. . . everybody's having fun

Merry Christmas!

I'm at work today, because Christmas is not a public holiday in Japan. It just doesn't feel like Christmas, not at all. Not that I am not having any fun: I got to play hangman and fruits basket today with the first graders, who are just young enough to enjoy playing games (the second graders are too 'cool' for them).

I was looking forward to a white Christmas, but the weather has been doing some very strange things recently. The bitterly cold weather of the middle of the month has ended, the snow has turned back into rain and the sun has come out. It looks like spring is on it's way already, which is ridiculous. The grass even looks greener than it did the other week. Yesterday the ticket booth lady at the train station told me it is the first non-white Christmas she can remember seeing in Konoura, ever. She placed the blame on the shoulders of Global Warming, ignoring the fact that last year's winter was the snowiest in 86 years, with blizzards for the two weeks leading up to Christmas.

Kamagadai however is an utterly different story. 20-30 minute drive away (depending on the driver) though it may be, it has been covered in a constant blanket of snow for three weeks now. I won't be going back to Kamagadai until the start of term three in mid January. By the time I return there, the snow will probably be several metres deep.

On Friday I went to an end of year work party. We all stayed at a onsen/hotel in Yamagata Prefecture all of 30 mintes drive away. We had a dinner and played a lot of silly games, like charades. We also played Secret Santa Bingo. I won a string of Christmas lights, the type designed to be put in ones garden or on ones Christmas tree. As my Chritsmas tree is 10cm tall and I don't have a garden, I have put the lights up on my wall. They look a bit funny because the cables are dark green and my wall is white, but that's okay.

I had a bit of trouble getting to sleep that night because four male teachers in the room next door were playing Mah Jongg until three in the morning, and having a fine time of it if the noise level was any indication.

Yesterday I took the train into Nikaho to pick up my tickets to Seoul. There is a two and a half hour wait between when one train arrives in Nikaho and when the next train back to Konoura leaves. It took me less than 15 minutes to pick up the tickets. What to do with the rest of the time? Go shopping of course. I went to Daiso and surprisingly did not buy much. What I did buy was mostly practical stuff like new kitchen cloths which are cheaper there than at the supermarket, a new paring knife etc. Then I went to the drug store and bought such interesting things as soap, air freshener, pain killers and obscenely cheap sanitary pads. (New Zealand should be ashamed of itself, charging women so much for their necessities. Here in Japan a woman can get a double pack of Whisper pads, 44 in all, for the equivalent of about NZ $3.50 so long as she goes to the drug store and not the supermarket. You can't even get 20 pads for that much in NZ unless you buy No Frills brand, which can't absorb a sparrow's piddle. The downside is that all tampons here are applicator.) Then I went to Max Valu and bought things that aren't available at Konoura Max Valu such as cheese that doesn't taste like soap, croissants that were baked on premesis and not in a factory on the other side of the country somewhere, and a turkey leg. Then I caught the train home again. I am turning into such an adult.

I ordered a Christmas present for myself over the internet, although it probably won't arrive for another couple of weeks. I didn't think of doing so until last week. I ordered three items through Amazon.co.jp's marketplace, from an England-based discount book and CD distributor. What I ordered was two CDs by a group called Mediaeval Baebes: Mirabilis and The Rose. They are not my usual fare, but what is? The Mediaeval Baebes sing songs that for the most part borrow lyrics from mediaeval poetry, to music that they compose that is inspired by real mediaeval music and played on mediaeval instruments such as citerns and recorders. They sing in all sorts of languages: Old English, Latin, 11th century Irish, 15th century Spanish, French, Russian . . . Good stuff. It's not all flowery high-brow stuff either. One of my favourite songs of theirs tells part of Chaucer's 'Milleres Tale' or possibly another fabliaux of very similar theme. Another song on the same album is a 15th century Welsh poem that was outlawed because it was in praise of female genitalia. It's such a pretty sounding song too; what a laugh! Not all of their songs are crude; they have also done renditions of Scarborough Fair and the story of Tam Lin.

The third thing I ordered for myself is the new book by Bryan Sykes, Blood of the Isles. I already own 'The Seven Daughters of Eve' and 'Adam's Curse'. I can't wait to get my hands on Blood of the Isles. I guess that not everyone is as interested as me in books on human genetics, but if you are, you really ought to read Bryan Sykes' books.

Anyway, everyone reading this either: I hope you have a merry Christmas or; I hope you had a merry Christmas.

And let's all have a Happy New Year.

Kiritanpo

The other week I made kiritanpo for myself for dinner one night. Kiritanpo is a traditional dish of Akita Prefecture.

The ingredients I used were:
Chicken soup stock that came in a packet from the supermarket

Kiritanpo. These are made of rice that has been wrapped around a stick and then lightly grilled by an open fire.

