School Marathon

Every year my school has a marathon day and all of the kids have to participate. The girls are required to run a 4k route while the boys are given an 8k route. All classes are cancelled for the day and the teachers are positioned along the path to cheer the students on.

I was at a point that gets passed once early on in the race and once near the end as they loop back towards the school. I had one of the English teachers (Taguchi-sensei - the one that invited me to his BBQ) and a member of the PTA stationed with me. So I was able to chat with them while we waited for the kids to pass us again.

They girls went first and as I cheered and waved at them I got a few students who seemed genuinely surprised to see me there. But they got huge grins on their faces and waved back at me as they passed. So that made me feel good, especially since there was a parent and fellow teacher there to witness it :) They like me, they really like me!

About 20 minutes later they came by again and said "thank you!" as they passed me while I clapped and cheered. It was really cute.

Amazingly, I got even better reactions from the boys. This really surprised me because in class the boys always try to avoid me. But for some reason they got really pumped about having me cheer them on. Some of them even cheered back at me. Go figure!

When the boys looped back around some of them actually looked green. I'm not saying that as an expression, there must be something about the Japanese skin tone because they really were green! I was worried some of them were going to pass out in front of me but they pushed through it and some of them perked up a bit as I cheered them on.

In the afternoon we had the award ceremony. All of the teachers had chosen numbers a few days earlier that would correspond to a student's finishing position. So if a student finished 117th and a teacher had picked that number then the teacher would give that student a special present. One teacher actually gave their students Kleenex >.< Another gave Cup a Noodle and apologized as she gave it to them :P And then there were the teachers that gave grocery bags full of candy! I gave my kids a box of Oreo chocolates and Oreo cookie "straws" so I think I was safely in the the middle. When my numbers were called the girl with that number actually squealed in excitement and she ran up to me with her arms outstretched as if for a hug. So I hugged her but it was really awkward because I realised too late that maybe that wasn't what she was going for. Oh well! But the really strange thing about it was that I didn't actually teach either student but they seemed really excited to get my presents. I'm telling myself that it is because I am just that awesome but it could have just been the fact that I was giving them presents...

All in all it was a really great day and I am happy because it was after I had started to feel like maybe the kids didn't really care for me. I'm glad to see that at least some of them are happy I'm here.

Maenishi International Day

Today my school had their International Day and 9 other ALTs came to visit and share a little about their home countries. I was really stressed and worried leading up to today because I didn't really know what to expect and I knew that all of the other ALTs would be looking to me for answers. Luckily everything went pretty smoothly and everyone seemed to have a good time.

After the opening ceremony some students from the Korean class presented Alice in Wonderland in Korean and the Chinese class sang some songs. Two students from the Spanish class did a tango for everyone and it was really funny to watch because the girl was leading and they had at least a good foot of distance between them the entire time.

The rest of the morning was spent having the ALTs present their home country to a group of students who then went back to their classes and taught everyone else all about that country. All in all there were 9 countries represented today so I think they got a pretty good introduction to the English speaking world. There was someone from Canada, America, Barbados, England, Ireland, South Africa, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

Some of the facts got a little muddled when they had to report back to their classmates but for the most part they seemed to understand a lot of what was told to them. I especially enjoyed the report on Australia because they spent a lot of time talking about how it started off as a prison colony and then proceeded to list off all of the things there that could kill you. Sounds like a great place, let's go!

I was one of the things they had to draw for Pictionary.

 In the afternoon we got to play games with the kids and that was a lot of fun. We played pictionary, hangman, telephone, shiritori (you have to make a list of words where the next word has to start with the last letter from the previous word. ie: boat, talk, kangaroo) and wanderword (you are given a letter and you have to write as many words as possible that contain that letter).

The only thing that I didn't enjoy about today was having to share my kids with everyone. Now my students know how much fun some of the other JETs are and they are stuck with me! Some of my 3rd year students asked me to take a picture of them with the JET from South Africa. All I can say is that they had better ask for a picture with me when they graduate! *shakes a fist in their general direction* I have my eye on them!

JET Halloween Party

The JETs in Gunma organized a Halloween costume party for all of us to attend in Takasaki on Saturday. A few of my friends and I decided to meet up before hand so that we could all go together and take some photos at a photo booth on the way to the party since we were all dressed up.

Once we got there we found out that the bar where this is being held is above a strip club and next door to an escort service. Classy. Inside are about 100 foreigners dressed in everything from Smurf costumes to The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth. Everyone was having a great time and I decided to make it an all-nighter with a few of my friends because catching the first train home is all part of the Japanese experience.

