Merry Christmas!

What do the Japanese do to celebrate Christmas? The opposite of what most Westerners do. You know New Years? That's their Christmas. Parties, hanging out with friends, big romantic dates. In Japan, New Years is the big family holiday where they visit shrines or temples. Oh, and apparently chicken is a thing, for Christmas not New Years. Fried chicken. KFC fried chicken to be specific.

He's a plump old man with a white beard and a red suit. That's basically Santa, right?

I forgot to mention the cake. 

Yeah, cookies aren't really Christmas fare here. Cakes are the Japanese Christmas sweet. You literally have to reserve your chicken bucket. That's how popular fried chicken is for Christmas.

So what did I do this Christmas day? Besides finally updating this blog, I watched a bunch of movies, did laundry, and baked cookies! I figured out how to do some baking in my microwave and the cookies came out delicious!

Crunchy on the outside, gooey inside, and chocolate everywhere!

I also found a church in Tokyo that does an English Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. It was a nice service with a bunch of my favorite Christmas songs. And it was in the middle of Harajuku, so the street decorations were gorgeous.

And then there was  a motorcycle gang dressed as Santas.

Because Japan.

And tomorrow I'm Skyping with my family on their Christmas Day! 

Merry Christmas to you all!

Teacher Stuff

It's finally the end of 2nd term. We had our closing ceremony on Monday and tomorrow's my last day of work since I took the 25th and 26th off. Not that I attended the ceremony properly. The 3 1-4 teachers, Jeremy, and I snuck out of the gym and into the athletic teachers' office and managed to have a meeting to discuss the schedule and ALT workbook for the 3rd term.

That's an excellent example of what the past month has been like. Getting ready for exams and evaluating presentations and debates was immediately followed by marking essays, and grading tests, which was in turn followed by figuring out what to do next term. I managed to squeeze teacher's meetings, sending out Christmas presents and cards, and some time for myself somewhere in there.

I'm pretty excited about the 3rd term for our first years. We're doing a unit on Narrative Writing, so I get to teach them about story arcs. Hopefully, we'll be able to encourage their creativity too. One of the 1-4 teachers is pretty disparaging about their imaginations, but their final skits (advertising an amusement park, restaurant, or tourist attraction) including some interesting ideas. Although there were the rather boring Starbucks and McDonalds, one group advertised 'Sakado Land' and another invented an aquarium with over a million visitors a week. They have creative potential; we just need to give them some space to let it out and experiment with it. The second half of next term will be devoted to the basics of speech writing and giving to help prepare them for 2nd year English Exoression, which focuses on debate. It sounds like a return to boring formulas, but we've tweaked the presentation portion for that to make it a bit more interesting. Hopefully, it works out they way we think it will.

So, tomorrow I'm printing out the workbooks and journals and cleaning and reorganizing my desk to get ready for the break and next term. Speaking of break, I'm headed to Thailand for a week! My friend, Victoria, and I are hitting both Chiang Mai and Bangkok. So that'll be another country off my travel bucket list, as well as a week of warmth before the coldest part of Japan's winter.

I'll end this post with some pictures of what teachers do during finals. Hint: it's mostly sitting at desks and looking at piles of papers.

Preparing a quiz game for the Gaigo (foreign language) Open House. 

Me, all dressed up for the Gaigo Open House. I even got a cool neon arm band, identifying  me as a teacher at Sakado High School. Got to impress those junior
high kids and their parents!

3-4 (my third year class) English Expression essays. We don't see this class next term, because they have university exams, so this is their final English writing project. They put a lot of time and effort into these. I'm really proud of the topics the picked and managed to write about. I also have a much more massive appreciation for all my teachers. 

I don't remember which class these tests are from. There might actually be two tests here. One piled in the middle and the other set spread out on top for grading. The clipboard in the middle of the two desks has the answer key as well as example answers/criteria for the writing portions. 

Train thoughts

I love the way Japan does rivers.

They're always surrounded by lush green. Sometimes manicured with perfectly placed boulders for benches, sometimes wild tangles of grass and plants, sometimes miniature forests of trees and bushes. Almost always there are walkways placed to take advantage of the views, and allow access to the nature, as well as a path to flow back to concrete civilization.

The views are especially compelling when seen fleetingly out the window of a train, rushing over a bridge high above the riverbed. It never fails to make me wish to get off at the next station and wind myself back along the tracks, so that I may pause and take in the scene again at my leisure.

Happy Pocky Day!

Today is November 11th, or 11/11, which means it's Pocky Day! If you don't know what pocky is, you are missing out on one of Japan's best snack foods. See below for picture reference.

My contribution to the pocky pile: chocolate and sweet potato.

Enjoying the leftovers!