They are cut like this before being cooked.Chicken
Vegetables. Specifically, leek, chinese cabbage, Japanese parsely (both leaves and roots), burdock root and long white mushroom thingies.
Here it all is boiling.
And here it is served.

Sick, sick, sick

I have a cold, a real one this time not a mini-cold caught eating lunch with hundreds of kids. I feel wretched.

On Saturday morning I helped out with a Christmas party for the Challenge Club kiddies. I think I mentioned it last week. Anyway, it was lots of fun. We made advent calendars, ate junk food (only one mother brought along nice healthy fruit to the tea time - everyone else brought chocolate, cookies, chippies etc.) and then played a few games. At the end I read 'The Night Before Christmas' to them. Someone else read the Japanese version of the book to the kids. Whoever did the Japanese translation did not bother to rhyme the sentences or even to put any rhythm into them; it is pure prose. It sounded odd.

That evening Miwa came to my house and we looked at some travel books for Korea. I couldn't read them of course, but I pointed out pictures of places I thought looked interesting and food I thought looked good. I really should start studying some Korean phrases and written Hangeul. It will make things easier for me.

Yesterday I had to go shopping because there were some things I had to buy. I didn't really want to go because I already had a cold, but I had no choice. Because I went out into the cold while sick yesterday, that is why I feel so bad today.

Flicker and Dash

My airplane ticket to South Korea is ordered and hotel room reserved. I went to the travel agents with Miwa last Friday. There is a bit of trouble with my travel insurance in that because I have health insurance through the JET Programme I only want to buy baggage insurance, but the travel agent will not sell me it separately. Either it comes as an add-on to health insurance or you can't buy it at all. I'm sure I will get it sorted out. Either that or I will go without my luggage insured. No biggie, I suppose: I didn't have my baggage insured when I went to England last year either.

Things have been a bit boring recently because (shhh) Atsuko has a new boyfriend although that is a secret, at least from people on this end, and the weather is bad so I can't muster the motivation to go somewhere by myself on the weekends. But inversely work has been fairly busy recently. I have been asked to help at the Nikaho City Challenge Club (weekend English club for elementary kids) this Saturday. We are going to have a Christmas party. Yay! I will make Xmas cards with little kids and then read them a simple Xmas story book. Also, this week and next week I will be spending my Thursday evenings teaching useful English phrases to the 13 Jr. High kids and their parents who will be going to NZ in January. They will be staying in homestay, and since they are mostly 1st graders their English is not very good. I don't get to go with them, despite how much I could help out, being a Kiwi myself and all; I just get to teach them a bit of English. In one month time they will be in Christcurch and then in the Wellington sun and I will be here in the Akita snow . . .

AAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Today there is more than 80 yen to the NZ dollar! I want to send money home, but the exchange rate is against me. When will the NZ dollar weaken? I've been waiting for months and months . . .

Nanhan

I see that I haven't been blogging much recently. This is a combination of being eternally just a little bit sick, of being up to my eyebrows in 'The Dark Tower' series by Stephen King, and of being lazy.

The reason I can't get entirely well is because every week I go to the elementary school, and so every week I am exposed to kid-germs. The perils of being a teacher.

I haven't really done anything over the last two weeks. Last Sunday I went to the school festival at Kamagadai. Because I had to get up early in the morning, I did not go out on Saturday night. Anyway, at the festival the students performed speeches, research projects, a piece of music and a play. Because there are so few students at the school, every single student had to participate in the concert, all the elementary students had to talk about their research, and all the Jr. High kids had to perform in the play.

Afterwards we had a mochi-zuki taikai (rice-cake making competition). We all had to take turns at bashing the rice with a mallet, me included. What we made was mochi - a sticky heavy play-doh like food. I know it sounds disgusting, but actually I'm quite fond of mochi. Then we ate lunch: mochi with boiled red beans (azuki), mochi with white bean powder (can't remember the name) and mochi in vegetable soup (zouni) and one mandarin each. Although I like all three dishes, especially zouni, eating them all together is very hard on the stomach. Straight after lunch there was volleyball. Although the volleyball was a student vs. parent tournament, I had to play too because of the scarcity of Jr. High students. I hadn't played volleyball for a decade or more. Despite that I did better than the parents if not as good as the students, so I didn't embarrass myself.

