Kumano and Gundams!

Before I get started... Sorry about that bad image in the previous post. I was hoping to show what a middle school uniform looked like, but failed bad apparently. I took my camera around today and took some photos though.

Re:Phil. Upon closer inspection, yes, most bikes here have that sort of built in bike handcuff. Mine came with keys though... Some people have their bikes stolen, but at the same time, many people here grow up with having a bike, and always have a bike. It's like, why would you steal one when you already have one, and everyone you know has one. Plus people here like buying new bikes. (not to mention they're quite inexpensive) so you'd be hard pressed to be able to sell a stolen bike.

Last Sunday I went to a town called Kumano to a calligraphy and art museum. I went with My vice Principal's family (from Kure Chuo Middle School). The museum was pretty cool, though I couldn't really take many photos inside, so some of the really great works I wont get to share with you. I think in part I would have appreciated some of the calligraphy works more if I could read more Japanese. I can appreciate the penmanship, but not the meaning behind the kanji. Either way, I've got some photos for you folks :)

I did get to make a calligraphy brush for myself though. It was a very interesting experience, that's for sure!



After visiting the museum and making my paint brush, Mike and I went for a walk and a bit of a shop down the main strip in Kure. We were stopped in at the dollar store picking up a few things when we noticed that, the normally closed, top floor, was now open. And was emitting much noise! I hung onto our bags while mike took a quick peak around. A few moments later he came back with a dumbstruck look on his face. "They have gundams up there. Gundams on sale!! and a little racetrack!! "



We went upstairs to check it out, and they did in fact have a mountain of buildable Gundams in boxes there on sale. We decided to buy one each and build them together. The problem was though, it took a little time for us to find ones we really really liked. The shop keepers (a semi mom and pop shop, that seemingly also looked after the racetrack on the floor) gave us a bag of long green peppers and eggplant with our purchase as well. They were pretty cute. We're hoping to go back next Sunday and thank them properly for it :)







On the topic of Gundams though, Mike and I are thinking of taking a trip to Shizuoka (real close to Tokyo) sometime in the near future. Why do you ask? Because they're celebrating the 30th anniversary of Gundam. The past two years they've built a full size replica of a Gundam model overlooking the outskirts of Tokyo. In case anyone was wondering how big that is, here's a rough photo for you... Pretty awesome. Besides, it'd be fun to give the shinkansen a try. :) (this picture is the one they built last year, this year it's a bit different and has a beam sword!)




I don't think I want to overload this post with photos, so if you'd like, you can head over to my flickr account, where I've made comments on all my pictures that I've uploaded for this day.


Kumano and my Schools~ <----- flickr account!

My first few days teaching classes

Yesterday I spent the whole day at Minato Machi Elementary School. To get to Minato Machi I ride my bike to the train station and then take a 2 minute train ride. From the train station where I get off, it's 1 one minute walk to school. Technically this school is the farthest away but it is very easy to get to. The hardest part of getting to this school is finding a place to put my bike at the station. All over the ground at the station there are signs saying “don’t park your bike here, or it will be taken away.” Of course, most people ignore this completely and put their bikes right on top of the signs. (Generally when I'm coming home, I can see about 100 bikes parked around the station where the no bike parking signs are.) Yesterday I arrived just as the station workers sent out someone to stand where people were putting their bikes to tell people they couldn’t park here. I asked the guy in my broken Japanese, “umm, where? Bike? Is it Okay?” (I’m really mastering this 3 word communication thing.) The man told me there was a place down the road where I could park my bike for 100 yen (about 1.25$). I understood this part, but not where to find the parking. I set off to look for it, but couldn’t find it and didn’t really have the time to look. I ended up following a Japanese middle school student to a spot where she left her bike. Literally just left it. She rode up next to a railing, (still a few feet away) put up her kickstand, and walked off. Her bike was sitting on top of a “no bikes here!” sign. After watching for a while, I decided she wasn't coming back and that it was safe to leave my bike there, so long as it was out of the way.

