Last Days at Yumesaki Junior High School

This past week was my last week at Yumesaki Junior High School. Next week I'll be teaching community classes, the following week I'll be in Okinawa sightseeing, and the week after that I'll be at my new junior high school.

This week was a fun one. The students had only half days of school, and the mood was pretty light considering they have the next two weeks off, so I was able to wander around and take photos of the kids goofing off during cleaning time and club time.

This drawing cracks me up! Outside the teachers room is a blackboard and calendar which is updated every month by a couple of students. One student drew this picture as I watched. It started out so sweetly, a little child in bed with Santa standing over him. Then she drew the "virus" haunting the child and added some snot on the child's nose. Next she drew in an unnamed superhero to chase away the virus! I guess the text must say "Merry Christmas and Stay Healthy"!

All term, I've been meaning to take photos of our textbooks. Instead of fun, easy and potentially useful vocabulary like food or clothing, the publishers of the textbook decided to go for heavy topics, like starving children in Sudan, landmines, and civil rights in America. I guess they want to reinforce that learning English is a difficult and depressing chore. A couple photos of the textbook to illustrate my point:

And some of the vocabulary the publishers think will be useful: "civil rights movement", "equality", "slave", "slave owner". I gotta tell you I hated teaching that lesson on MLK!!

On to lighter subjects! On my last day, I brought in thank you gifts for the four English teachers at the school. I decided that they would all appreciate a bottle of wine (except for one English teacher who I couldn't imagine drinking wine, so I got him a bottle of Smirnoff!) After making my purchases, I headed off to the hyaku-en store (the equivalent of the dollar store, but much nicer!) There I found these absolutely adorable wine bottle covers!! The teachers also thought they were cute, and even thought I made them!!

First thing on Thursday morning was the usual staff meeting. Of course these are in Japanese so I just tune out during them. But suddenly everyone was looking at me and laughing! I asked for a translation and apparently they were laughing because they were trying to figure out how to tell me that I would be giving a speech in Japanese to the 7th graders that morning! Great! They jokingly asked me to make it an hour long, but I quickly got them down to five minutes! Please note that my Japanese has not improved at all these last four months, so basically I wrote my speech in English and asked a teacher to translate. When fourth period came, I waited for my cue (being nudged in the elbow by the teacher next to me), went to the front of the gym, and just sounded out the unknown words on the paper in front of me. Then the 7th graders presented me with letters they had written me (some in Japanese so I have no idea what they were telling me) They were very cute, most had drawings on them showing me as a beautiful blonde! I was encouraged to "hold on" by many of the letters. And what was most interesting was the spelling variations of my name. The 1-1 class decided to spell my name as "Sera", and class 1-2 spelled it as "Sala". The other three classes got it right though.

Then yesterday, the last day of the term, was an all-school ceremony. The brass band played a number from the Sound of Music, then I was invited on-stage to give another good-bye speech - also in Japanese! Once again I wrote my speech in English, had it translated, and just sounded out the words. I was then presented with a lovely bouquet of flowers, and the leader of the student council said a speech to me in English and Japanese. It was very sweet!

After the ceremony, students had homeroom. I happened to be walking in the hallways and saw that in one classroom, the teacher was standing in front of the class holding an open umbrella over her head. I can't imagine what she was telling the students!

Once they were dismissed from homeroom, I got lots of hugs good-bye from students. I was told to "gambatte" which is basically the equivalent of "good luck", but can also mean "work hard", or apparently "fight"! I was very puzzled as to why the students were wishing me to fight, but we finally resolved that they were wishing me good luck.

Then last night was the enkai (staff party)! Once again, I amused everyone by taking photos of the food. In this first picture, there is sashimi (raw fish), but the real reason I took the photo was because of the flounder under the sashimi! Apparently some of its flesh was in the bed of leaves and the remaining flounder head and tail made for a nice presentation.