The plan was to catch the first train back into Maebashi around 5:30am after we sobered up at a nearby Denny's. We got a few weird looks from people there because Japan doesn't really celebrate Halloween and our group included a viking, a kid in pajamas, a cat, an anime character, Batman and Alex from Clockwork Orange (me).

At around 5am we start heading over to the station so we could catch our trains home. We caught the 5:30 train and I got stuck having to wait around for my transfer for another hour by myself looking rather sketchy. About 5 minutes before my train is due to roll in I decide to get my keys out so I will have them ready when I get home and I can get to my bed that much sooner. Well wouldn't you know it, my keys are nowhere to be found! I go through my purse and all my pockets at least 3 times before I admit that I really don't have them on me.

So I have to wait an extra 20 minutes before I can get on a train going back into Takasaki in the hopes that the bar is still open and that my keys are there. The bar is a 30 minute walk from the station and people are starting to wake up and go about their daily lives. And here I am, dressed as a psycho from Clockwork Orange, wondering around Takasaki all by myself while severely sleep deprived. Go me!

I eventually find my way back to the bar and am amazed to find that the door isn't locked. As I poke my head in I find a few JETs passed out on couches and one or two passed out Japanese people. I decided to just move around them and try to find my keys. I moved furniture and looked everywhere I could think of. No luck. Now I am starting to panic. I have no idea how I am going to get back into my apartment and all I want to do is go to sleep after my night of drinking.

I wandered back outside and decided that I would retrace my steps from the night before. This worked well in theory but not in practice because I'm not from this area and everything looked different during the day. I quickly realised that I had no idea where I was and that I needed help if I was going to make it through the day. Unfortunately all of my friends who would be in a position to help me were passed out cold at this point. I decided to call Katie anyway. No luck. I then tried Angela since we had gathered at her place before the party and there was a chance my keys were there. No go. Alice? Nope.  I tried Katie again and heard a very groggy voice answer the phone - Hallelujah my prayers were answered!

After I described my predicament and where I was she volunteered to come and pick me up and help me look for my keys. While I was waiting I heard back from Angela and she told me that she couldn't find my keys anywhere at her place. I'm crushed by this news because I was quickly running out of places they might be.

After Katie found me we headed back to the bar to have another look. This time there was an employee sitting at the bar so I told him we were looking for my keys. He says ok and went back to what he was doing. Even with two of us we couldn't find my keys so we headed out and tried the photo booth place only to learn that they didn't open for another 2 hours.

So Katie drove me home because maybe I was dumb and dropped them outside my apartment. After looking all over the place that proved fruitless too so we decided to go to Starbucks and get a coffee (more weird looks). At 9am I realised that the only option left to me was to call my supervisor and admit my idiocy. She agreed to help me and called the estate agency that I am renting from to see if we could get a spare key. They weren't open so my supervisor said she would try again at 10am when most things would be open for the day. At 10:15 I got a call and found out that they weren't open on Sundays and that my supervisor was out of ideas. We would have to wait for Monday.

So I had to spend the night at a friend's house and I get a lift into school the next day. The only problem was that I was DRESSED UP as Alex from CLOCKWORK ORANGE! *facepalm* Oh and I was supposed to prepare a complicated lesson plan for a class I had on Monday but all of my lesson planning things were locked in my apartment. Brilliant.

Katie went back home to bed and I was left to try and find something to wear to school the next day. Luckily I was able to find something that fit and worked with my white pants.

I got back on the train and headed towards downtown Maebashi so that I could crash at my unsuspecting friend's house. I texted her asking that she let me know when she woke up so that I could talk to her. Finding myself downtown I started to meander towards her apartment because I didn't know what else to do in my current state. I sat outside her place until her husband woke up and let me in.

They lent me pajamas and let me pass out until dinner time. I then heard from another friend that she had found keys at the bar the night before and had given them to the bartender who hung them up on the wall behind the bar. Could these possibly be my keys?! I started to get really excited by the prospect of getting to sleep in my own bed and getting to wear something other than my costume to school the next day.

After waiting 3 hours for things to get sorted out and looked into someone else ended up claiming the keys that I had convinced myself were mine. I was crushed. So I spent the night with Alice and Sean and my supervisor picked me up the next day at 7:50am.

I managed to get my lesson planning done during 1st period and we arranged for a locksmith to meet me at my apartment after school to change my lock and give me a new set of keys.

