Fall in Fukui

One of the local gaijin in Fukui is an amateur film maker. Please enjoy this video about fall in Fukui. However, be warned. Anything that looks like its larger than a suburb was not filmed in fukui. There are a couple shots of Tokyo and Kanazawa here. dont be fooled. Fukui is INAKA.

Autumn in Fukui, Japan from Nam Tran on Vimeo.

Kindergarden Parties!

I absolutely adore my school. I could never imagine requesting to change schools. The teachers, the students, and the area are wonderful. My students are high level academic students but not the best in the prefecture. Therefore I can enjoy average normal conversations with my kids without the pressure of having them constantly performing perfectly. My JTE’s are relaxed, very friendly and have fantastic English.  The other teachers at my school are friendly, young, and have tons of energy. Literally, I have it made.

But, I only go to one school so I don't get to experience the joy of elementary school visits. Most JETs spend 3-4 days at their “base school” (a junior high or high school) and travel the rest of the days for elementary school visits. The other JETS always talk about how much fun they are because the students aren’t tested in English and don't have textbooks so they literally just talk to the students and play games with the adorable children. I have always been a fan of working with younger kids. At Camp Allen I preferred working with primaries, both as a senior staffer and a counselor. Therefore I was a bit sad to learn I wouldn't be teaching elementary school in Japan.

So, when a friend asked me to volunteer at a kindergardeners Christmas party on a weekend I jumped at the opportunity. The students were adorable. We introduced ourselves in Japanese, played Dodgeball/”Snowball fight”, watched 3-4 year old performances, and dressed up in costumes to hand out Christmas presents to the kids. I was an elf, Kyle was Santa, and everyone else was a reindeer  Wish I could post my pictures of the kiddos for you to see. Trust me when I say they were adorable.

Leaving for Cambodia and Thailand in 4 and half days. I will be there for two weeks including Christmas and New Years. I'm excited to escape the cold for a few weeks and lie on a beach. Its hard to believe that this life I write about here is mine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Cat Cafe

Do you want to enjoy all the fun of owning a pet but none of the responsibility? 

Do you want to cuddle with a cat on a cold day but no long term commitment?

Do you enjoy delicious coffee, tea, and cakes?

You should visit Cat Village in Katsuyama!

Enjoy playing with cats and coffee for a small fee!

Cat Cafes are a Japanese thing that needs to catch on in the States. Loved it.

Halloween Train

Halloween isn't really a Japanese holiday. However, Japanese people love celebrations, especially seasonal celebrations. So, there is a lot of halloween decorations up everywhere, but nobody really celebrates halloween with a party, costumes, and candy. Fukui, however, has an awesome international club that throws the most ridiculous halloween party ever. Basically they rent an entire train for the night and we have a halloween party with 200 people on a train. Every stop we pick up new people. When we get to the end of the tracks there is a large party, food, drinks, and a Japanese KISS cover band.

yep.

Afterwards we all pile back onto the train and ride it back to Fukui city.

 Originally, I was supposed to be something but it fell apart at the last second. So I had to make a costume in just a few hours. I defaulted to my trustiest and most used costume, a strawberry. All night I was called "Ichigo-chan!" (Strawberry in Japanese). Enjoy photos and video of the train and take in the awesomeness.

Me and my neighbor Linda. She is "Wally" or "Waldo" depending on where you are from!

A stop motion video of the night made by a local Fukuian. pretty awesome!

All of the people getting off the train in mikuni.

craziness.

Kyoto.

Did I mention I visited Kyoto? Well I did for a friends birthday and It was beautiful. I'd love to go back again soon someday. Here are some of my photos.

our hostel for the trip!

Fushimi Inari. Does it look familiar? Hint: look up!

these lanterns were gorgeous when the sun was setting at night. wish I had a picture of that.

wash yo' hands fool.

Nicole, the birthday girl!

Nigel is todd from the fox and the hound.

beautiful.

cutest picture I have ever taken

watching the sunset here and people watching might've been one of my favorite things about Japan so far.

Colonel Sanders Japan style.

the Irish gals at Nijo Castle

more of Nijo Castle

Kyoto Station is a little larger than Fukui Station

Ohh Japan.

