Alright, alright, alright. I know. It’s been a while. I have a legitimate excuse. Brittany Fiscus is visiting us this week, so instead of writing this at night, we’ve been hanging out with her. For those of you that don’t know Brittany, she’s the one who got us interested in the JET Program. She’s been here for two years in the Nagasaki prefecture. She completed her JET contract August 1st and has been walking around the island of Shikoku for the past month on a religious pilgrimage. She promised to visit us before she left Japan, and here she is! On Friday, she will leave for Hiroshima, and from there she will take a ferry to Korea and Russia, trans-Siberian railroad across Russia, visit multiple places in Europe before taking a boat from Italy to Miami, and Greyhound it back to her native Jacksonville, Arkansas. I told her that she is far more courageous than I to do all of that!! Anyway, on to catching up.
Random story-
I forgot to tell this story. The other day, one of my English teachers asked me to print out pictures and place a name and verb on them. The grammatical concept to learn was “does.” For example, “Mark does like judo.” I made six cards:
-Ami/ plays volleyball -Akemi/do kendo -Tom/like his bicycle
-Melissa/like Japan -Mike/eat ice cream -Nobu/drink milk
I’m not sure if I misunderstood or my English teacher switched it, but instead of having the grammatical concept of DOES, we went over the concept of DOESN’T in class that day. My flashcards wouldn’t have been an issue EXCEPT for the “Melissa/like Japan” one. “Melissa DOES like Japan” suddenly was switched to “Melissa DOESN’T like Japan.” That was the very last one we did, and the students looked horrified when we got to that one. There was a huge pause right after I said it, and I had to explain very quickly that I DO LIKE Japan. Yay for awkward embarrassing moments in class!
Sunday-
Ian and I had another sports festival on Sunday. This time it was at the nursery school. I was mistaken which nursery school it was, so we actually went to the wrong one and were a bit late. Whoops. We thought that last week it was adorable to watch the elementary school’s sports day, but it was even CUTER to watch the nursery school’s sports day. The parents joined in a lot of the events, and no kid was too small to participate! If the kid couldn’t walk, the parent would carry him or her across the finish line. Ian and I even got to participate in one event. They volunteered us to do a race. We had to crawl under a net, jump over a limbo pole, walk on tin car stilts, fish for a prize, and sprint across the finish line. I don’t want to brag, but I won. ;) I also got some quality playing with kids time. The younger kids absolutely adore me and I them. They want to chase me, pull on me, high five me, show me what they can do, etc. Precious. J When we were leaving, we got invited to ANOTHER sports festival next weekend. We think this one is for adults, so it will be interesting to go to this one.
Brittany had called us and told us she was on the way. Originally, we planned for her to take the train to Hitoyoshi and pick her up there, but she said that her train wouldn’t leave Kumamoto until 9:30 PM, putting her in Hitoyoshi a little after 11. Ian and I agreed that even though Kumamoto is a 2-3 car ride, we would pick her up there. We were both very excited to see her, so we made the drive. We got there around 8PM, shortly after her train arrived. Whenever we pulled up to the station, I shouted “Brittany Fiscus!” I ran out of the car, and it was a wonderful reunion!! Ian and I were incredibly excited to see her! None of us had had supper yet, so we decided to go to the ninja restaurant. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a really cool ninja themed restaurant in Kumamoto. The servers were dressed like ninjas, and the food was wonderful! We stopped for ice cream before heading back to Yunomae. It was VERY late when we returned, but Brittany was finally able to get a shower. She said that she hadn’t bathed in 18 days. :S I think I finally went to bed around 1:30AM.
Monday-
I picked the wrong day at work to be sleepy. I knew that Monday was going to be a demonstration day. That means that teachers come in and watch you perform, and after class, there’s a big meeting to discuss your teaching style. I wasn’t too nervous about that…I’ve had observations before in the States. I knew it was going to be a weird day as soon as I stepped foot on campus. I noticed that there were no cars in the parking lot. There are usually about 10 of the teacher’s cars in the parking lot. When I walked in, students were cleaning. Normal cleaning time is in the afternoon. All of the teachers were dressed up. Mostly, teachers wear sweats or at least casual nice clothes, but on Monday, it was mostly business attire. I had on my cute little pink ruffle blouse and white Capri pants. Yep, the foreigner stood out more than usual. When I reached my desk, I noticed that there was an unusual schedule there. When I asked my English teacher about it, she said that today’s schedule was different because of the demonstration.
I proceeded about my day like normal, trying not to look too tired. After lunch, there is a break time. Normally, I wander around the hallways looking for students to hang out with/talk to/teach English games to/learn Japanese from. However, I noticed all of the teachers staying in the teacher’s room. When in Japan and you do not know what to do, you take the lead of people that do! All of the teachers had to line up against the wall as higher ups from the BOE and elsewhere filed in the teacher’s room. There was about 20 new people in there, all dressed in business attire. It was at that moment that I understood why all the teachers had dressed up and why there were no cars in the parking lot. J Everyone had to go around the room and introduce him or herself and what subject he or she taught…in Japanese, of course. I got VERY nervous after I saw everyone. I thought ALL of them were going to be observing. I asked one of my English teachers, and she said that it would just be one person sitting in the room, and others would come and go. When we were in the classroom, I was very nervous at first, but I got used to it, so it was just like a normal day. After the class, we had a meeting to discuss our performance. Both English teachers, the guy observing, and myself were at the meeting….also conducted in Japanese. The guy could speak English and told me that I had good pronunciation and a positive, bright attitude for class. Yay! After the meeting, he was less formal and talked to me about America. He was a really cool guy.
On Monday afternoon, I walked home with a few elementary boys. When we were close enough to the housing complex, I asked them if they wanted to race. I swear I would have won had I not had a big backpack bouncing on my back. I came in third of four. Ian and Brittany were sitting on the couch in the middle of Thor when I walked in. Monday night was dedicated to catching Brittany up on American movies. Ian downloaded several movies from Itunes recently, and after Thor, we watched Transformers 3 and started Constantine. It was a big, fat lazy American night. We loved it. So that this doesn’t get too long, I’ll stop here and break this into two blogs.
I know that this is an aside, but I felt like it is worth mentioning. When I was in third grade, I don’t know why, but most of the girls in my class made flags. We’d find pictures of international flags and use a full sheet of paper to color them. I know we made fat stacks of flag papers and said that we would make a quilt out of it! I remembered that the other day and thought about how it foreshadowed my current life as a world traveler. J
No comments:
Post a Comment