"Sounds of laughter, shades of life"

Photos

I have finally put up a few photos that I've had kicking around, so here are the links and a little explanation. I have also corrected the Photo Gallery link on the navigation bar btw.

- A few weeks back I visited a friend at Nozawa Onsen, one of the best ski resorts in Nagano prefecture. Out of ski season, Nozawa is a beautiful village with a population of only around 4000 very old and traditional Japanese people. Alan is the only ALT they have ever had who hasn't already spoken Japanese, and he might be the most involved and dedicated ALT I have met so far - despite the language barrier, he plays sports with his students every day at school and most sundays, and gets drunk with all the locals when they go snake hunting once or twice a week. This is where he gets to live everyday.

- Last weekend I went on a field trip to a neighbouring prefecture with a my predecessor Kirk's adult English class. It was my first time to Gunma prefecture, and we went through Shiga-kogen to get there, an incredibly vast ski resort that I visited once last year during ski season. In the summer, the rolling mountains are covered with trees, as shown in this photo that I took at an altitude of around 2,100m.
Pushing further up to the peak of one of the mountains, I wondered what the smoke was that had enveloped our car only to realise that it was cloud. Out of the clouds, we eventually reached the peak of a still active volcano and walked around the rim of the crater at the very top, where a lake of sulphure has been created (the temperature is around 127 degrees centigrade, or so the guide claimed) - photo here.
The area around the volcano is famous for the mineral rich water produced from the hot springs. The center of the town is host to only two onsens, but a large hot water well with a complex wooden framework helps to extract the water, and there is a foot bath that you can use for free. A plaque will tell you that one of the old Emperors of Japan demanded that the water for his bath be taken all the way from there to Edo (now Tokyo) because nothing else would do - by bus, it's over 5 hours. They didn't have busses in the Edo period. What a bastard, eh?
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- I took a couple of photos of my awesome new wheels too (as opposed to my awesome old ones) - 1 2.

- Last week, I had the pleasure of eating lunch with the first year class 1.4. Their lessons normally go smoothely, but they don't study very hard and they never talk in class, especially when they are meant to. I was, therefore, taken by surprise when I was practically raped by 7 or 8 boys simultaneously every single day last week. From the moment I stepped into the class room, one or two boys would steal my dictionary, 2 would try to grab my junk and the remainder would rub my stomach and grab my hips, shouting "meat!", "beef!", "niku!". Then the onslaught of sex words would begin - secret whispers, hap-hazard grammar construction, then finally approaching me and asking me if I like *insert sex-word here*. Hilarity ensuses. Eventually a girl comes near and I threatened to tell her what they are saying, so they all run away. Needless to say, it was an absolutely awesome week.
Yesterday I was checking through some of their work when I came across the work of one particular student I remember - see link below. The corrections are in red, and the circle on the first line means it is OK, not that it is wrong. clicky clicky.

What about the summer?

This summer will see me on an exciting adventure to the land of the free to visit Nick and a couple of friends I have made here that are returning home. My itinerary begins with Seattle on the 23rd of June, then San Francisco, then Chicago for 6 days to go camping, finished off with 5 days in Hawaii and returning back home on the 9th of August. I'm doing the whole lot alone, which will be pretty cool, but travelling somewhere where I can speak the language be a (possibly unwanted) novelty.

What about now?

Now, I am finishing the last day of my last school term in my first year. As I type this, it is 4:21 in the afternoon by my PC clock, giving me exactly 54 minutes till I have finished my first working year in Japan.
However, I'm not going to turn this into a monologue about how great my life is here - I don't see this as a landmark, just a 5 week break in what has become my life. I'm not visiting Japan anymore and making the most of every day; this is where I live, and I just live every day as it is.
What I would like to do is tell you how much my students and my job have come to mean to me, but I can't do it - I don't have the words. Sometimes I feel like I'm back at school with a group of friends and I'm 15 again, making stupid jokes or arsing around, and yet I also get to teach them and help them achieve what they want to in life. Articulating this wonderful feeling is something I'm going to try to work on, even if it takes the entire collected works of this blog.
What I can tell you now is that I'm starting to feel sad that I have to go home, that I don't get to come to school tomorrow, and I'm already wondering what omiyage I can buy for them in the states.

Tanabata

Tanabata is a Japanese festival that celebrates the story of two lovers, Orihime and Hikoboshi. It is a story originally taken from a Chinese legend about Niulang and Zhinü, a cow herder and a fairy, who are represented by the two stars Altair and Vega respectively. The Wiki entry for Qi Wi, the original chinese version of tanabata, tells the story much better than I ever could:

A young cowherd named Niulang ("the cowherd", the star Altair) happens across seven fairy sisters bathing in a lake. Encouraged by his mischievous companion the ox, he steals their clothes and waits to see what will happen next. The fairy sisters elect the youngest and most beautiful sister Zhinü ("the weaver girl", the star Vega) to retrieve their clothing. She does so, but since Niulang sees her naked she must agree to his request for marriage.
She proves to be a wonderful wife, and Niulang a good husband, and they are very happy together. But the Goddess of Heaven finds out that a mere mortal has married one of the fairy girls and is furious. Taking out her hairpin, the Goddess scratches a wide river in the sky to separate the two lovers forever (thus forming the Milky Way separating Altair and Vega).
Zhinü must sit forever on one side of the river, sadly weaving on her loom, while Niulang watches her from afar and takes care of their two children (his flanking stars β and γ Aquilae).
But once a year all the magpies in the world take pity on them and fly up into heaven to form a bridge ("the bridge of magpies", Que Qiao) over the star Deneb in the Cygnus constellation so the lovers may be together for a single night, the seventh night of the seventh moon.

Tanabata is celebrated in Japan on either the 7th July of the 7th August, because the original Japanese calendar recorded the seventh month to be August by our current calendar. People decorate bamboo trees or wooden frames with origami decorations and write wishes on strips paper that they then hang from the tree. It is said that if they pray hard afterwards then their dream can come true. Some photos of a tanabata festival in Hiratsuka showing many different decorations are available here.

The 7th of July fell last friday, and outside the medical room in my school, one of our school nurses hung a branch from a bamboo tree. Through an exciting journey of mystery with the school nurse, my headmaster and one English teacher, I decorated the tree with origami lanterns added the first wish. By the end of the day, serveral others had written wishes and tied them to the tree, all of which were girls asking to pass their entrance exams for high school and to meet a cute boy - although out if place, I felt no shame.

Tanabata at the hokenshitsu - 1