I keep saying that I have all these funny stories but I haven’t written any of them down for this blog… so here are a couple of them officially.

Two Amusing Short Ones.

1.   This past weekend my friend Malcolm took my neighbor Linda and I to a bar that he visits regularly. The place was fairly empty just us three foreigners, two Japanese people, and two bar tenders. My Japanese, being the worst among the three of us, proved pretty much useless. Luckily, Malcolm’s Japanese is very good and we enjoyed a very nice time with the Japanese folk there. We listened to some of Linda’s original raps, learned to DJ, and Malcolm taught us what he knew of hip hop dance. And this is where it starts to get weird. The bartender, who is 37 years old, started giving me compliments through broken Japanese/English conversation. Eventually he arrived at this comment, “You have beautiful skin. Crystal clear. Can I touch it, only one time?” Perfect English! Linda and Malcolm just stared at me smiling, waiting to see what I would say. They were zero help at getting me out of this awkward situation. …and since I found this whole situation hysterical, I might have let him touch my face (a decision I regret. What was I thinking?). My friend's birthday party in two weeks is at this same bar and I’m a little frightened to go back to be honest.

Asked a Japanese friend about this story and she said it isn’t a cultural difference, just a really strange pick-up line. lucky me.

2.  I am working really hard to learn Japanese but it isn’t always easy. To break the ice with my students and to give myself practice I throw Japanese words into my teaching whenever I know a relevant word or phrase. The students giggle at my pronunciation and I often make mistakes. I like making mistakes in front of students because it encourages them to try English and make mistakes. My JTEs always say that mistakes are how we learn a foreign language! Usually my mistakes are silly and not a big deal. However, sometimes they are really, really, embarrassing. While teaching class 1-1, I was trying to stay stomach in Japanese, which is "onaka". But I said "okama" resulting in enormous laughter from my students and teachers. The teacher just kept going and corrected me, “its onaka!” Later I cornered the teacher to ask what I said to all the students. He told me that I pointed to my stomach and accidentally said, “gay man.” Awkward.

Niigata in The Inaka Basketball

There is a group of ALT's and Japanese people who get together on Wednesday night and play basketball in Fukui city. It's a really fun group and a mix of very talented competitive players and more joking fun games. The ALT's that play there entered a tournament put on by the ALT's in Niigata and I went with them to play.

The Fukui Crabs

It was a ton of fun and the Fukui Crabs came in second place losing in the finals by a single point. It was a great game. After the tournament all the hard working ballers went to the local onsen. With our tournament fees we all got a free pass for the whole weekend. It was a glorious time. The tournament happens both in the summer and winter. Fukui will be looking for revenge come summertime. I'm loving the rekindling of my basketball playing in Japan. Who would've guessed that would happen here of all places?

How crabs cheer for their team mates.

Teaching

After my first few months of teaching in a Japanese school I have accumulated a rather large collection of humorous stories and observations. Here are just a few of them. I’m going to try and keep this post short, but I already know that I will fail.

1. Lets start with something sweet… Students LOVE their teachers. In Japan there is a teacher assigned to every class called their homeroom teacher. Being a homeroom teacher is a huge responsibility. These teachers stay with the same students all the way through high school and are like a 3^rd parent. A homeroom teacher visits every student’s home 2-3 times a year to meet with the parents and give updates on student progress and discuss the future of the child. Often, if there is a problem with a student outside of school the homeroom teacher is called to come and discipline the student rather than their parents. In response, students become very close to their homeroom teachers. For example, When the blue team won sports day they were cheering and yelling and then an entire class of boys ran over to their homeroom teacher and picked him up and starting throwing him in the air and catching him repeatedly. It was like a rock concert or the ending to Rudy x3 intense points. Probably one of the sweetest things I have seen.

2. High school in Japan is not obligatory. If you choose, you can finish junior high school and get a professional job at the age of 15. This is quite unusual but it does happen. Therefore, high school students are treated more like university students. Discipline is completely different. If a student feels like getting up and walking out of class, they can do so. If a student feels like talking or sleeping through a lecture, no one will stop them. Luckily, I am at an academic high school which means most of my students are preparing to enter university, so they take studying seriously. But, I still have issues with behavior. Adjusting my expectations to the Japanese expectations of behavior in a classroom has been a real challenge.

