Speech Contest and stuff

I am so tired.

For about two weeks, I have been staying late at school to help train a couple of students for the Yuri Honjo Speech and Recitation Competition that we had this week. So I am tired.

On Saturday I went with Atsuko to Honjo. I had to take puri kura (those little stickers) of myself (alone - so lonely!) to use at the competition. We met up with Mariko, a friend of Atsuko's. After I had the puri kura taken, we went to buy cakes at a specialist cake shop. Buying expensive cakes was something I never did before I came to Japan because it seemed like such a waste of money. I would just buy supermarket stuff. But now that I have the money, I have learnt how much more delicious real cakes are than supermarket ones, or even than corner bakery ones. Also, it is nice to have your cakes put in a white cardboard box and then tied with a pretty ribbon.

Anyway, I bought a small blanc mange and a slice of a chocolate cream-filled chocolate roll. Both Atsuko and Mariko bought three cakes. I cannot eat as much cake as Japanese women can. I feel sick while they are still saying "Maybe I should have bought more . . ." Come to think of it, because I have never really sat down to eat individual (ot shared) cakes with people from other countries, maybe it is not just Japanese women who can eat more cake than me, it is most people. I don't know.

We went back to Nikaho City to eat lunch at Kitchen Morimoto in Nikaho (I had chicken curry) and then we continued on to Atsuko's house to eat our cakes. We talked until dinner time, and then Mariko went home and Atsuko and I went to Sumiko's house. We had not been there for a long time. Umeko the tiny cat is not so tiny anymore, and she is also not so evil anymore. We ate pizza, gyoza and salad, and watched TV.

On Sunday I went for a walk to take pictures of the rice fields before the harvest. On my travels I met a very photogenic dragonfly. It was sitting on a wooden post and would not give it up no matter how much I invaded it's personal space. First he shuffled over on his post as far as he could to get away from me. Then when I put my camera even closer, he would just fly in a short loop and land in the same spot again after I pulled away. I took nineteen photos of the dragonfly before I decided to move on. After taking photos of the rice fields on my way back home, I deiscovered that the dragonfly still had not moved.

I skipped dance on both Monday and Tuesday because I was busy and tired. Not only did I stay late at work training the girls, but I also had to prepare for the ALT games and activities that were held for the speech participants in the afternoon after the speeches had finished.

On Tuesday I was at Kamagadai in the morning. The school lunch there that day was goya champloo, a dish from Okinawa. It is a kind of stew, but the main vegetable indredient is goya. I had only heard of goya recently. It looks like a bumpy, ugly mutant cucumber, and the taste it so bitter! It tastes like that stuff people put on their nails to stop them from biting them. Now I know that I am known as the girl who licks that stuff off and then bites her nails, but This was a whole stew of it. I ate it but it was not fun. About half the students had trouble eating their goya, and one boy couldn't eat it at all.

Yesterday was the speech contest. This year there were four student of mine at the contest, two from Konoura and two from Kamagadai. The first student of mine to perform was Mitsuki, a girl from Konoura. She did a recitation. I was quite surprised the first time I heard that Mitsuki would be taking part in the competition. She is a weak sickly girl who hardly ever makes it through a day of school without leaving before lunch time. She is very smart academically, but she is so quiet and shy that she can barely speak. Because she did a recitation, she did not have to make her own speech and so I spent a lot of time encouraging her to speak louder and to use emotion in her voice. When she did her performance, she was very quiet, although louder than she usually is. There was not much emotion in her voice, but more than there was before. I am proud that she was able to get better, because that is something that is difficult for her.

The student from Kamagadai who did a recitation was Kengo. He is actually only a second grade student, but because there is only one third grade student at Kamagadai, a second grader had to perform. Despite being younger than most of the other contestants, I think Kengo did a good job. His speech was a bit rough and jerky. You could tell he had learned each word individually (many of the words in his speech he had not seen before he started practicing). But not bad at all.

The student from Konoura who did an original speech was Hiromi. She and Mitsuki are best friends. Hiromi did not do very well at all, but I don't think she was to blame. To tell the truth, the English teacher only finished translating her speech into English (she wrote the speech in Japanese) a week before the contest. Most students practised for a large portion of, if not all of, summer vacation. I felt so sorry for her and so angry at Mr. Togashi. Of course she had trouble remembering her speech. She had hardly any time to remember it in.

The boy from Kamagadai who had to to a speech was Hironori. This boor boy is the only kid in his class and grade in his school (which by the way was the subject of his speech) so he had to do a speech if he wanted to or not. Unluckily for him his English is terrible. He hates English. He did a lot better than anyone expected though. He managed to remember most of his speech. He just had trouble remembering which sentence came next. He took a copy of his speech with him and when he started to struggle, his teacher signalled him to look at it. No one is angry at him for that, because it really was a miracle that he could even get up there in the first place, poor kid.

In the afternoon we had the ALT activities. Each of us set up a stall showing interesting things about our respective countries to the students. I taught many kids about Wellington, netball, Maori, weta, kiwi and extreme sports (or what I know of them anyway). While I was doing that activity, I was reminded of how some other ALTs can not speak Japanese, and that the Japanese people who know them are used to talking about foreigners within their hearing, "because they can't understand anyway." An English teacher and her students standing less than two metres away from me while waiting for their turn at my stall, were talking about me in Japanese. "She's big." "But look at her boobs. Japanese people don't have boobs like that!" "Yes. And her hair. Japanese people don't have hair like that either." I am right here, why are you talking about me like that?!