After a harrowing 2 days I felt I deserved pizza and beer so that's exactly what I did.

Impromptu Halloween

The week before Halloween I did all of my Halloween lessons at school so that I could have them all done before the season was over. They all went really well expect for the fact that I had to combine my 2 third year classes into one because one of the teachers I work with just started 2 months of sick leave.  So now I have one big class but the lesson still managed to work, much to my relief. Unfortunately, one of the students wasn't able to do any of the activities because of religious reasons. I asked my JTE what religion she was but she refused to answer :( It seemed a little extreme to sit out of the activities because one of them involved listening to Werewolves of London and filling in blanks in the lyrics and the other activity had them drawing Halloween related things on a picture of a haunted house. Personally, I don't see where the conflict lies but to each their own! We listened to Halloween music and had a good time for the rest of the class.

The next week I had some of my super genki girls from that class come up to me and ask if we were going to have a Halloween party. I thought we already had, but apparently not >.< I told them that we couldn't because with the combined classes we needed the extra week to make sure they were at the same point in the lessons and that we needed that week's class to even things out. We were all sad about it but I considered it resolved. That is until 4pm when they came up to me at my desk in the staff room to say that they had talked to another of their teachers and they said that I could use their class to have the party the following day. So now I had to pull another Halloween party out of parts best left unnamed.

Once I was free to leave school I raced to the grocery store to buy candy because I figured we could chill and eat for at least some of the time. After that I headed home to start coming up with Halloween games that used simple English and would appeal to a large group of 18 year olds. I was up until midnight making 40 different Halloween bingo cards by hand and 20 large print outs of pictures for a relay race.

The next day when it was time for the party I asked the teacher who was letting me use his class what room it was going to be in and he said, "Oh I thought we could do it in your room". Thanks for the warning! I could have been preping things in there! Then he casually asks, "Can you do it on your own?" Oh yeah sure no problem! Bring on the 40 18-year-olds who can't understand English and let me try and tell them how to play the games >.<

In the end it went really well though. After Bingo we played the relay race where they had to run up to the board and slap the image that I called out before the other teams could. It got super rowdy and I was a little concerned that I was going to get in trouble from other teachers trying to teach but that's what you get when you make me run a party on my own! Luckily no one complained (at least to me) and the students seemed to have a really great time.

Tokyo Disney Sea

Yesterday a couple of friends and I went to Disney Sea in Tokyo to celebrate Angela's birthday, but the adventure started on Friday.

Right after school I raced home to pack an overnight bag and catch the train into Takasaki. There I met up with Alice and Amy to check out an Alphonse Mucha exhibit that was in town. It was amazing! I had no idea that he was talented in so many different styles and mediums! If you ever get the chance to see an exhibit of his take it!

After that we headed over to a garlic restaurant for dinner. Liz would have loved it! We had garlic pizza, garlic french fries, garlic steak and a really yummy appetizer called Dracula which was roasted garlic, cheese, anchovy oil and something else made into a spread that came out all hot and bubbling that you could spread onto slices of baguette. Mmmmm!

Then it was time for me to say goodnight to my companions for the evening and meet up with Angela and Laura. The plan was to crash at Angela's place and get up at the crack of dawn so we could hit the road by 6am and hopefully make it to the park before the gates opened.

Things were looking good as we rolled out of bed at 5am and managed to bundle ourselves into the car by 6 - and then I was given the roll of navigator. I would like to take this time to give a shout out to my homey, the iPhone. I only missed one exit and was able to quickly calibrate another route and it was smooth sailing from then on. Our trip home wasn't quite so glorious but I will get to that later. Due to traffic our 2 hour drive became a 4 hour drive and we got to the park around 10am. Not too shabby.

Once we were there we got our first taste of lines to come when we endeavoured to buy tickets. After about an hour we were 5 people from the front of the line when the unthinkable happened. We all watched in horror as all of the ticket signs came down and SOLD OUT was slapped on top of the one-day pass. SOLD. OUT. After we were able to scrape our jaws off the pavement we shuffled over to the counter and gave our best puppy dog faces. The lady at the wicket cheerfully asked if we wanted 4 one-day passes and told us that the sign was for people who were half-way through the line. We were safe!

This was my first experience with a Disney Park and it really was like walking onto a movie set. I think most of the pictures I took that day were of the architecture but I did score a couple of shots of some of the characters!