3. Japanese schools take physical education seriously. In addition to sports day, last week my students walked up a mountain and all the way back to the high school. It was a total of 26 km and the whole day of school was given up so the students could have a good dose of healthy exercise.

4. Teachers work hard together. Teachers also play together. “Choir practices” in American schools have nothing on Japanese enkais. An enkai is literally a work drinking party. The first 3 weeks working at my school, I had 3 enkais in a row. The first one was only for the English department and it was their welcome enkai for me. The English teachers were great and it was the first time I really got to see the teachers that I work with daily relax and be themselves. They were all eager to tell me something about the teacher sitting next to them and across from them. I learned that the English department nicknamed  one of the other teachers “god” because he reads English better than most native English speakers, that my supervisor claims to be shy but isn’t, and that the tiniest English teacher at my school is so scary to students that sometimes she makes them poop their pants. My second enkai was a part for only the young teachers. A young teacher is a teacher under the age of 35. There are 16 of them at my school, 17 including me. That is ridiculous amount for a high school. Needless to say this enkai was far and away the craziest. One teacher proclaimed himself a break-dancer. I responded with, “prove it.” After pushing chairs and tables out of the way he did, and he was pretty dang good for being drunk. There was karaoke afterwards and a drunken good singing time was had by all. The third enkai was a whole school enkai where I sat next to Kyoto-sensei and Kocho-sensei (seats of honor) and was required to give a speech in Japanese to everyone. Luckily, I was a little late so by the time I gave my speech everyone was drunk enough that my crappy Japanese didn't make a difference. The teachers were unbelievably kind to me and also more willing to speak to me than while at school.

5. Students love to touch my hair.

Have you visited Ono, Japan?

Last weekend I went to Ono City! It's about an hour from my place in Awara and was a nice break from the routine of my little town. The JETs there are a wonderfully welcoming and fun bunch. I might just have to return sometime soon.

Highlights:

• 1. Swimming in the coldest water I have ever felt.
• 2. An early morning adventure walk in a completely foreign city.
• 3. Telephone pictionary into early hours of the morning
• 4. Skyping my sister with Nicole at 4am to watch her try on wedding dresses.
• 5. Rainy day ramen.
• 6. And... the friendly people living in Ono. of course.

Hideaki and Christine's drawings of Kyle. impressive.

I was drawing some random portrait of a girl and then we decided to turn it into Brett in a tiara.

Secretly,  Brett LOVES that this rock is in the shape of Texas. Texas in Japan y'all.

...and a video for your enjoyment.

Sports Day

Imagine field day for high school kids. In Japan it is called tai iku sai. 

“Sports Day” is probably one of the most impressive events I have been to since moving to Japan. There were four teams and each team had a team captain. The captain coordinates everything and is usually a 3^rd year boy student. Each team also has a giant sculpture mascot and a 5 minute long choreographed dance/cheer in costumes handmade by the students themselves. The events the students competed in would be considered dangerous in American schools. They never would have been allowed. Many of them just involved the students being in pain. Please look at these photos.

pain

more pain.

This year was also unusually hot and humid, even for Japan. There were many kids passing out from heat stroke. The first few kids who passed out were terrifying to me. The teachers ran over with a stretcher loaded up the large high school student and carried him off to air conditioning. The student sat inside and drank water for about a half an hour and then hobbled back onto the field like nothing happened. Over 30 kids passed out from heat stroke sometime during the day. After the first 5 I wasn't too concerned anymore. In fact, I actually found the way that the students and teachers handled the matter kinda funny. In a Texas high school there would have been EMT’s and ambulances, but in Japan after 30 minutes you send them back out into the heat. Practical.

At the closing ceremony there was a choreographed folk dance all the students, and some teachers, participated in. It was adorable. There was also a large sculpture.

Here is a bunch of the video that I took of the day! enjoy!

https://vimeo.com/50464069