I'm behind on my posts.

November 11th

 3  very cute 2nd graders came to the teachers room to see me.  They had made me an invitation to their small festival that was this past Monday.  The invitation was hand written, in a hand-made envelope that was beautifully coloured, and also contained 5 "coins" for me to use at the festival.  Needless to say, I made an appearance. Unfortunately because I was teaching all day, I couldn't stay for more than the opening ceremony.  I got to see the grade 2s dance! They were amazing, as always; but I didn't get to spend any of my coins at any of their shops and stands.

I also got invited to go to dinner with all the teachers at my base school last Friday at an Italien restaurant called Momma Mary's.  I got invited to my other school's dinner too, but it was also that Friday. The food was amazing!!! But I'll talk about that later.

I was running late Thursday (the 11th) morning with everything! I was still throwing my lesson together as the first period class kids came to get me.  Despite being hastily done, it went really well. I even had students who never volunteer for anything come up at talk in front of the class!!!  Everyone had fun! I just felt relieved. lol


Onoda Sensei pulled out a textbook at one point, and one of the pages had a picture of a Tolberone bar.  The class wanted to know if I knew what it was and how to say it properly.  Then Onoda Sensei offered to buy some for everyone because he had seen them at an American food store near his house.  I asked him to get me one too.

On the 10th I went to an SGI meeting and we watched a video about SGI and how it is divided into three sections/goals.  Peace, Culture, and Education.  The section on Culture was amazing and by far my favourite!  It was like watching a festival performance or theatrical performance on video! It was amazing! All I kept thinking was, I wish my mom could see this because she would love it!  Also, I want to do that too!!!!  If I can get my hands on a copy I'll bring it home to show people!!

November 12

I love teaching the Izumi class!!  Today we did big/small and long/short as wells as colours, faces and lots of singing!!! 
The 2 kids who took me back to the teacher's room left without me and then, when they put my bag on my desk, they started talking to me.  When their teacher came to get them a few minutes later, she had to pry them away from me.  They had literally latched on to me! haha!
That poor teacher had to pull one of those boys off of me earlier this morning too. She keeps apologizing to me, but I don't really mind.  The kids are too cute and they just want to make sure they have my attention so they can ask me over and over again to tell them what "everything" is in English.  He literally pulled me around the classroom pointing at things and waited for me to tell him what they are in English.  When I told him I had to leave to get ready for class, he wrapped himself around me so I couldn't leave. lol  Most of the kids don't want me to leave once we start having fun.  I really need to learn their names.  I'm so terrible. lol

After school I went home to change and get ready for dinner. I walked to Mamma Mary's. It took about 25 to 30 minutes.  All the teachers were there.  Dinner was expensive..but worth it.  $50 for the evening.   It was all you could drink and there was so much food.  We started out with a cheese fondu with bread. There was also a platter of thinly sliced raw pork (I didn''t have any of that).  There was also another plate of cooked meat and vegetables. There was chicken, ham, duck, and various veggies.   Now all of these plates are large for sharing.  So we take a few pieces for our plates and pass the big one around.  4 people per plate. 8 people per table so about 2 plates of each on the table at a time.

Next up was these rice ball things. I thought they were meatballs...but they were rice and cheese inside some kind of batter and covered in tomato sauce.  They were really good.   Then we had pizza! 6 slices per pizza, 3 pizzas total.  Half the pizza was plain cheese and the other half was very japanese (although they didn't seem to know that! lol) It had miso and cheese and spinich and squid. It was ok but I much preferred the cheeze half.  I had 4 slices of pizza over the evening. Also one of the teachers at my table left early so there were only 3 of us per dish instead of four.

Next we had salad.  A really big salad with lots of stuff. I didn't have any.  I was getting full...and salad should really come at the start of the meal, not the middle. lol  After Salad there was pasta!  2 kinds of pasta. One was tomato meat sauce, large pieces of tomato and large kurds of Mozerella cheese.  So good!  The other pasta was good too! I'm not sure what kind of sauce it was, but it really didn't look like there was sauce, but I could taste it..so there was.  It had some veggies and shrimp in it.   Then finally we had dessert!  2 kinds of pudding (mango and some chinese thing that tasted like medicine) and sponge cake with some sort of whipped cream.  I didn't like the pudding but the bread and creame were great!  We got to take stuff home too! (that's unusual in Japan).

Dinner lasted 3 hours.  We socialized lots and played a few games! There were also the mandatory speeches.  I did one as well, in English, and when I finished, Onoda Sensei jumped up and came over with a piece of paper and told everyone he was going to translate for me.  lol  Yeah, his paper was completely blank! lol  He started off saying what I had said, about how I live in Canada and it's cold...then he went off and said how much I like him, and that our Principal is a very nice guy, and that Kondo Sensei is a terrible, no good man (Kondo Sensei and Onoda Sensei are actually really good friends) ...meanwhile everyone is laughing like crazy...so I grabbed his paper and flipped it around so they could see it was blank and that I hadn't really said any of that...  Then he turned to me and asked very nicely if he could have his paper back. So I gave it back, he said thank you and then continuted on with his speech of things I didn't say LOL!!   Yeah, it was a good night!