The photo above is nabe, a sort of hot pot. It's really quite tasty and contains just a hodge-podge of food cooked in a broth. This one had fish-balls, crab, mussels, chicken, cabbage, mushrooms and bean sprouts. I think it's a winter dish since we had it at the last enkai last month too.

Besides the food, heavy drinking was on the agenda (I was told to go home from school early and rest up for the "heavy drinking"!). At the beginning of the dinner, I turned my head to chat to the vice principal, and when I turned around again, there were four drinks lined up at my place! Here the helpful teachers are pointing them out to me!

At some point, a rousing game of rock-paper-scissors was played (they LOVE that game here), for the prize of the evening - $200 in cash!! Mr. Enomoto, one of the English teachers, was the winner. Here you can see the semi-finals of the game.

I was a guest of honor (the party also functioned as my farewell party), so here I am posed with the principal and vice principal (yes, I did get a haircut!).And just a few photos of the drunken silliness that ensued:

Mr. Maeda drinking straight from the pitcher.

A little later, Mr. Maeda passed out and being mocked. A photo at "phase 2" - the bar after the restaurant. We had french fries and edamane as snack food!

I really had a nice time at this school this term. The teachers are a great group of people and the students so friendly!! I'm going to miss them. I hope the people at my next school are half as nice!

December 12 on 12

Unbelievable that another month has passed by. This year is flying by!!

A couple of anecdotes from the last week or two before we get to the photos.

Yesterday at elementary school, a third grade boy asked me “Do you like god?” I was confused because the Japanese people are mostly Buddhist and so don’t believe in a god, and also, they never mention religion. So I gave him my blank stare and we called the teacher over to translate. She told him the word he was looking for was “sheep”! I think he probably meant “goat”, but I was happy we sorted that out and I could tell him confidently that yes, I do like goats!

In the 8th grade class, we’ve been doing a Christmas lesson. The teacher starts the lesson by playing the song “All I want for Christmas is you” and we talk a bit about the lyrics with the students. After doing this lesson for the fifth and last time, the teacher looked at me and said “this song isn’t appropriate for kids”. What?? (and I might mention that he chose it!) He thought the lyrics “Santa Claus won’t make me happy” were too suggestive for the students. I didn’t know what to say to that…

Last little story – the staff room is pretty bare here – ugly gray government issue desks for everyone. And teachers have to bring in their own laptops if they want to use the computer (well, there are four computers in the teacher’s lounge to be shared by everyone). But on Wednesday morning, I came in to work and was surprised to see everyone’s desk cleaned off. Apparently all teachers were getting laptops! (Not me, in fact next week is my last week at this school). So a team of men in blue jackets went around and set up the laptops – including securing them to the desk with a cable. Guess they’re not meant to be portable laptops. And I was just told, for unknown reasons, they can’t use the laptops until February!

Here are a few miscellaneous photos I’ve taken, trying to show some everyday scenes.

A little sign on the table at our favorite Indian restaurant. "How much you like spicy?"

This is a common sight - a bunch of water bottles all lined up in a row, sometimes with a pile of salt at each end. I've asked several different people what they're for, and I always get the same cryptic answer - they keep the cats away.
It’s getting cold, but we’ve had only one frost so far. I’m told February is the coldest month. Up to now, I’ve managed with just a fleece, but I think this weekend I’ll be buying a proper winter coat. However, it appears that I might survive just using the hand warmers for sale everywhere here. And not just hand warmers, but foot warmers (for inside your socks), and back or belly warmers (to be taped onto your T-shirt). And of course, you can get them with cute cartoon characters. There's an entire aisle of the drug store devoted to them, plus numerous endcaps!
Remember the photos of Asia a few years ago during the SARS scare - everyone was wearing face masks. Apparently they're a part of the culture here. When you're sick, it's considered polite to wear a face mask (I guess the thought is that it makes you less contagious. I haven't heard any scientific proof of that. I think they look rather dorky. I'd just call in sick, personally. But I don't have the Japanese work ethic). You can buy a variety of face masks - check out this display at a local drug store. I'm still trying to get a photo of people in public wearing them. Stay tuned for that!

