:Japan )

I don’t know if I’ve blogged about this yet, but every Tuesday night I’ve been traveling to Hachinohe to meet with many of the other ALTs in the area (and some who come quite far out of the way) to attend Japanese Language classes. The past few times I’ve attended, I’ve hardly seen any of the other people because they are on a different floor of the building and they seem to rush out the door when class is out, and thus far my class has been a little tardy in letting out. Well today was doubly special in that, A) I finally relieved Lorraine of the duty of babysitting my camera that I had left in that restaurant 2 weeks ago and B) there was quite a crowd that decided to go get a bite to eat and socialize at a little back alley restaurant.
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So today I finally got my hair cut for the first time in Japan. The service level was way higher than I was expecting… A “standard cut” had one hair wash /shampoo at the start, the cut, then another shampoo and cut (I don’t know why shampoo either), and then finally a scalp, neck, shoulder massage. That was an unexpected little piece of heaven..I hadn’t had a massage in sooo long. Ah and it was a very big plus these were female stylists as well, cute compared to many that have cut my hair in the States.

Or so I thought. The past week or so around 6 pm there has been massive drumming in the distance. I drove around trying to find out where this stuff was coming from because I knew it could mean only one thing…MATSURI!! I wasn’t lucky in my driving but after asking the next day at work I was able to get in with the float building team. So for the past week and a half I have been working from around 6pm to 9 -10ish helping on the float. Finally the event weekend came and what better way to celebrate completing the float? Oh yes! Drink like crazy before a big feast! (That ended up to come back on me later).

I just wanted to help out to show I was interested in participating with the office on stuff like that…before I knew it I was going to be a person who is actually on the float! Awesome! Waking up feeling great and then progressively feeling worse as the morning leads to noon…very sucky. I actually had to ask for a plastic bag in case I needed to escape into the back float during the parade and …well you know. Thankfully much canned juice products flowed my way and I was feeling just fine by the time the parade actually started.

Everything went great from there, well there were some people that kept asking if I was okay no matter how many times I said yes…but I can’t get angry for that now can I ? Everything went great and to reward the hard work of actually getting through the first day of the parade we of course had another dinner with optional drinking and post dinner odd-but-fun japanese video game playing. Ahhh that felt good…I hadn’t played the playstation since I got to Japan at that point.

Sunday I didn’t ride on the float, I was instead a clown of sorts handing out stickers to all the little kiddies I saw as I walked with another clown down the main route of the parade. Our clown outfits were pretty minimal but it was enough for almost no one to recognize us and provided for much fun. (more…)

First off, yes I’ve been lazy. I’m gonna backdate this entry and the 2 others after it so I might hide that fact

Okay! To continue the trend of weekend partying I went down to Hachinohe over the weekend to party it down at Mike’s, home of the legendary inherited kick-ass playlist. Much fun was had by all. Highlights include scarily flaming out-of-control blowtorches, “you can’t zoom a zoom” zoom-schwartz games, the men in blue jumpsuits trio, girls jumping on one lucky guy’s bed, dirty dancing in the same bedroom by different people, everyone just dancing like crazy at a club, and everyone dancing like crazy in a club trying to avoid scary stalker guy who decided to follow us because someone said hi. The next day the cure for the morning after hangovers or just plain munchies was of course a huge bowl of ramen. The weather was nice so we all hit Shirahama beach that wasn’t too far away (the same one that I believe I’ve written about before).
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Well actually CM (shee-emmu as pronounced here) stands for commercial, specifically TV commercials. For some reason Japanese people love seeing foreigners in commercials, so in keeping with that tradition, I have been tapped for one of my very own wacky, over-exaggerated Japanese commericals! The commercial is promoting a locally made carrot/plum jam of some sort. It looks almost exactly like baby food but it does taste good, thank goodness for that, I feel sorry for those who have to make commercials of nasty food and then spit the crap out between takes after saying with a smile that it tastes good.

