three Great Views.

Picture of Matsushima Bay.

Giant red bridge that you have to pay 200 yen to cross onto an island.

There were many local tourists about during Golden Week and traffic was terrible.

Will had to descend the area using the rope, because I chose to go off the beaten path.

A nice little shrine.














Will, Tyler, and Nicole from left to right, taking in the view of Matsushima.



From Matsushima we hit Sendai City for the second time. This time we found a book store that sold English books!

There was live music on the street, we found 4 Starbucks and got drinks at two different ones.

We had no luck finding any cheap hotels in Sendai because they were all booked up due to Golden Week. So we ended up having to drive back from Sendai.

We spotted a nice little park on the way back lit with lanterns. There were beautiful cherry blossoms here.







Then we met this character in purple who wanted to take our pictures many times. I decided to take his picture, too.

Hanami

Today was the first day of the Golden Week holiday and I spent the day engaging in the tradition of Hanami, a custom of enjoying the beauty of the flowers. The cherry blossoms were in bloom and the flowers near the onsen were perfect for a picnic out in the park.





For Hanami, the Japanese generally go to the park or somewhere that the cherry blossoms are in bloom to picnic. Outside of the onsen was a popular spot because people were there all day taking pictures and grilling out.





There is also a little body of water on the backside of the onsen with a tree in the middle and giant goldfish in the pond.





Tomorrow I am leaving Osaki City and going to Yonezawa to see a samurai battle and then to Sendai and Matsushima. Matsushima is the site of one of Japan's Three Great Views. It has a picturesque view of the coast with numerous tiny islands covered in pine trees.