When I got home I ate some left-overs from the night before and then lay down to take a nap. I woke up 45 minutes later with the most painful stomach I can remember having experienced. It had bloated up up so that I looked 7 or 8 months pregnant, and was very hard. Moving sent stabs of pain shooting through me as if my stretched flesh were about to give way and rip open. It must have been the mochi of course. My stomach is just not used to eating so much of it at once. It probably didn't help that the left-overs I had eaten had been curry. I actually wondered if my appendix had burst, and if I were about to die. But I told myself I was being stupid, that it was my own fault and that there was nothing I could do about it. So I went back to bed for another 3 hours and when I woke up again I was mostly better again. But I still had a sore stomach on Monday. Then, horror of horrors, the school lunch was curry bread and zouni, the lumps of mochi floating therein laughing at me I'm sure. *sigh*

I have one other bit of news. It looks as if I will be going to South Korea over winter vacation. Nuclear missiles, bird flu and -7 degree temperatures aside, it is a great opportunity. I will be going with Miwa, and Miwa can speak Korean. As well as being able to navigate Seoul with ease, Miwa can also book hotels that only locals usually know about, instead of the over-priced ones tourists usually end up in. This means as well as my trip being language confusion-free, it will also be cheap. Yay!

New Arrivals

Congradulations Gillian and Ant!

Winter or merely Autumn?

The weather today is a perfect example of mid-winter Wellington region weather: it's alternating between rain and sleet, it is very windy and it's about 5 degrees. But it is still officially autumn, and will remain so until the first snow falls.

The kerosene heaters in the staff room have been fired up, so I have a headache from the fumes. They stink!

For the past two weeks there has been a thunderstorm practically every day. I don't remember there being so many last year or the year before. Last Wednesday there were only three people at my English conversation class because no one wanted to brave the weather, even with cars. I had to go, and of course I had to go by foot. I walked there last night too, in the middle of a thunderstorm. I didn't take an umbrella with me because I thought it would be a bit dangerous.

Last Saturday I went shopping in Akita City. I went by myself, by train. My umbrella broke while I was walking about. On Sunday I went with Atsuko and Toshi to Sakata City. We ate at a tonkatsu (pork cutlet) restaurant. It tasted rather ordinary to me. Then we went to a big new butchery that we had seen an article about on TV. The butchery is owned by a farm outside town, so the meat you buy there has never been frozen. They sold all sorts of things there, but mostly made out of pork. A friendly employee let us try lots of little bits of cooked meat. I ate little sections of sausages, bacon, raw ham, cooked ham, sausages with peas in them . . . I'm not usually a big fan of pork, but the meat from that butchery is delicious, it really is. I bought an uncut section of bacon to take home with me.

It was very cold that day. My cellphone told me that the weather was snowy. It didn't snow in Nikaho or Sakata, but it did snow in Akita City, apparently. And I heard on Tuesday that it had snowed that weekend up at Kamagadai, although it had not lasted long. It looks as if the snows will be coming early this year. Although it has been horrible leaving my apartment to go out places recently, it has been nice to listen to the rain on the window panes and the wind whistling around the building in the evenings. I ought to enjoy those sounds while I can, because soon they will be replaced by the gentle fall of snow, and the blanketed silence that follows.

Another Brick In The Wall

I found it! There are several different videos for Pink Floyds 'Another Brick In The Wall' but I finally found the one that I remember seeing on TV when I was 2 or 3. I remember being freaked out by the teacher mincing the kids, but I didn't remember the walking hammers at all. Enjoy!

This Post Has No Title

For some reason last week did not really leave a big impression on me. I had Monday off because I'd had to work the previous Saturday. I can't really remember what I did that day. In the evening I went to Yosakoi practice, I remember that much.

Last Tuesday I spent all day doing Halloween lessons at Kamagadai. The elementary kids even dressed up and went trick-or-treating around the school. The staff all got into the swing of it, and the school principal, vice-principal, elementary teachers and all Jr. High teachers who did not have a class that period were walking around with bags of candy ready to be trick-or-treated. It was so much fun. I wish I could do such things at my other schools, but it is impossible when you have lots of students.

On Wednesday my English conversation class was on holiday because the Community Centre was busy.

On Thursday I went to work only to find that Mr. Togashi was on a business trip and therefore I would have no classes for the entire day. Did he tell me before hand so I could prepare and bring something else to work to do? Of course not.

Friday was a public holiday. It was raining so I did nothing other than mess around on the internet, wash dishes and read comics.

Saturday evening I went into Honjo to say goodbye to Sayaka. We drank a little at an izakaya (kind of the Japanese version of a pub, i.e. there is both alcohol and decent food). I was going to stay out later and go to a bar as well, but for some reason my stomach started hurting. I went home early with Atsuko (who had a cold), all the while thinking that as soon as I got home I would feel better and regret having left. But I was wrong. My stomach got worse and I spent the rest of the evening feeling very uncomfortable indeed.