So my part of the commercial is to dip a finger into a jar of this stuff (while holding the label toward the camera of course!), taste it, make a thinking face for a second, then make a super excited face that transitions into me giving the camera a thumbs up and saying “Good Taste!!” in a super genki fashion. The commercial won’t hit the TV for a couple of months but I hope I can get a tape of it. I’m sure this will provide for endless laughing at my expense in the future.

This past weekend I had to decide between two very fun outings: one on the other side of the prefecture climbing Mt. Iwake and the other closer to home carrying a mikoshi in the Towada town festival. (A mikoshi is a small float like thing on 4 or 5 beams of wood which people use to lift and carry it) Granted camping and hiking up a mountain sounds much more fun than carrying a float through the streets, I eventually decided that because the Towada festival was a one time a year deal and I wanted to some house cleaning the next day, I would go to Towada. So like many of the festivals in Japan, drinking is half the fun! They’ve mastered this fact to a science. How so? Well how do you motivate about 15 - 20 people to lift a heavy object and carry it down the street, even turning it around and pumping it in the air? Elementary dear watson!…you get a beer cart and put it in front of those carrying the float! At every break time you hand out the beers (sometimes sake) then when it’s time to pick the float back up, steal the beers you handed out back or force the carriers to down the rest of their drink on the spot. Very effective indeed. I’m sure Pavlov and his dog would be proud.
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Today was pretty kick ass… I went to give a 2 hour class to 3rd graders at the elementary school I live in front of. I started out with my introduction lesson, which admittedly needs a little sprucing up to keep from boring the kids, but then I got to move into new territory. First I was kind of blind sided into singing a song (Old McDonald) which I didn’t think I could ever do that in the past but I did Old McDonald proud I hope. Then I had to come up with a game, so I did a semi-standard pass an object around while music plays and then when the music stops the kid who is holding the item has to do something. In this case the something was to get up and say “hello, my name is _____…..Nice to meet you” and shake my hand. Well can you guess what happened with the first kid who had to get up and do it? Can ya, Can ya? Yep that’s right, he started getting tears in his eyes…I must be one scary, ugly gaijin…I didn’t know what I was gonna do if he couldn’t pull through. Bless his heart he made it and the rest of the Chosen made it without a hitch thereafter. Well there were a little interesting moments when I would step into the midst of them to hear and shake the hand of a kid that was in the back and someone at my feet would start squeezing my calf muscles and my Ach. tendon, feeling it up like one would when judging a melon to buy at the local market. (more…)

This week I had my first class that didn’t involve my self introduction lesson. I didn’t do much planning for it as the teacher had already something planned. So it wasn’t too hard. Lunchtime however was a challenge to get the kids to say anything in english. I would usually ask the question, sometimes I would even translate to japanese, but then the person asked would giggle and then ask their friends what they should say. Only sometimes did this produce an answer. The good news is that I heard the girl that I made cry earlier won 2nd place in the english speech competition. I didn’t get to hear it but I’d like to think that she tried something that I suggested and that she found it was good advice.

I only really had one day of teaching this week because of a typhoon cancelling the others I was scheduled to go to but I did get to some other really interesting stuff. There is a famous wood sculptor who is helping a junior highschool carve statues for the schools opening (the school is grounds are still under construction but it’s able to hold classes) The carving that is involved is not very difficult — it’s just carving out little “scales” with a chisel that has a curved blade — but I find it fun. It was especially amazing, from an American perspective at least, that the school allowed 20 some odd kids have sharpel chisels and not much safety gear at all. The real kicker was when they allowed 4 or 5 kids at a time to try out a chainsaw, this time with supervision but still no safety goggles. Just the thought of doing that would probably get you sued in America. I had a good time though — it was fun to work with my hands again on something artsy along side the kids. In fact I came back on Saturday to do it some more and got to talk with the instructor quite a bit. Apparently he’s has work all over the world…Santa Monica beach I think is where one of the sculptures is located but China, Germany, France just to name a few of the countries where others are. I’m hoping to get his card that has his website address on it when I got back to do some more carving on Wednesday.
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