Homestay in Hakusan

The great thing about being in a foreign country with an program like JET is that they organize all these neat opportunities for you. This past weekend, I did a "homestay" where a Japanese family generously offered to take me into their homes for a day and basically show me what a typical day for them is. This offered me an excellent opportunity to see how real people (as opposed to T.V. people or people in textbooks) live.
I was fortunate enough to luck out, and get paired with the best family ever. Here's a brief timeline of what I did:

1. Arrive in Hakusan with other people doing homestay.
2. Have BBQ with everyone and meet family.
3. Sing Canadian national anthem into microphone with 4 (?) other Canucks while waving the Canadian flag (they wanted a brief presentation on something Canadian).
4. Play BINGO for prizes that everyone had brought from their home countries. My and Lisa's contribution was an imported bottle of Maple Syrup that we bought in Japan at a foreign food store. It was authentically Canadian, though (even down to the bilingual labelling), and after peeling off the Japanese labels, no one was the wiser.
5. Go to family's home.
6. Take disc out of bag, and get walked through neighbourhood to the local park.
7. Find that it's a park(ing lot). Did I mention the whole lack-of-space thing yet?
8. Have disc mangled by two kids and the pavement.
9. Turn into human jungle gym within 2 hours of meeting the two kids in the family.
10. Dad comes home.
11. Unload rice from back of truck.
12. Drive to ("real") park; play baseball.
13. Amaze family with frisbee. I don't think they'd ever seen one before, much less seen one thrown "flic" and "hammer" style.
14. Go to onsen (Japanese hot water-type bath). Picture a bunch of naked men relaxing in various hot-water pools. There's also a sauna, and one "cold" water bath, which is apparently too cold for most people here to tolerate for more than a few minutes, but I was perfectly happy to chill out for a while and relax in it.
15. Go back to family home feeling rather refreshed.
16. Have excellent meal cooked for me that was completely vegetarian (although they added meat to theirs). The main dish was okonomiaki, and is kind of like a pancake without the dough, and lots of vegetables. It was yummy. One unfortunate note here is the realization that some Japanese households are still very "traditional" in many respects; the dad wanted me to sit and drink beer, but I wanted to learn how to cook. So, I went into the kitchen to help (the mom), and the dad came in too. He tried making rice balls after I did, and I later found out that that was the first time he had ever done so. Also, while on the subject of food, I guess some people here don't see the need for dental hygeine when you're young (because you'll lose your teeth anyways, I guess), and as a result, the two kids' mouths were full of cavities.
17. Eat. Drink beer.
18. Eat more. Drink more beer.
19. It's crazy how much better my Japanese gets (or maybe just how much better I think it gets) when I've had a few drinks. Also, it gets easier to understand everyone else's English too.
20. Play "guess the sound" game (see picture below).
21. Go to sleep. In this household, everyone sleeps in the same room, with a bunch of beds pushed together. One very intense experience was in the middle of the night, the youngest child just started screaming at the top of his lungs, and thrashing wildly (managing to land a few good blows on yours truly). At this point, the mom wakes up, says ONE syllable, and the kid completely shuts up, and goes back to bed. I guess the kid must have been having a nightmare or something, but still. I need to learn what that one syllable is, and use it on the kids in my classes.
22. Wake up.
23. Eat breakfast. Again, extremely yummy.
24. Get furnished with gifts, including: bag of rice (the grandfather grows rice), dragon doll-type thing, food wrappers (so I know what to buy at the grocery store, a dozen eggs (the dad works with chickens), and leftovers from the night before. And all I gave them was some maple syrup, and some maple cookies.
25. Get driven back to some building, where there was traditional Japanese stuff going on. I participated in a tea ceremony, made some wicked origami, and wrote out some calligraphy in hiragana (Japanese characters). I wrote out "arigato" (thank-you) and gave it to my host family.
26. Other things going on that I saw, but didn't participate in, included kimono dress-up, shadow sketching, yukata (Japanese guitar) playing, and listening to the Japanese harp (I forget the name of it).
27. Get driven back to the train station, take train home.

In a nutshell, that's it. Lots of other stuff has happened since then, but I figure this is enough for now. I need to start leading a more boring life so I won't have to type out as much stuff. Maybe I'll start this weekend.

Hope all of you are well. I miss you all.

a bientot

This is the family I did the homestay with. This is a picture of us at a park, where we played baseball and frisbee with the kids.

This is part of a tooth-throwing tradition. When kids lose their teeth, they throw the upper ones (pointing down) into the ground, and the lower ones (pointing up) onto the roof. Apparently, the toothfairy does not visit Japanese children.

Me and the dad playing a kids' game. Basically, the toy makes a noise (like "A" or "B") and you have to press the right key. He played in English, and I played in Japanese. Good times were had by all.

Yay! Pachinko!

Pachinko!

Pachinko!

Ever played pachinko? I have. See pictures. Pictures good.

Pachinko rules:
1. Put money in.
2. Hold knob.
3. Turn knob left = balls shoot out slow.
4. Turn knob right = balls shoot out fast.
5. Watch shiny balls fall down (like PLINKO from Price is Right).
6. If balls fall in one place = good.
7. If balls fall in other place = bad.
8. Yay!!! Shiny balls.
9. Every now and then, fish swim on screen. Watch fish swim.
10. Yay!!! Shiny balls.