Angela, Jiminy Cricket and me

After grabbing a bite to eat we went in search of our first ride. We found a line that was only 1.5 hours long and joined the queue. It was for a Steampunk ride called Storm Rider and was one of those rides where you sit in a moving chair as you watch a screen. What made this one particularly awesome was that a giant laser crash through the ceiling and it proceeded to rain on us :)

I'm glad I enjoyed it because as fate would have it that was the only ride I went on! I had been battling a headache all day and it got the best of me 2 hours into the line for Indiana Jones. I fought my way back through the line and went to the nurse's station.

There I was poked in the tummy because I was feeling nauseous and then given Chinese medicine (some kind of powder that tasted like cinnamon, in fact I think it was cinnamon) and put to bed. A few minutes later I was sick and had to apologise profusely in Japanese because I didn't know where the bathroom was. Thank god I had a bed pan! After being fixed up by a very nice nurse I was put back to bed where I passed out for 3 hours. When I woke up I was feeling well enough to try and find my friends again. As I was heading out of the station I was handed 2 cutely folded barf bags just in case. It made me laugh.

I had slept through the evening show and the fireworks had been cancelled but I was able to meet up with Katie and grab a bite to eat before going shopping for the remainder of our time there. I even managed to score some milk tea flavoured popcorn! Yummm!

By the time the park was closing I was starting to feel a little green around the gills again so I opted to give Katie navigating duties and the iPhone so I could pass out in the back seat. I woke up to Katie urgently insisting that I wake up because they missed a turn and no longer knew where they were in downtown Tokyo. I recalibrated the map for her but was now to scared to go back to sleep as the rest of the car was mildly panicking as we sped through a web of highways in the middle of a gigantic city. Just as I was about to doze off again we reversed because we had missed a turn O.O! I'm was awake now.

We eventually made our way out of the maze safe and sound and I was able to crawl into my bed around 1:30am. If I ever go back or want to check out Tokyo Disneyland I think I will take the train and book a hotel for the night.

School Sports Day

On Wednesday my school had it’s annual Sports Day. On this day all of the students are placed on teams according to their homeroom and are pitted against each other in epic battle.

It was a welcome break from teaching. But I did have the principal come up to me and ask if it was ok for me to be in the sun. I think he was worried that I would burn as soon as sunlight touched my skin because I was still sporting my burn from the weekend in Nagano. Or at least I think that’s what he was saying, it was all in Japanese with a little bit of charades thrown in there for fun :)

I got to participate in a few of the games. One of them involved me holding up a basket on a pole above my head as the students tried to throw bean bags into it. It was fun and scary at the same time to have 40 students surround me and throw bean bags over/at me.

The other game I got to do was a teacher relay where we had to keep a ball on a racket as we run around the track. I was rather disappointed with my performance and demand a rematch when I am not holding a camera!

But my favourite race of the day was the club replay because they had to do it in team uniform/something that represented the club. The sports clubs were pitted against each other while the arts clubs squared off. The track and field team had to run while carrying the pole vault pole because they had an unfair advantage. I felt really bad for the poor kid from the ping pong club who had to run around the track while bouncing the ping pong ball on the paddle, the wind blew it off every other bounce and he had to go chasing after it. Needless to say the ping pong club got lapped!

The arts race saw a guy in a dress (drama club) and a fat kid with a marching band tuba wrapped around him. The ikebana girls got off easy, all they had to do was run while holding a bunch of leaves :P

Nagano Soccer Tournament

This past weekend I found myself in Nagano Prefecture for a soccer tournament with ALTs from all over eastern Japan. We teamed up based on what prefecture we were from so I was playing for Gunma on the girl's team. The pitch was gorgeous because it was up in the mountains and had a spectacular view.

We did really well considering that half our team had never played before. On the Saturday we had 4 games where we lost two 0-1 and tied the others at 1-1. I played defence for the majority of the time and was sad to find that I am a lot slower than I used to be. I must be getting old :(

That night there was a dance party and too much alcohol was consumed. Let's just say that I am never going to drink that much again...or at least while I'm in Japan and am expected to play soccer the next morning! I woke to a massive hangover and could barely keep my coffee down. But I hauled my stubborn self onto the field and managed to play one half before I side-lined myself. The rest of the day saw me hiding under my jacket from the sun and trying to calm my stomach. But my team managed to win both games and get us into the semi-finals (I choose not to believe that it was because I wasn't playing!) By the time our final game rolled around everyone was ready to go home so we bypassed the actual game and went straight to the shootout. The Gunma girls won it 4-2 and landed us in 3rd place :) And what was our glorious prize? More alcohol. Needless to say I gave mine away.