update

Hi everyone,

just a quick update to say I've changed the links at the bottom of my previous blog post. They now are public links to pictures on my facebook album. Now, those of you whom I don't have on facebook, can see them.

YAAAY...

michelle

Kyoto and Shizuoka

For our birthdays, Mike and I decided that we would go on a trip. So this weekend being a long weekend (4 days off) for me we packed up our bags and went to shizuoka city in shizuoka.

Day 1

We left on Saturday morning at 10am, and caught the train to Hiroshima, from hiroshima, we bought a Shinkansen (or “Bullet Train”) ticket to Kyoto. If you look on a map, you will see that Kyoto is roughly half of the way between Shizuoka City and Hiroshima. I was hoping to stay for a night in Kyoto, but because it’s a very popular season, we couldn’t find a hotel in any part of Kyoto or outlying areas or cities. In Kyoto, we met one of my old students, Shota, whom I taught at uvic for a few months. Shota and I kept in touch after he returned to Japan and it was nice to see him again. Because we only had a few hours in Kyoto before we needed to be back on the Shinaknsen to Shizuoka to make it in time to check in to the hotel, Shota took us to a very famous, but luckily nearby temple. This temple was called Kiyomizu, and has one of the most famous views of Kyoto. We walked for about 15 minutes shoulder to shoulder with other patrons up the temple hill, surrounded by souvenir merchants and vendors. From the top of the hill, you could enter the temple grounds and take in the scenery. Because Saturday was a very hazy day all over Japan, the view wasn’t as spectacular as perhaps it would be on clear day. However, we could certainly see why so many people come to Kyoto in November. In November, the Japanese Maple trees change their colours. Suddenly, Kyoto becomes the Japanese version of Boston in the fall. The maple trees surrounding Kyoto become completely scarlet.

After our visit to the shrine, we headed back to the train station to catch the Shinkansen. When buying a shinkansen ticket, you can choose to buy a reserved ticket, in the reserved sections or, non reserved ticket in the free for all sections. While the reserved seats are a bit more expensive, you won’t be forced to stand on the train, like mike and I did for part of the trip to kyoto. We decided not to buy a reserved ticket though, seeing as though we had enough time to line up to get a seat for our train. Plus, the train we were going to take had 2 extra non reserved sections to sit in. When the Shinkansen arrived we hopped on the train and jumped into the first non reserved seats we found. We found it a bit odd that people who had gotten on the train before us didn’t sit in those seats, but moved on to other ones. After being seated for a moment a fellow came up to us motioning at the seats, and showed us his ticket. His ticket had those seat numbers on them, apologizing greatly we hurriedly found another set of seats. A few minutes later, when the train had left the station, a train attendant came around and checked everyone’s tickets. He checked our tickets just fine, but a moment later took out a pen and paper. He proceeded to point at our tickets, go umm and uhh, for a few moments, and then write a few lines on the paper. I checked the time on my phone, and suddenly it dawned on me what it was all about. The train we were supposed to be on hadn’t even left the station yet. Not only were we sitting in a reserve section; we were on the wrong train! The nice train attendant gave us the information on how to transfer at the next stop onto our correct train, but he also didn’t ask us to move from our seats. The next station was Nagoya. Luckily, the train we were supposed to catch also stopped in Nagoya about 5 minutes later.

Hopping into some seats on the correct train, we pleasantly enjoyed the last of our journey to Shizuoka.

Once arriving in Shizuoka, we made our way out of the station to the nearby hotel where we were staying. That night we ate in the hotel restraunt. The food was alright, though the portions were mostly tapa sized.

Day 2 Shizuoka:

On the second day of our adventure, we got up around 9 am and headed downstairs to our complementary breakfast of a boiled egg, salad, toast and croissant. Not a normal breakfast for either of us, but the change was nice. Afterwards we headed out towards the gundam! We asked the hotel staff what the best way to get there was. They suggested taking the train for about 3 minutes, but at that distance we just decided we would walk it and see some scenery. Although it was ridiculously hot for a day in November (was about 18 in the sun that day) there was a nice cool breeze. I’m glad we walked to the gundam, because on the way, we caught a glimpse of Mt. Fuji! Though without snow.. After about 20 minutes of walking we could see the tip of a gundam head peaking over some of the buildings. The Shizuoka Hobby fair was about two minutes away from the train station in Higashi Shizuoka. The Hobby Fair contained other things than gundams, but it certainly was the main attraction. Inside the Hobby fair were food vendors, a stage where later a juggler performed, a hobby museum, and a giant inflated ship being eaten by a giant orange octopus/kraken that doubled as a children’s slide. (I really wanted to go down this, but I was a bit big...) Inside the Hobby museum there were all sorts of old models, and old model boxes. I took a fair amount of pictures, so I think they can explain themselves. Afterwards, we visited the gift shop, and had our picture taken with the giant gundam as as well as taking our own pictures.

Afterwards we took the train back home and relaxed our tired legs in the hotel room before heading out to find some dinner. That night we decided to try our hand at some ramen. It wasn’t bad, but we both agreed that we much prefer buckwheat noodles called Soba.

Day 3 shopping in Shizuoka

Day three, Monday, which was my birthday, we decided we would go visit the Nihon Daira Zoo, We saw it advertised on a poster at the train station when we were coming back the previous day. Before we headed out to go to the zoo we decided to check the website to see their hours and it turns out they were closed on Mondays. Rain pouring outside, we weren’t really sure what to do with our day after that. Only knowing that we would probably want an umbrella what ever we did we set out to go to the nearby 7/11 to get one. This sort of lead into our walking adventure of Shizuoka city. We found a few malls where Mike bought me some Body Shop lotion for my birthday, we found a Soba restraunt for lunch, and also where I bought a whole bunch of leggings and leg warmers to wear for work. That night we chanced upon a really nice restraunt serving some of the nicest North American style food we’d had since we arrived. Plus, they also had a bread and drink bar, where after paying your fee, could help yourself to fresh bread and non alcoholic drinks. The bread really was fresh, too. Whenever they brought out fresh bread from the kitchen, they would ring a bell and shout the type of bread it was. Also, it was quite reasonably, coming to roughly the same price of our ramen dinner the night before.

