My Valentine’s Day festivities began on Monday night. In Japan, it’s tradition for girls to buy guys chocolates on Valentine’s Day. Weird, huh? Then on March 14th (known as White Day) guys buy girls chocolates, and usually their chocolates will be better and cost more than the original gift they received. If you ask me, it’s messed up and backwards. Can’t we all just agree to stick to one day? Anyway, I usually make treats to take to school for the teachers on holidays, and I decided that chocolate chip cookies would be good.
We had to go to Hitoyoshi that night to meet Melissa, Justine, and Shara for dinner. We’re all on the beginner level Japanese classes that the CLAIR office in Tokyo provides for JETs, and we have monthly tests to complete. The tests are open book, open note, open friend, so we get together and go over our answers together. The books aren’t that great, and it’s VERY difficult to learn from them, so it’s actually great that we have each other to rely on! Since it was the night before Valentine’s Day, Melissa B. got each of us a chocolate bar. She is always so sweet like that! She’s from Washington state, but I swear that she has southern hospitality bred into her. For example, when we had our Christmas pizza party, she couldn’t come because she was going home for the holidays, so she made us a cheesecake to say sorry for not coming. 
She goes waaaaay out of the way to make people happy!! Anyway, that was a sidetrack, but my main point was that it was really sweet of her to give us chocolate!
On the way home, I realized that I wouldn’t have nearly as much time as I would need to make chocolate chip cookies, so I decided that mini chocolate chip pancakes would just have to do. We didn’t get home until around 9:15PM, so I immediately started whipping up a double batch. It took a while for several reasons—they were tiny pancakes, I had it so low that the flame went out and I didn’t realize it a couple of times, and I was trying to make them in a frying pan and wok. At 10:45 when I finally finished, I plated and saran wrapped them. I had two plates for the JHS, one for the BOE, and a few that were leftover for us to nibble on. (I didn’t make any for my ES because I’m only there once a week, and it’s on Wednesday, which wasn’t Valentine’s Day. Does that make me a bad person? Now I feel guilty. Blarg…..)
Tuesday morning I had to go to my nursery schools. My first nursery school was the one that only has about ten students. My days there are hit or miss. Some of the things that I plan to do are really best with bigger groups, so it doesn’t always work out, but on Tuesday, it was perfect! At my second nursery school, there was a haunted house. I know that sounds really weird to have on Valentine’s Day, and honestly I’m not sure why they wanted to have it then, but that’s what happened. They had told me not to worry about planning an English lesson for the day but just to have fun with the kids. That I did. The haunted house was in one of the classrooms. It wasn’t very long or scary, and some of the teachers had dressed up to scare the kids. When I got to class, they were just starting it. One of the teachers was at the back of the classroom allowing a few kids to go through the door at a time. The willing participants went through and came out with a bag of candy. The unwilling participants cowered at the back of the line in tears. At most, I had four kids crying on me, and none of them were in too big of a hurry to reach the front of the line. Several kids, despite getting bags of candy inside the haunted house, were BAWLING after it. It was the saddest/funniest thing. I hated that they were so scared about it, but at the same time, it was ridiculously funny at how pitiful some of the kids were acting. All of the teachers were laughing. I think some of them took a little pleasure in shoving the kids into the haunted house. I had to take one girl through because she WOULDN’T let go of me. The whole five minutes that we were in there, she CLUNG TO ME, and when one of the teachers jumped out and scared her, she accidentally kicked me in the ribs. One of the kids got lost in the haunted house and was beating on the front door from the inside wanting out. We could hear him crying. It was just so pitiful! 
/
Do these look like the faces of happy children? Nope!
Ian and I really didn’t do anything special on Valentine’s Day. I told him that we didn’t have to celebrate on just one day because to me, every day together is like Valentine’s Day for us! (insert awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww here) j/k. We really don’t celebrate it normally. We might get each other a little something, which is what we did on Monday night. We agreed to split a box of chocolates and buy a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup (a treat and one heck of a find here!). Tuesday after school I guilt tripped myself that I hadn’t done anything special for Ian. I didn’t think about it until I was leaving school, but I should have made him a Valentine’s card at school, I could have let my JHS girls who absolutely swoon over Ian make him Valentines, we should have planned to go to the Italian restaurant in Hitoyoshi, we should have made fondue…..the ideas were rolling! It was too little, too late though. I tried to find him some chocolates at the store, and they did have a whole Valentine’s display of chocolates, but for some reason, none of them seemed good enough. Instead, I decided on a common everyday-run-of-the-mill box of Pocky (tradition Japanese candy….think chocolate covered pretzels).
Ian made dinner, and we did watch the movie Valentine’s Day on Valentine’s Day (awwwww), but it just seemed like we should have done more. I feel like being here and out of the swing of things, we’re never really sure how to celebrate holidays. We ate noodles on Thanksgiving, Christmas just seemed like another day, we waited for someone to count down for New Year, and now we don’t know what to do on Valentine’s Day. What’s next?? 
We did cap off the night by looking at what Ian called “food porn.” 
I’m not sure why, but I started browsing the Pizza Hut website, and we drooled over the deep dished, cheesy, pepperoni goodness of the pizzas. We switched to other websites, but it was all the same—foods that we miss from home. Attention those of you reading this: If you can figure out how to ship a Pizza Hut pizza here and make it taste the same as freshly delivered, we would be ENTERNALLY grateful. 
I hope everyone had a special Valentine’s Day whether you did nothing like us, had a romantic dinner for two, or sat at home and ate chocolates all night.
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