Four days of being a tourist in Japan

I went on a trip to Hirsohima Friday-Sunday with friends and then Kyoto and Nara with my grade 6 classes Monday-Tuesday. The pictures are in reverse order that I took them, so bare with me. (I'm still not friends with blogspot's treatment of photo placement)




On my field trip I saw 7 temples in 2 days. That's a whole lotta Buddha. One of them is also featured on the 10Yen coin (check it out on Wikipedia) Another one in Nara is home to one of the biggest wooden Buddahs, and is, if i recall correctly, over 2,000 years old. It's also huge and has many deer who live around it. The deer are very friendly and poop everywhere. For the rest of the day the bus smelled
vaugly of deer poop. lovely.



































The one of me standing on a mountain is on Miwajima Island, just off of Hirsohima. On the Saturday we took the cable car up most of the way and then climbed the the very top for some spectacular views and then clambered down. Miwajima is also home to the "floating" tori, apparently one of the most scenic spots in all of Japan, and also, like Nara, many deer. The deer here were more depressing though and I saw one eating garbage off the beach and it saddened me. But it was quite beautiful aside from that.


















At night we went out for Hiroshima- yaki, which is Hiroshima's special version of Okonomiyaki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki) and walking about the town. For a city that doesn't have a single building older than 60 years old it's pretty impressively built up. I found the random orb on an early morning walk, and looked at the cities rather uniformly modern architecture.



We spent Sunday in Hiroshima visiting the A-bomb dome (a building that was still standing-more or less- after the bomb was dropped,) and the Peace Museum. It was very well done and fairly even sided. The park surrounding the museum and A-bomb dome is full of memorials and paper cranes. The cranes are have become an international symbol of peace, due to the story of the little girl, named Sadako, suffering from leukemia, (a byproduct of being exposed to radiation when the bomb went off) who tried to make 1,000 paper cranes, which upon completion would make her wish to get better come true. She didn't finish them but every year kids come and bring their own 1,000 cranes with the wish that no bombs will ever be dropped again.

Highlights of the past 2 weeks

In no particular order...

-Purging Myrie's apartment of all the random crap her predecessor left, and finding a closet in the process
-Holding 2 small salamanders/newts/geckos(?) in my hand at Ochidani after school. I was hesitant at first, but last time I was there I held a tooth so I thought I should keep up this new tradition of holding strange things
-Dancing in Osaka from 12-5am because the train station where we locked our stuff got locked up at 12, and at 3:30 when we really wanted to sleep it was only there was only 1hr 1/2 left till we could get it. Also, there were models to dance with! Hilarious.
-Hosting a Canadian Thanksgiving dinner attended by 3 Brits, 4 Canadians, 1 Aussie, 2 USA-ians and 4 Irish
-Playing poker in Wadayama with Myrie and some other ALTs and making 10Yen instead of losing it all like last time
-Attending a Fall Festival (aki matsuri) complete with men (who weren't wearing pants) carrying portable shrines, simple tea-ceremony, and drinking a beer with my boss in front of my neighbourhood at 11am
-Wearing pants comfortably
-Meeting a former professional volleyball player who lives in my town and lived in Holland for 5 years
-Finding boots in Kobe that fit me! First time I’ve seen women’s shoes in my size!
-Baskin Robbins “pumpkin pudding” and “ghost world” ice cream, it’s no DQ pumpkin blizzard but it’s pretty good.
-Teaching the ni-nenseis (grade 2 kids) in Awaga solo while the teacher escorted a kid to the nurses office as he was bleeding from the head (he then went to the hospital to get stitches) and having them actually listen to me
-Having a conversation in Spanish for about 30minutes with an Irish friend, while waiting outside a “police box” for a cab, that a police man had nicely called for us, at 3am.
-Finding a church that had headsets so I could listen in English, after over 2 months of no church I was in serious withdrawl
- And by finding I mean approaching a 6ft black man at a train station, asking if he could help me, as I was trying to get to church. He said he was also going to church and showed me the bus that was waiting.
-Having dinner at a Spanish bar in Kobe’s Chinatown

So they let me be a teacher...

(Photos of Ochidani)

I have just realized that I haven't really talked about what it's like to actually be a teacher while in Japan, which is the main reason that I'm here. I guess that's because it hasn't really be routine until recently. There have been a lot of days off, random practice days for Sports Festival practice etc. but now things have settled into a rhythm, which I shall now try to explain.

The basics are that I work Monday-Friday. Monday-Thursday from 7:50-4:35, Friday from 7:50-11:50. I don't teach the whole time I'm at school, the most is five 45 minute lessons/day, but that usually is just on Thursdays. Most often I teach three 45 minute lessons/day and fill my time doing miscellaneous things.

Mondays and Thursdays I teach at Kanzaki Junior High (JHS). I have 2 JTEs (Japanese Teachers of English) that I work with, Kimura-sensei and Fujimoto-sensei. Fujimoto-sensei I think is more in charge of me that Kimura, as he's usually the one to explain any changes to the class schedule of the day, but that might just be because we sit at the same block of desks. Regardless, they are friendly enough and classes with them are easy for me. I mostly act as a tape recorder in class, pronouncing words in my wonderful Canadian accent, sometimes ad nauseum. (Today's loveliness was saying "toilet" about 20 times). Sometimes I feel bad for the students because it doesn't always feel like learning so much as 45 minutes of "test how fast you can memorize" but ultimately, languages do involve memorization I just wish it wasn't so rapid fire.

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday I work at an elementary school. Either Awaga (the biggest with around 250 students in total), Ohyama (about 100 students), or Ochidani (about 60 students). Usually I will work two days at Awaga and one at either Ohyama or Ochidani. I am given lesson plans to work with, but because there are so many schools and so many kids, even though I teach more days at elementary schools, it takes about a month for me to have taught the same lesson to all kids. This too can feel a little repetitive, but because every time I go into the classroom at elementary schools, even with the same lesson plan, things change based on the homeroom teacher's understanding of the lesson and understanding of English. Added to this is that I teach the same lesson from grade 1 through to grade 6, so "It's a cat" "It's a monkey" changes difficulty levels. It means that I get creative, based on how tired I am of a lesson.

Yesterday at Ochidani a highlight was playing "erase a man" (instead of hangman, suicide is a touchy subject here so I thought I'd leave that alone). After teaching them the new vocabulary, I would draw a person on the black board along with the blanks for a word. There are a few tricks-- there are many 3 letter words, and to keep it interesting I usually have the first few guesses be wrong. The last word I did was monkey, and I made my stick person a little girl. Sure enough, things started going well but then there was a conspiracy to have the little girl die. A kid guessed "z!" when "monk" was already up. In the end it was just a skirt and an arm left. tear :(

I haven't had any terrible experiences, well except for when I asked a girl "What's this" holding up a picture of a monkey, and she started crying! I felt like a monster but the homeroom teacher kept coaxing her along to say it when I would have left it alone. (She eventually got it and stopped crying, but the next time I asked her I let her pick the animal) But aside from that I usually have fun. I haven't had any serious trouble kids, and my fear of "kancho" (See kancho.org for an explanation) has so far proven unfounded. The kids tend to energize me and there is always a cute face smiling at me (sometimes in sheer confusion but I take what I can get).

I also get school lunches, but I'll save that for another time when I haven't been so long winded already.

Sports Festival

I mentioned this in an earlier post, and instead of regaling you with a complicated description, here is a link to photos from the days: http://mta.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2026694&l=c6d9e&id=164200203
they pretty much say it all.