I met up with some JETs for dinner in Kawagoe. We followed the resident Kawagoen to Nomad's Diner. We were served eggcelent burgers and fries. I definitely recommend the egg and bacon cheeseburger! The milkshakes were a little off. They were served after the meal like most drinks in Japanese restaurants. Both the vanilla and chocolate ones had some sort of nut chopped very finely and mixed in. The vanilla ones also had raisins. None of us could figure that one out! We then enjoyed our pocky. Everyone brought different flavors, but there were a few kinds of chocolate. I enjoyed the coconut ones and the ones that were heart-shaped and strawberry flavored.

On our way back to the station we took purikura! We had fun, as always, at these Japanese style photo booths. Here are some of the results:

 

All in all, an excellent Tuesday night!

The Making of a Costume

The materials have been gathered. 

The pieces have been cut and pinned.

The dress fits. 

The seams are sewn. The dress still fits.

Sleeves are added.

Snaps are added to the top of the back seam.

The hems are sewn.

An apron is tied on top.

A hair ribbon and light make-up completes the look.

Alice and Maleficent enjoy the party in their fabulous handmade costumes.

Halloween

I have never celebrated Halloween as much as I have this year. I taught a lesson on it at my visit school, used it as a theme for two classes at my base school, and talked about it for English club. I also attended my first real young adult Halloween party. October has been crazy busy! In between the Halloween stuff, I also participated in a volunteer day in Iwaki, Fukushima, had a Japanese version of Tinker Day, and volunteered at the JET booth at the Saitama International Fair.

My Halloween class for my visit school was taught 7 times, because that's how many classes there are. I started out with a worksheet with pictures of traditional Halloween items, pumpkin patch, Jack-O'-Lantern, costumes, haunted house, etc. Students worked in pairs to write the English word, in katakana if they didn't know the English spelling. Pumpkin patch was thrown out in favor of pumpkins as soon as I started making my way around the classroom, checking on their progress. I explained pumpkin picking using the word field as they already know and understand that word. Trick or treat bag was also reduced to candy bag. After they wrote down their guesses, I made them say the answers as a class, which was harder in some classes than others. Once I threatened to pick students one-by-one, the class usually went ahead and answered. After they answered correctly, I wrote the English word on the board and had them practice saying it. Then, I gave a brief explanation of the item and its use in American Halloween celebrations. Haunted house was very easy to explain. I first reminded them of the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland. And if that didn't get a big response, then I brought up obakeyashi, the Japanese version of a haunted house. These 'scary mazes' feature prominently at all school festivals.

The second activity was a Trick-or-Treat dialogue. The JTE and I demonstrated the dialogue, helped by my witch costume (black shirt and skirt and 100 yen witch's hat) and candy bag. Then the students practiced with each other. If they did the dialogue with me or the JTE, then they got real candy.

At my base school, the first year gaigo class is now learning how to express opinions and negotiate. Last Thursday's class was on making plans, so we went ahead and made it Halloween themed. Each pair had to pick costumes and whether to go to a party or go Trick-or-Treating. They had to write up a quick skit and perform it.

For English club, we had Halloween charades and made masks and bats out of construction paper.

The Halloween party was hosted by some JETs in Kawagoe, 6 stops down on my train line (also where my visit school is). It was pretty fun. We had lots of food and drinks (both alcoholic and non), thematic music, and towards the end some very trippy cartoon shorts from the 70s and 80s. A Witch's Night Out was the name of the strangest one. I made my costume for that one. I'll post pictures of it in a separate post.

All in all, my Halloween spirit has been thoroughly exhausted! Halloween isn't celebrated the same way here, but they know about it and are interested by it, which makes it a useful teaching tool. It does have some similarities to other aspects of Japanese culture. Obon is the festival of the dead. It's celebrated in August, but also has superstitions and lanterns associated with it.

Food Observations

It make look the same, but ordering from a subway in a shopping mall is a sometimes fraught experience. First off, the menu is a bit different if course. Small salad shrimp seemed to be the featured meat, at least the day I was there.

Then there are the misunderstandings that happen in any restaurant, such as ordering a ham and egg sandwich and just getting the egg, because it's loud and the server missed the first part. And sometimes you run into one of your students, which is odd in and of itself, but made worse when you still can't figure out how to tell them you only want lettuce. I'm used to getting stares in The States when I don't have a lot of toppings, but here I got looks of semi-panic. Probably because the poor girl wasn't sure if I really didn't want any toppings (who doesn't want more toppings??? Crazy American!) or if she wasn't understanding my request for something.

Thank the world for helpful old ladies! The woman behind me asked, in pretty good English, if she could help me. She looked askance at me when I told her I didn't want anything else, but at least conveyed that request to the server.

Other things, however, remain the same. Club activities, at least the ones I've participated in, usually involve a snack time where everyone brings something to share. I'm both happy and very amused that some snack foods are eaten the same way I grew up eating them. Chip Star chips (Pringels) are made into duck bills before being eaten, and Tongari Corn chips (Bugles) are placed on fingers to make claws or witches fingers and then consumed one by one.

Chip Star reference photo