During dinner, mike looked across the table to a shop behind me and said, “Hey, that’s a music store. And look, they even have ukuleles.” Before leaving to Japan, I had mentioned to Mike that I was interested in learning to play the ukulele. It’s a bit of a silly instrument but seemed like it would be a lot of fun. I had thought about it some when arriving in Japan, but not seeing any music stores close by, I hadn’t thought too much more about it. After dinner we went over and I chose out a beginners Ukulele and Mike bought it for me as an early Christmas gift.

After dinner, I had a nice hot bath in the hotel room’s tub with my new bubbles and lotions from the Body Shop.

Day 4

After finding out that the zoo was closed yesterday, we decided to delay returning to Kure until the afternoon so we could visit the zoo in the morning.

After having our final complementary breakfast, we headed down to the Shizuoka Station. There, we found a coin locker to put all our bags in and took a train down towards the zoo. We ended up sharing a taxi from the station with another japanese woman who was also going to the zoo. There was a bus that went from the zoo to the station and back, but the next one wasn’t going to leave for another hour.

At the zoo we saw all sorts of animals, some in better condition that others. While entertaining, some of them seemed pretty bored. Such as the hyenas that just walked back and forth in their cages, and the polar bear that did continuous back flips into the water.

It was an enjoyable morning anyways. At around 1:30 we headed off to the station to get onto the Shinkansen and headed home! The trip home was pretty uneventful with us catching the correct trains, hah.

Over all it was a nice trip and we both had a great time.

all the photos can be viewed here in set #1 and set # 2 for those of you on my facebook friend's list.

Miyajima and Yamato Museum Adventure

Hello everyone,

I'm here today to tell you about our adventure of two (or three?) weeks ago. Mike and I went to the island of Miyajima, in the inland sea. To get to Miyajima, we took two trains and a ferry ride :) in all, it took about 1 and a half hours. The ferry ride took only about 7-10 minutes.

As with before, I've uploaded the majority of the photos to my Flickr account, which is linked here: Miyajima and Yamato

Miyajima was kind of fun, but it was quite hot that day, so it was sort of uncomfortable. There was a lot of things we wanted to see, but often involved climbing a mountain, or a whole load of stairs or something. We decided we'd come back again another day when it was cooler so we could see more of the island.

Miyajima is inhabited by loads of deer. (and also monkeys, though we didn't see any wild ones, only one trained pet monkey) The deer are so accustomed to large groups of people and eating anyhting and everything, that it was very difficult to eat on the island. A few times deer stuck their heads in my low pockets and ate what they found there (reciepts at first). On the way back to the ferry terminal, we saw a deer accost some poor guy of his travel brocoure and ate the front and back page.

Because Hiroshima is famous for growing oysters, there were many oyster stalls grilling fresh oysters and serving them. We decided to eat shaved ice instead. (Mike had cola flavour, I had mango) which was a nice reprieve from the heat.

One of the fames of Miyajima, is the giant "Torii" gate in the water. When we were there that day, the water was out, but it did mean we could walk up and touch the gate. Otherwise the gate seems to just float along the top (although it isn't really floating..)

A week later, Mike, our neighbour Alex, and I went to see the Kure/ yamato battleship museum. I liked the museum, and they even provided us with an engish audio tour, but I defenitely would have appreciated it more if I could read more Japanese. Most of the museum didn't allow photos, so I only have a few...

The top floor of the museum was the coolest though. It had a lot of what seemed like science fair toys. you got to play with (water) wave systems and all sorts of things I can't actually explain but were fun.

Tonight I'm going to go have a shower and then maybe trim my bangs. (I'm starting to need a haircut haha)

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!

One more day...

Today is my last full day in Canada. Knowing this, my brain said, "Hey! it's5:30 am! It's daylight out!! Why are you still sleeping?!" to which the rest of my body replied, "Feck off!". However, by about 6:30 the SkyTrain said, "VROOM-WHOOSH-SMASH-SMASH-THUMPTHUMP-SMASH-WHOOSH" and repeatedly exclaimed this every 5-7 minutes until I got up.

So today not only marks my last full day in Canada, it also marks the earliest I've been out of bed (in this time zone) since the Christmas of '98. (Well, that's not entirely true, but it's certainly how it feels.)

Today is my last predeparture orientation, followed by a reception at the Consulate General of Japan's residence. I hope to be able to have some nice photos to update with tomorrow.

(Left: all my belongings!) (Right: Dad and I infront of his house)

Last Tuesday I spent the afternoon with my Dad and Mike, visiting and going for a walk and a coffee. It was a very beautiful day, but rather hot at times. I'm glad I got to spend time with them together before I leave. I was doing pretty good, holding my composure when saying goodbye, but I got pretty teary in the car on the drive home. Sadly, I didn't get to see Georgia that day. (So Georgia, if you're reading this, I'm sorry I missed you!!)

I took a bunch of photos that day, but I think this one is my favourite of us together.

As always, click to view the photos in a larger size! (though I'm not sure anyone cares to see my luggage in more detail haha)

..And we're off!

Well, the time is finally here! I've headed off to Vancouver! I wont update about it now, because I have loads of pictures to upload and post still. So here's a teaser picture! taken by mike via his iPhone at the BC ferry terminal today!

Sorry I'm so glaringly white, but it was a very sunny day!