Surprisingly, it is the Holiday Season here. Christmas stuff has been appearing since before Halloween. This post though is going to focus on the holidays I've celebrated so far, namely Halloween and Thanksgiving. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but the weather here has become unseasonably cold. So I’ve supplemented my wardrobe with some cute but warm Japanese clothes. Also while shopping, I found a Halloween costume! Well it wasn’t really a costume, just the hat from Chopper in the anime One Piece. This is my favorite anime and a favorite among Japanese people of all ages.
Halloween was a great time for me. Three out of five schools asked that I prepare materials for special Halloween classes. Thursday Oct. 28 at Seibu JHS we did a crossword with Halloween words and the students had to draw a face on a blank pumpkin picture and write a story about the jack-o-lantern they made. The kids had a lot of fun and those stories were probably the most creative I've seen any of my students get with English. Also, I brought in my Chopper hat and the kids thought it was awesome. Many of the students wanted to wear it so it got passed around quite a bit (it was even more popular with my ES students)…luckily I don’t seem to have picked up any sort of head bugs.
The next day at Kume and Hayakawa Elementary Schools I printed out pictures of kids in costumes and jack o’ lanterns to teach the kids about what we did in America and then taught them fun Halloween vocabulary. At Kume we played Halloween bingo. The best though was when we played a trick-or-treat game. Each teacher went to a different corner (wearing our silly hats of course) and the kids had a chance to get candy if they could correctly answer a question in English. They loved coming up to each of us, pretending to knock on a door, and saying trick-or-treat. If they didn’t understand the question they had to say “help me please” before they could get a clue to help them get the candy.
At Hayakawa they combined the 5th and 6th graders that I usually teach into one class so that I could also have a class with the combined 3rd and 4th graders. Also, in between classes Tamaki (the Japanese girl that helps with translation) and I went to the 1st and 2nd graders with candy. All they had to do was say trick-or-treat and they got a piece of candy but they still loved it. At Hayakawa we also did the trick-or-treat game but changed some of the other activities. The 5th and 6th graders got to make jack-o-lanterns and give them a name but they didn’t do the writing part. For the 3rd and 4th graders they made tissue ghost families. It was so cute!!! So far that has been the single most fun day of teaching yet…probably because it was a party rather than the normal less interesting stuff…
That weekend Wyatt’s (the bar where the ALTs know the owner) had a Halloween party. Cody, Joe, and I went. It was nomihoudai (all you can drink) for 3000yen but I didn’t want to pay that much or drink that much so Satoru (the owner) said I could just buy a bottle of wine instead. Yay connections! I’m pretty sure all the Japanese people in Himi between the ages of 20 and 35 were present…so there were a few dozen people. I wore my Chopper hat again and it was a good icebreaker with the Japanese people. They all thought it was really fun to come take pictures with the foreigners and one of my favorite picture was with other people dressed up as different One Piece characters.
This is Chopper.
Another fun holiday event happened the weekend of Nov. 13th. It was the Toyama JET Thanksgiving party. Alex and I were the only two that went because it was really far away and we knew we would have to spend the night at the host’s house. The food was awesome because it was a potluck party with all sorts of dishes (I made stuffing) and there was even a turkey (which you almost never find in Japan). It was great because there were a lot of people from other countries that got to celebrate their first Thanksgiving. It was definitely not the most traditional Thanksgiving but it made me really happy to have a great group of people to celebrate with during my first Thanksgiving away from home!
That same weekend had some other fun events. On Saturday Alex and I went and watched our students in a Handball tournament before we left for the Thanksgiving party. My team lost but Alex's won the whole tournament! I had never seen handball before but it is really popular here. According to Alex the game play was very similar to water polo just on land. Then on Sunday John, Katie, and I received tickets to a band concert that some of our students were in. It was a large group that had students from many schools. These students were lucky enough to go to Seattle to march during the halftime show at a Washington University football game. The performance was partly to show us the march they did. I was very impressed and I really like seeing my students outside the classroom setting.
2 comments:
Yay the return of the blog! It's always fun to read about your Japanese adventures. Not that they are all that different from my adventures in Winston... =p
Dear Cynthianotsoscarychu,
Interesting that your entertainment consists of museums and bars. Perhaps eating the squid cooked in it's ink would have been a teeny bit scarier. We missed you for Thanksgiving.
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