I got a ride home, which I was happy about, and then I watched a movie.  The Friday night Road Show played Twilight. But they cut out huge parts of the movie...and continued into the 2nd movie.  So I got to watch the first 2 movies in just over 90 minutes.  THe first movie only took about 30 minutes to get through and the rest was the second movie....interesting.  Also, it was in Japanese. I had fun.  

next post:  November 16-17 Fukushima Mid Year Conference.

Fukushima Mid-Year Conference

Tuesday morning I got in a taxi at 6:35am.  I met up with a bunch of other Iwaki JETs at Kashima Sakana Centre. There we got on a charter bus that made a stop at the Iwaki Board of Education to pick up a the rest of the Iwaki JETs and then we headed off to Fukushima City.  We left the BOE at 7:40 and got to Fukushima city around 9:30am.  There were 240 JETs at this Conference, so it was quite large.  We signed in and got our lunch tickets and then headed into the large lecture hall to begin our day.  The day went by quickly enough, lunch was not the greatest, but it was ok. I had a Japanese style box lunch, but from what I saw, the American style lunch was still Japanese lol.  This is what my lunch looked liked:



The first day finished at 4pm with the FUJET meeting where I had to hand over a large sum of money for various activities (dinner that night and a 10,000 yen deposite for the Snow festival trip in Feburary).  Due to the large amount of money I spent, I will no longer be going to the Disney Land trip on the 27th :(

Next we headed out to our Hotel (after we figured out which hotel Iwaki JETs were going to be in, noboy seemed to know lol). Then a group of us headed out to Jupiter, a store located in the Fukushima station that has only imported goods.  I got TIM TAMS!!!  and a small Toblerone bar, 3 cans of Canada Dry, a small bag of mini Rocky Mountain Marshmallows, a jar of skippy crunchy Peanut Butter and a box of Van Houten Hot Cholocalte.  All of under 20 bucks! So happy!!!

Then about 90 of us met up in the hotel lobby (we stayed at the Sunroute Plaza Hotel, which is the same place I stayed last time I was in Fukushima City) and we boarded 2 Charter buses to go to the Asahi Beer Garden.  All you can eat and drink restaurant just outside of Fukushima City. I made a new friend with a really different name (Shasta) who is from Australia but whose father is American.  We sat next to each other on the bus and at the restaurant.  I also met a a nice guy names Nick from New Zealand, whom I had met once before.  We talked quite a bit through out the evening.  I got some pretty good pictures too. I'll post a few here but the rest will be on facebook.
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The rest of the pics will be on facebook.

None of us slept well that night because the hotel had the rooms way to hot.  My room temp was set at 25C and I couldn't turn it down.  So I had the window open for a while.  I remember when I got back to my room I had the impression that someone had been in my room while I was away. I didn't know why I thought that, but I did. Nothing was missing or anything.  

The next morning I left my window open while I went to breakfast because it was too warm and I would be in my room for a bit when I got back. Breakfast was good.  It was buffet style with both Japanese and American style foods.  When I got up to my room, my window was closed. So I guess I was right about someone having been in my room.  I checked all my things, but everything was there.  So, not impressed but whatever. Japanese customs are weird!

The second day went by quicly as well. We went straight into workshops until lunch and then after lunch we had a 90 minute lecture on intercultural Education in the classroom.  It was really good!  I'm going to end up using a lot of the stuff I learned in that lecture in my classes.  I'm planning lessons already for that!  Really useful!

 

The day ended at about 3:30 and we got our bus at 3:40pm and made it back to Iwaki by 6pm. Tomoko met me in front of LATOV and we went to a restaurant for Ramen.  I had a big bowl of ramen with a plate of gyoza and ice cream for dessert.  Then we went to a local SGI discussion meeting where I gave a short self-intro speech and everyone was amazed by my Japanese and asked me some questions and it was fun.  Then 2 of the girls at the meeting did some Hawaiian dances for us.  One of them was really good and the other was very mechanical...but it was fun to watch!  After the meeting one of the ladies gave me a bag of magazines that I had forgotten there the last time I was there.  Then she took the bag back from me and told me to wait a minute.  She came back a minute later and the bag was much heavier!  She gave me 3 apples!! These apples are HUGE!!! here look!
  biggest apple I have ever seen!!!  And so goood!!! lol

Then I got a ride home and crashed...hard!   Turned my heater on because my aparment was only 14C and I woke up in the middle of the night freezing.  And today it was off to school.  I woke up with a sore neck.  It's still sore. I hope it gets better soon.  

There, now I'm all caught up. I think. lol

Take care everyone!!! *hugs*