On Sunday morning I could not eat anything because I still felt icky. But I went out anyway. Not far, just to the supermarket and then to Atsuko's house. Atsuko, Toshi and I ate shabu-shabu (again). Before that, we were watching TV. There was a travel special on, and it was all about New Zealand. These two rather bizarre people went to NZ and showed us their adventures. But I use the word 'around' lightly. First they were in Auckland, and the very first thing the man did was go to a fish and chips shop. Then they bought wine, went to an expensive restaurant and stayed at the Sky Tower Hotel. Because normal tourists do that all the time. Then they went to Matamata to look at hobbits. They spent about 15 minutes of the programme on Matamata. They also went to Rotorua to learn the Haka, to a kauri museum up north, and then they stayed on this guy's farm in some teeny weeny place up north and helped with the sheep. And that was about it. They didn't go any farther south than Rotorua. I hope this programme continues next week, and that is not all of NZ that NHK thought worth showing.

This morning I once again woke up with a painfully stiff neck, this time on the right side. It happened to me for the first time two weeks ago on the left side of my neck. I thought at the time that it was a one-off event, but apparently not. I guess I must be turning into an old woman.

Enough, already

I have been feeling unwell for several weeks now, off and on. It's an on-going cold that just won't go away. Yesterday was bad and today is possibly worse. Of course I have to work today; it's PTA day. Can't have a cold on a Saturday without also being busy at the same time, now can I? The good news is that I look so damned wretched that all the staff noticed and started giving me various medicines. This alerted the Principal to my woes, and I will be able to go home after lunch even though I was supposed to have a class this afternoon. Yay for bloodshot eyes and sheet-white complexions!

It is hard for me to keep my head up as I type. It keeps sagging like a windsock in summer.

I got to go home early on Wednesday too. I looked wretched that day, and since there was a big meeting for all teachers that afternoon and no one would even be at the elementary but the cleaner, the elementary Principal said "Go home and get some rest."

I really must look as bad as I feel. Usually when I am sick no one notices unless I sneeze, but not this time.

Photo Treasure Hunt

Here are the photos I entered into the photo treasure hunt competition.

1. Most Classic Gaijin Moment
This is me doing one of the early steps of the tea ceremony. I am cleaning the spoon with a ceremonial cloth. The first year ALT who held the competition introduced this photo as "Someone sitting on tatami reading a book." I had to yell out and correct him, first time of many.

2. Oldest Fruit And Vegetable Vendor

Unfortunately the ancient old woman who usually works here was on holiday, and her daughter (?) was on duty.

3. Most Beautiful Japanese Panorama

4. Most Shocking Fashion Statement

This time the guy doing the competition only showed the top half of the photo and said "It's . . . a girl in a kimono . . ." and I had to yell out "Show the legs, that's the whole point!" Because that is the point: every Japanese person who has seen this photo has gasped and said "I can see her legs!" in a scandaled voice. But I suppose I shouldn't have expected ALTs to understand that.

5. Biggest Beer Container

Everyone seemed to miss the point that in this photo the 'beer container' was Toshi, not the cans. I feel so misunderstood, just like a real artist. When I asked Toshi to pose for this photo, he said "Wait," and put his sunglasses on first. I don't know why.

6. Least Appetising Item In The Grocery Store

7. Most Appetising Item In The Grocery Store

8. Best 'Engrish' T-shirt

I won this category.

9. Most Classic Japanese House

This picture was taken at Atsuko's house because it was after Toshi had abandoned us there with no car so that he could go and get his hair cut.

10. A Picture Of A Buddhist Monk

I won this category too. Because everyone else did the competition only with ALTs, no one else had a friend with them who knew the family of a buddhist monk well enough to ask one to dress up and pose even though the temple was officially closed and the monk in question was just about to go and play golf in a purple paisley shirt.

11. Most Creative Use Of A Daikon

This is the Shirase Memorial Museum in Konoura. And a daikon (Japanese radish).

12. Most Shocked Bystander

Yes, it's posed. You try getting a photo of a shocked bystander when you have to wear an armband saying 'photographer' on it.

13. Biggest Item You Can Pick Up Using Chopsticks

This apple clock used to be famous among ALTs as being the strange clock in the legendary Amanda's apartment. But no one seemed to remember it.

14. Funkiest Keicar (small car with a yellow numberplate saying it has different insurance because it is so light and would get creamed in any accident)

There were no funky keicars, so I just entered a picture of a normal keicar to fill in the blank. People booed this picture. Gaijin are so rude.

15. Most Interesting Rice Field

This picture got lost and didn't even end up in the competition.

Bonus: Most Delicious Thing You Ate For Lunch

Gusto soup (not that good, but better than the rest of the 'meal.' This picture got lost too, and I got made out to look like an idiot because I 'neglected' to send a picture of food.

I guess you can tell I still feel very bitter about the competition. Getting booed and having no one cheer for you in a cheering competition does that to people.

One conclusion I came to during the conference last week is that gaijin really are very rude. Not just the competition, but during the lectures and speeches and such. Half the ALTs there were so disrespectful, it made me so stressed to witness it. There, I've said it. Japanese = polite. Foreigners = rude. And yet I still hear so many complaints about Japanese 'stereotyping' of foreiners as having no manners.