Pictures of the US

A girl at my high school has been suspended for 3 weeks! I’ll give you $100 if you can guess what she did...
to be continued...


I taught a lesson a while ago about Cultural Images. I told them that lots of people don’t know much about Japan except, of course, for the famous cultural images such as sumo, giesha, sushi, manga, etc. I wanted them to think about the cultural images of the United States. This was a selfish lesson - I really just wanted to know what they think of when they think of the US. Later I’ll use it to build a stereotypes/assumptions lesson. I really liked a lot of their answers and I wanted to share it with you. Pictures of the US:










In other Tsurusaki High School News... our soccer team (yes, there is only one and it’s a boy’s team) has advanced to the final round of the Oita High School Tournament! They have the championships next weekend in the big dome stadium that hosted the World Cup Tournament a few years ago. Exciting! If they win they will advance to the national tournament in Tokyo. Go Tsurusaki!

Usuki Bamboo Festival

It has been a weekend of exploration for Shawn and I. Yesterday we went to a bamboo festival in Usuki, a town about 40 min to the southeast of us. Usuki is a place with lots of historical significance, there are castle ruins, stone buddhas carved into mountains and a historic street that reminds me of the Japan in Memoirs of a Geisha. Long narrow streets bordered by beautiful traditional Japanese houses. It was awesome.

For the bamboo festival the people had carved designs into huge bamboo reeds and then placed candels inside to create a lantern effect. They lined the streets and winding through these historic homes there were various displays of amazing creativity and art. The lighting was beautiful.

We bought at tripod for the trip so we could photograph the illumination in all it's splendor. Shawn has amazing pics of lots of the displays. I could only catch a handfull of non-blurry pictures. Here they are:

To give you an idea of the construction:













Festivals are an excuse to people to celebrate their traditions and some take the opportunity to wear their kimono. Here are a few girls I wanted to scoop up and take home with me. How adorable are they!?




We also saw women playing the koto, which is a long instrument with strings you pluck...sorry I can't describe it better than that.



It was a really great experience.
We were also able to explore a little around the castle ruins and hang out. I'll leave you with some photos from the rest of the day.






Despite all the festivities and lovely photo-ops, I think I captured the best moments on the train ride home.








Have a great week!

November already?

I've been saying things like this alot recently:

Wow, it's already November?
It's already Thursday?
It's been over a week since I last updated my blog?
It's already time to pay rent again?

Time seems to be flying by!

Last weekend I watched a wheelchair marathon here in Oita. It draws people from all over the world, and coincidentaly enough Shawn and I met two out of the three Americans racing at dinner one night. It was quite inspiring. Here are some pictures of the event:







Halloween is the first holiday I've been able to teach here so I went all out. I made a Halloween DVD consisting of clips from Hocus Pocus the movie, scary music and some clip art images. I wanted to give my students some visuals. Then, I designed a fun class with some games, etc. Little did I realize that after the EIGHTEENTH time of teaching this class I would be oh-so-over Halloween. I was excited, and now I'm glad I don't have to say the words, "Happy Halloween!" for at least another year.

Yesterday, on Halloween, I hosted a small party for the ESS club. I was promised some orange pumpkins from the fruit stand guy near my house, but I was delivered 7 very small, squat, thick green pumpkins. It was terrible, I was so disappointed because I had been telling my kids they would get to carve American pumkins... I accepted defeat, and we tried to carve the green ones. Guess what! We did it! And they really didn't look much different than American orange pumpkins once you got the candle inside. It also turned out that my high school has four big boxes of all kinds of costumes, so I brought them out. We had 'dirt cups' with chocolate pudding, oreo and gummy worms. And the whole time scary music and sounds playing in the background. We even toasted the pumpkin seeds! They were happy, I was happy, and the Jack-O-Lanterns were happy:





Shawn even stopped by!












It was a good Halloween.

As you may have read we also got a new couch! The arrival of this new couch prompted us to reorganize our entire apartment and rearrange furniture. It looks so great now! It seems like we have so much more space and we are feeling very comfortable. Love the new couch. Much better than the two split-seam chairs we have been sitting on!

I want to send a special thanks to my wee cousins DJ and Jessse - Thanks so much for the letters! They were great! I will reply very soon. :)

Hope all is well. Happy November!