I fretted about it a bit for the rest of the day. Not knowing if my bike would still be there when I got off, but luckily it was. And so was that Japanese school girl's bike. Either way, I have heard of people having their bikes stolen or towed away from the train station. So maybe next week I’ll just bike the whole way to school.


Yesterday I taught four classes, two 5th grade classes and two 2nd grade classes.
They went fine I’d say. (All my classes yesterday were about my self introduction. They lasted a full 45 minutes with picture and such.) My poor teachers had a bit of a tough time explaining some of my pictures, such as, why I have two mothers in my graduation photos. I think one of my teachers told them that my dad beat my mother, so now he has a new wife. I tried to explain that they were not married anymore, but still friends, but sadly some things are still lost in translation.

My 2nd grade classes went fine. The younger students are very excitable, and will set off at anything. In my last class of the day, the teacher filed the 2nd graders into the room and without any introduction or anything at all just said, “Okgo!” It was a little weird I guess. Normally the teachers like to do their own daily warm ups. But I winged it none the less and jumped right in. This class was pretty rowdy. Generally I’d pass my (laminated, thank goodness) pictures around while I’m talking, but these students just yelled and semi fought over the pictures, so instead, I put them up on the blackboard. That class also had a semi-special needs student. I’m not sure exactly what the deal was. At first I thought she was just rambunctious. But instead the teacher had to devote all her attention to keeping this student sitting, and not running around the room, hitting things, hiding behind the blackboard, or jumping out the window. I guess she was a bit of an ADD student. In the future, if I can, I’d like to involve her in the class doing something productive, such as, giving everyone a handout, holding a picture really high for everyone to see, and so on. I think her running around crazy energy is what’s causing the rest of the students to have a hard time concentrating too.

(the 200 steps!)

Today I spent the first half of my day at RyoJyo Middle school. That’s the school on top of the mountain. Today was a bit cooler, but not enough to make a big difference by the time I got to the top.



Today I taught two grade 9ish classes, a grade 8 class and grade 4(?) class. I’m beat! In my first three classes I did roughly the same lesson. I made a bingo sheet where the students chose words from a list and made their own bingo card. Then, as I was doing my introduction I'd say some of the key words and they’d check them off on their bingo sheet. This worked pretty well once the students understood what they were doing with the bingo sheet. Luckily the Japanese teacher helped me explain. These kind of games are nice, you only need to teach the instructions once. If a few weeks from now we have new vocabulary, I can give them a similar sheet with different words and they’ll understand what to do.


In my second grade 9 class, I gave out Canadian Pennies as prizes for bingo players. In my grade 8 class, I only gave pennies to the students who got two or more bingo lines. These made the pennies worth so much more! Suddenly the damn penny was a coveted item! One girl after class was really admiring a shiny penny, so I gave her one, even though she didn't get a Bingo. She was so excited! Like, “for me? Really!? A..a…..thank you!” Afterwards she even found me on my way to the staff room to say thank you again. Kids here are cute :)


Today there was a typhoon warning sent out. September is typhoon season here in Japan. the edge of the typhoon will just be brushing Kure, so it's nothing to be too concerned about, unless it suddenly changes coarse. Should it change course, I wont have to go to school tomorrow! yay!

A few minutes ago, the sky opened up with rain. The heavy cloud cover has actually made it a bit cooler today. I was still sweating bullets by the time I got to school this morning, but coming home was nice. I was rained on for the last few minutes of my bike ride, which cooled things down.

Lastly, I'd like to leave you all with two songs! These guys are the Yoshida Brothers. A few years ago they came to Victoria to play, but I was unable to see them. The Yoshida Brothers have mastered the Japanese Shamisen, a traditional instrument that is probably one of the most difficult to play.



This song is the first on my playlist of Yoshida Brothers. Every morning I bike to work staring my day with this song. It's very moving!



This one is just another jazzy little number! Plus you can see the music video for this one!