And as long as I'm taking photos in stores across town, I might as well take a few photos of the snacks available at the convenience stores. Dried octopus, squid, eel, seaweed, and whole fish. Plus "beer sticks". I don't know what they are!

After the January 1995 earthquake devastated Kobe, Italy sent the city a light display. The lights are lit just for a few weeks each year in December. We were told it was spectacular, so we went to check it out, along with a couple hundred thousand other people! It was incredible how many people came out to see it (and come out every year). There were nine policemen at the intersection of the nearest train station to direct all the pedestrians. Several blocks of roads in downtown Kobe were closed to cars and had metal gates lining the road, so that the people heading to the luminaria could walk down the streets, while those people shopping had the sidewalks. The crowd of people going to the luminaria zigzagged for several blocks. We were part of this mass of people for about 45 minutes before we even caught our first glimpse of the luminaria. The crowd was murmuring “Sugoy” (Wow). When we saw it, Heather said “Daijobu” (it’s alright). While it was impressive, it wasn’t quite as impressive to those of us who grew up on Christmas lights. I was more interested in all the nice stores we were passing – Armani, Louis Vitton, The Gap, Banana Republic, etc., and in all the people holding up their cell phones to take a photo of the luminaria. Here are my photos from the night. You be the judge whether it was “Sugoy” or “Daijobu”.

While we were in Kobe, we headed to Harborland (a shopping center at the port) where I took this photo of the Kobe Port Tower all lit up.

That concludes this month's twelve on twelve. Stay tuned. January 12th will be here before we know it!

Winter break

Oh and by the way, I'm headed to Okinawa for eight days over the winter break!! I can't wait!! A tropical island, some serious sightseeing, and New Year's Eve in an unknown city!! Wahoo!!

Nagoyama Cemetery

On Sunday, we did a bit of sightseeing closer to home. We've noticed a large pagoda on a hillside many times on our walks around town, particularly on the way to The Mall (yes, the mall's name is The Mall), and today we decided to check the cemetery and pagoda out. It's a Buddhist cemetery (Japanese people practice both Shintoism and Buddhism, and typically funerals are Buddhist affairs).
The main building was incredible. Inside were statues of Buddha's 10 followers. Each statue had an offering of a box of Custard Cake in front of it - I guess even Buddha's followers like a little junk food now and then.

The Aggressive Monkeys of Ruridera

Heather, Sue and I decided to go to Ruridera quite by accident. Last week, I brushed against some flyers at the bus station and knocked them over. When I went to pick them up, I noticed they had some cute cartoons of things to do around Himeji, so I kept a copy for myself. Later that week at school, I pulled it out of the bottom of my bag and noticed a cute little monkey on the map. I asked the teacher next to me what that site was and she told me it was Ruridera temple where you could feed the monkeys! That was all I needed to hear! I sent a text message to Heather to ask her to ask her extremely helpful teachers how we could get to Ruridera. Aa always, her teachers came through with a detailed bus schedule.

We headed to Ruridera on Saturday, on a much longer and more expensive bus excursion than we had expected, but it was well worth it. Ruridera is a Buddhist temple complex in a very small town about an hour and a half northwest of Himeji. The temple buildings were beautiful, but we were the ONLY people there. Very eerie!

For some reason, the denuded mountainside at the Buddhist temple seemed a bit of a contradiction to me.

Notice the Winnie the Pooh (called "Pooh-san" here) as an offering next to this statue. I think this statue is of Jizo, who is a favorite Japanese Buddhist saint - the patron saint of infants who died.