Natural Disasters Galore

Okay, so I didn't feel the first earthquake, but I definately felt the second and third one. The strongest one was 7.3 on the richter scale, where a magnitude six earthquake can "inflict widespread damage in a populated area". Fortunately, this earthquake occurred 70 miles off the coast, and six miles beneath the ocean floor. Apparently, tall buildings in Tokyo were swaying. As for me, I'm fine. No damage to my apartment, and the only thing that fell was a water bottle, and a portable stereo (which had originally been precariously balancing on my t.v. anyways). Pretty crazy, though, getting woken up around midnight because the EARTH IS SHAKING!!! At first I was thinking "wow, and earthquake, this is pretty neat". Then it got a lot stronger, and I remembered I was supposed to go duck under a table, or stand in a doorway (which I did). Then, it got really strong, and I remember thinking "okay, you can stop the ride now, I'd like to get off...". I can't describe what it's like to have what was once solid ground tremble beneath your feet. Crazy tsunamis near the coastal areas too; fortunately, I'm far enough inland that it won't affect me. And to top it all off, there are two typhoons heading this way (one will most likely miss most of Honshu, though).

Anyhow, I came to school today, and taught my first four classes. It went well. There is a very obvious difference in how the kids act between grade levels. Since I'm responsible for basically the whole school (500 or so kids), I'll be giving the same lesson all week (my self-introduction). This is good, becasue I don't think I was completely comfortable until the last class today, but bad because I have to do the same thing over and over (but less prep time, I guess). Anyhow, I should probably get back to work.

Just a quick note to let you know that I wasn't one of the people hurt in the earthquake (in fact, there was negligible damage in my particular area), and that my first day teaching at school went well.

Lisa and Soga-san's mother. When I got my camera out, she was so excited that she ran over and posed next to Lisa, even though I had intended to just get a shot of the field and mountains in the background. Very sweet lady.

Me and Soga-san's wife. She's made the best food I've had since I've been here. Also, I got to wear cool Japanese clothes.

Neat river we found.

Before.

During.

After

Louis' living room. Note the tatami (staw-mat) floors.

Louis' kitchen. Note the size of fridge.

Earthquake...!

So guess what happened today? Give up? We had an earthquake. 5.something; I guess that's relatively big, as it created 50 cm tsunamis along the coast near where I live. Joe (for those of you who don't know here, she's the other ALT in Kameyama) called in to check on me after it happened, to which I responded with "what? We had an earthquake?" I was completely oblivious. I guess that's for the best. At the time, Lisa and I were walking back from the train station, and I guess they're harder to fell when you're in motion.

So, this weekend consisted of Louis and Lisa waking up at 7 in the morning, so we could be ready at 8 am for Soga-san to come pick us up, and take us to a judo contest. I didn't take any pictures from that, because I fogot my camera. It was a local competition with kids from the area, with the oldest ones being maybe 16 or so. There were some pretty good take-downs, and watching this little girl flip over this guy twice her size was pretty neat to see.

After this, we went to go "help" Soga-san harvest rice, though it turns out he didn't really need our help that much. We basically just walked around, until he told us we could go sightseeing. We then found this really cool river, with some of the clearest water I've ever seen, and went wading in it for a while. It was very serene.

Later, we helped pick up the many bags of rice seeds, and put them into the truck (the real reason we were there, as they were heavy, and the average age of everyone else was somewhere around 65). Soga-san and I then went to the place where you do whatever it is you do to rice between cultivation and kind-you-can-eat. Basically, this involved lifting the bags into this machine, and dumping out all the contents to be processed. Along the way, though, I saw some monkeys!!! At first, they were far away, and I thought "wow, those are some really hairy kids". Then we got closer, and I realized that they were moving on all fours. I guess the truck scared them, and they climbed the retaining wall (which are everywhere, because the land is so hilly/montainous), and disappeared into the bamboo forest. No pictures, though, because I couldn't get my camera out fast enough.
When everything was done, we went back to Soga-san's place where he turned to Lisa and said "you take shower now". Hahahaha. Turns out he wanted to have us for dinner, but realized we wouldn't be comfortable in our sweaty clothes. His wife is the best cook ever. Really yummy food. Soga-san got really drunk (which is both completely socially acceptable, and, in general, requires little alcohol for Japanese people), and taught me how to play shojin (Japanese chess) while Lisa relaxed in this from-the-future, robotic-massage-giving chair. Then he brought in his newborn granddaughter, and almost woke her up so we could "play" with her. As we were having dessert, Soga-san turned to Lisa and said "you should brush teeth before going to bed". I guess he's really concerned about her hygiene.

Today consisted of us going to Nagoya to get Japanese textbooks, dictionaries, and kid's books that we can (hopefully) read. If not, at least they have lots of nice pictures in them. Also, you should all be aware that oftentimes in Japan, when it rains, it POURS. We ran from the bookstore to the subway station, which left us outside for less than 30 seconds, and we were drenched by the time we made it.

That's it for now.

I've dyed and gone to...Louis' desk

I went to the bank today to set up payment for my gas bill through my bank (which I had to do during work, because the banks here close at 3 pm), and when I got back, this kid was sitting at my desk, and teachers were putting newspapers around his shoulders. At first I guessed the kid was injured or something, but when he smiled, I figured it was something else. Then the male teacher put this goop on a plastic comb-thingy, and started to run it through the kids hair. I tried to ask what it was for (lice maybe?) but when the female teacher started tugging at a part of his hair that, I got the idea: Holy crappers!!! You aren't allowed to have dyed hair in junoir high!!! Apparently, if you're caught dying your hair, they drag you into the teacher's room, sit you in the first avaliable desk (in this case mine), and dye your hair back to the only colour that is acceptable (black). I wonder what they'd do if they got an exchange student or something with brown/red/blonde hair.

Anyhow, I should get back to work. I'll post more pictures soon.

By the way, so far everyone is losing the name-Louis'-plant contest (Michelle, je ne veux pas savoir le genre de plant que j'ai, je veux que tus lui donne un nom, comme "monsieur plant" ou "bob"), and the grand prize of all-expenses-paid* trip to Japan is still up for grabs.