I concluded March with a trip to Kanazawa with Ayumi. Kanazawa is in Ishikawa, Toyama’s neighboring peninsula. It’s very famous for its beauty and I’ve heard it described as the Kyoto of the West. On our last trip, Ayumi and I had discussed possible places to visit and we decided on Kanazawa largely because I really wanted to see the Ninja Temple that I had heard about.
Turns out the Ninja Temple actually has nothing to do with ninjas, its real name is Myoryuji, though even in Japanese it’s referred to as the Ninja Temple. It’s called that because the feudal lord who built it filled it with traps and hidden doors and levels. There is rumored to be a secret tunnel between the castle and the temple. Even with no ninjas it was still really freaking sweet! Unfortunately pictures weren't allowed inside but I did get a pretty cool English pamphlet.
After the temple we went to a place where we made wagashi or Japanese style sweets. These sweets are commonly made with mochi (pounded rice cakes) and anko (sweetened red bean paste). I’m a big fan of both so it was fun to make (following the specific instructions of the teacher) my own sweets. The whole process actually reminded me of playing with Play-Doh . Also, they gave away a character sweet to one or two people in the class. My foreigner powers activated and a cute Doraemon one was given to me.
My finished products (the ones on the bottom) next to their display. 
Ayumi and I modeling our creations.
We did some shopping and drove around and took some pictures at the Kanazawa Castle. On the way back we stopped for food at a Korean restaurant and bumped into Yukio (you might remember him from first ski trip post, he gave us free fries) and some of his friends.
On the twenty-sixth John, Katie, Alex and I went to see the movie ほしのふるまち, The Town the Stars Fall Upon, or also know as When You Wish Upon A Star. This movie was based on a comic set in Himi. There were lots of posters and flags everywhere and spots where the movie was filmed (before I came) had a special banner marking their location. The story was a high school drama about a city (Tokyo) boy who is sent to live with relatives in the countryside (Himi) because of his school grades. The plot wasn’t bad but, to be honest, the film itself wasn’t that great. Still, I will be buying a copy when it comes out on DVD because it was really cool to see parts of my town in the movie. The theater was more crowded than I had ever seen it. We soon found out that this wasn’t just because it was opening weekend, but also because the lead actors actually made an appearance to talk about their experience filming and to thank the audience for coming to watch.
Alex, Cody, John, and Masa all had their birthdays fairly close together so we had many birthday parties within a few weeks of each other. To sum it up we ate delicious food, drank plenty, and went to karaoke several times. We’ll see if any of the pictures are worth sharing with the public…
April 6th marked our first day back to work and our first day at our new schools. To spare you any suspense I’ll just go ahead and tell you that I love my new schools. All three of them are great! I will give some of the credit to myself, I know so much more now about what’s expected of me and how to get the students to respond. I was very happy at my old schools, but this opportunity to start afresh has been fantastic.
My new schedule has me at Hokubu JHS every day, but on Wednesday and Friday I leave after lunch and go to Nadaura ES and Kaiho ES respectively. Hokubu is the largest JHS in Himi and at first I was nervous about that but the students and teachers are so friendly and it actually makes it easier to find students to talk to when I have a much larger group to sample from. Still, with nearly 500 students it is very different from my previous two junior high school, the biggest of which had about 130 students. Also instead of one JTE I work with three, one for each junior high grade level (age wise equivalent to 7th,8th,and 9th graders in America), and I end up teaching the same lesson multiple times to each of the many classes. For example, on Monday I teach all four second grade classes (like 8th graders) with one teacher and each of those classes is the same. So by the end of the day we’ve worked out any of the little kinks that might have popped up the first few times through.
After settling in Hokubu had a welcome enkai to celebrate the start of the school year and to welcome all the new teachers. If I haven’t mentioned it before, the Japanese education has teachers rotate around between schools at the end each year. Not all teachers move every year and some stay at one school for many years, as far as I can tell, there is no real method behind how this is decided. Alhough ALTs always move each time. With so many more teachers the enkai was a little different than what I was used to but I still talked to many people that I hadn't had a chance to meet yet and had a great time. I was very happy with the choice of the second place we went to because it was a wine bar. A little alcohol goes a long way in making me more confident in my Japanese and my Japanese coworkers more confident in their ability to talk a foreigner. As far as I know I haven’t mortally offended anyone with my Japanese yet. I did have a really fun conversation with the vice principal about the time he spent in Indonesia.