After wandering around the temple complex for a while, we hiked up the mountain a bit to the monkey (Japanese Macaque) feeding area. Heather had very unwisely brought a bunch of bananas along as a snack for herself, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the monkeys were very interested. They became more and more aggressive, especially since we weren't able to buy the regular monkey food they were used to humans feeding them. They kept swiping at her bag of bananas and one starting growling! Heather freaked out and sacrificed the bananas for her own personal safety (considering we were halfway up a mountainside and completely alone), and we hightailed it down the mountain. The moral of the story is obvious - "Don't bring bananas to a monkey feeding area". The rest of the photos from the day are on a Picassa web album. Enjoy at your leisure. http://picasaweb.google.com/sarainjapan/Ruridera

Ikebana

Last night, Merry and I attended our first ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) class. Our teacher, Eiko, practices the Misho School of Ikebana which is popular here in the western part of Japan.
It was really interesting – and very formulaic! Flowers are to be arranged in a specific order, at a certain height, at a specific place on the frog (spike), and at a certain angle. And there is a right answer to the question “which flower do you think is most beautiful?” It’s not an opinion (or at least not Merry’s or my opinions!).
Merry and I weren’t quite sure what to expect, how we’d get our flower arrangements home safely without destroying the arrangement or breaking the bowl. I was particularly concerned with how the flowers would do on the bike ride home in the cold weather. But we should have known there is a system!
Eiko provided the bowls and spikes for the class period and had gone to the florist to get our flowers - three pink snapdragons, three blue irises, and three stalks of little lilies.
We each took a bunch of flowers, unwrapped them, and then, because it was our first time, Eiko arranged them for us as she explained the formula. She made it look so easy, then told us to take apart the flowers and recreate the arrangement. That was much harder than it sounded! She was very encouraging as she made a few adjustments. It was really incredible to see what an improvement her little adjustments made to our first attempts at arranging.
We then took photos of the arrangement, dismantled the flowers, and wrapped the flowers back up to be taken home and recreated there. At home, I thought I did OK, until I noticed before going to bed, that one flower had fallen out of the bowl and onto the floor. I doubt Eiko would have been impressed by that. I just stuck it back in (rather haphazardly, I admit!).

For those of you interested in the formula, see below. For everyone else, here are the pretty pictures! We’ll be going to Eiko’s class twice a month, so look for more photos in the future!

Eiko’s demonstration arrangement.
My initial flower arrangement.
The photo at the beginning of the blog is of my flower arrangement, recreated all alone at home, and on display in the entryway to my apartment (where Eiko assures me the cold temperature will make the flowers last longer. That is, unless they freeze first!)

The formula:
First we measured the most beautiful snapdragon so that its height was the two times the diameter of the bowl, plus the bowl’s height (S1=2D+1H). (This point was interesting because it shows how picking the appropriate base will make a difference). The first flower was placed in the center of the spike standing straight up.
The second most beautiful snapdragon was cut to a height of 70% of the first snapdragon (S2=S1*.7) and placed one centimeter to the right and one centimeter in (closer to the arranger), and then pulled down towards the arranger’s right shoulder.
The third snapdragon was cut to 80 – 90% of the height of the first snapdragon, and placed behind it.
Then, the most beautiful iris was cut to 50% the height of the first snapdragon and placed in the spike to complete the triangle made by the bases of the S1 and S2 flower stalks. This iris was then pulled down towards the left shoulder, to make a triangle with the flower blossoms.
Irises 2 and 3 were then placed in the spike to create a triangle with Iris 1.
Finally, the three stalks of lilies were placed as filler flowers, in an inverted triangle arrangement,
Even with a straightforward formula like this, it was a challenge. Merry, who is a math teacher back in Phoenix, was loving all the numbers!

A Mystery Walk

Last week, one of the teachers invited me to hike the mountain behind the school. Well, actually he wasn’t going, so I’d be going with a few other teachers (who didn’t look thrilled to have me join them. More nervous, as in “how we will speak enough English to talk with her for several hours??”) But I gamely agreed, because really, how much chatting do you need to do while hiking?
I was told to go to the junior high school where the science teacher, who was not going hiking, would drive me to the meeting spot. This really confused me, because the mountain is DIRECTLY behind the school (see the photo above, taken a few months ago). I thought, maybe there’s a good trailhead near the elementary school he will drive me to. So I took the bus to the junior high school, and on the way, saw many people doing a neighborhood cleanup (at 8 am on a Sunday! I’m not usually out and about on Sunday mornings, so I wasn’t sure if this was a special event, or if they spend every Sunday morning cleaning. But it turns out that was part of the day’s activities).
At the junior high school, the science teacher drove me about a mile down the road to the elementary school. We parked and wandered into the school yard, where a couple hundred people were milling about. I never did figure out what exactly we were doing – my closest estimation is that the PTA was putting on a neighborhood cleanup and “mystery walk”. Apparently the hike up the mountains was not a casual hike with a few teachers, but the whole neighborhood on a mystery walk. I was assigned to a team with three other teachers (who, again, looked kind of scared to have me on their team). Each teacher and the principal and vice principal made sure I knew that we would be climbing the mountain. Yes, I was prepared to hike the mountain. Then they wanted me to be in the know that there are no toilets on the mountain. I must look like a totally city girl to them!
So we set off, walking back towards the junior high school where I started that morning. But on the way, we stopped at a temple to answer some “quiz” questions for the mystery walk, and one teacher had to move dry beans from one bowl to another with chopsticks (a mystery walk challenge). The teachers searched around the temple looking for signs with answers to their questions. I, not being able to read the signs, stood around and took this photo of Jizo. You can see that there was a fresh offering of food to Jizo – beer, yogurt and a rice ball! I was told this temple/statue of Jizo is to protect the river.
After they found the answers at that temple, then we headed off, the opposite direction of the mountain, across the river to a little shrine. I was just going with the flow at this point, but we were jogging to this shrine to beat the other teams. I was more concerned with saving energy for the hike ahead of us, assuming we ever turned around toward the mountain. Once again, the teachers searched for the answers to their quiz, and then we walked back towards the junior high school. I was instructed to use the bathroom there.
[Quick side note, I’m sure I’ve mentioned the obsession with changing shoes. We went in the school door, I changed into my school shoes for the walk down the corridor, then in the bathroom I changed into the toilet slippers, then changed back into my school shoes to walk back to the entrance and change back into my outdoor shoes. That’s four shoe changes for a two minute bathroom break!]
After the bathroom break, we went to a shrine right behind our school – I didn’t actually know it was there, so that was interesting. Again, more searching for quiz answers while I snapped these photos of the shrine's roof, and then we were off to finally climb the mountain! It was a steep climb to the top of the mountain and I fell back to chat with some 10 year old girls on the way up. On top of the mountain, there was more searching for the clue and a short break to snap these photos of our team and the scenery. That's our school (with the sandy playing field) at the base of the mountain, and the ocean in the distance. Then our leader pointed to the next mountain over with a radio tower on top of it, and said “that mountain, next. OK?”. I began to worry. At this point it was 11:30 am and we had been wandering around for a good two hours. All at a speedy pace, because this mystery walk was actually a race! But I followed along, and luckily, the second part of the trail wasn’t as steep. We did stop off at an ancient tomb on the mountainside, which was interesting but empty. And from one point of the hike, we could see Himeji castle in the distance. You can't really make out it in the photo, but the scenery is still interesting. There were at least two other stops, which I assume were checkpoints. We then descended the mountain and walked back to the elementary school, where we took our shoes off to go into the gym. I was given a lunch ticket (bonus!), and we each got a prize (I’m not sure if we won, or if everyone got a prize) – a Miffy dry erase board. One of the teachers told me no one would use that prize – I’m sure he’s right. And we each got a package of garbage bags (more about garbage in a later blog, but garbage must be placed in special garbage bags, so this is a very practical prize). We ate lunch sitting on the gym floor – it was fairly tasty – rice balls and soup, which I tried to call cabbage soup, but was told no, it was not cabbage soup because the leafy vegetable which closely resembled cabbage was called something else. But I’m still calling it cabbage soup.
So that was my not-so-casual hike and aptly named "Mystery Walk" up the mountains behind our school!