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On December 12th I went to Nirayama to help make mochi. It was with the same group that I went with to pick sweet potatoes.

Later we ate lunch. I had soup, daikon pickles, and of course... mochi! The mochi with kinako (soybean flour) was delicious!

Then we went to some local historical place. I don't remember the name of it or any details. I have a brochure but I'm too lazy to find it at the moment. The coolest thing was a tree that was actually three trees in one. Part of it is cherry so it has pretty flowers in the spring. Another part is Japanese maple so it has colored leaves in the fall.



I had a lot of fun, but towards the end I started to feel a bit sick. My throat was feeling a bit irritated and I was feeling very tired and rundown. By the time I was on the train heading back home, I had a fever. I felt bad all evening, but I slept a lot that night and felt better the next day. However, my voice sounded a bit bad which wasn't good in class. By Wednesday I had a pretty bad cough which made my throat start hurting again. On Thursday my voice was so weak that I couldn't really speak in class. So instead of me reading, the teacher played a CD. There wasn't much I could do. The teachers encouraged me to rest the next day if I still wasn't well. On Friday morning my voice was still pretty much gone so I called into work.

The school nurse stopped by my apartment that day and brought me food, drinks, medicine, a thermometer, a hot water bottle, and a heater. I was thankful for the food because I didn't have much food in my apartment and really didn't want to walk all the way to the grocery store. Another teacher called me later to check on me. The teachers at my school are really nice! :)

Last Friday I taught at kindergarten for the second time. It was just as fun as the first time... maybe even more fun! Last time many of the kids were shy around me (though most of them warmed up to me once I had class with them) but this time they were excited to see me right away.

I was there from 8:00 to 3:30 and I only spent an hour and fifteen minutes teaching. Most of the rest of the time was spent playing with the kids. A few of the kids arrived a bit earlier than the rest and we spent a little while "cooking" cardboard doughnuts and cookies in the Hello Kitty kitchen set. As more kids arrived I was drug around a lot to look at different things. There were many times where I had kids pulling me in several directions at once.

One boy pointed to an object and said, "red!" I corrected him and pointed at the object and said, "blue!" Uhhh... it was yellow... lol... so much for teaching these kids English.

They pulled out a bunch of plastic food and asked me what each thing was called in English. They showed me a tomato and I said, "tomato." They started giggling like crazy. They started saying, "Toe-mah-toe" because that's how it's pronounced in Japanese. They just thought I couldn't pronounce it in Japanese. I tried to explain to them (in Japanese) that it's "tomato" in English and "toe-mah-toe" in Japanese, but they still cracked up any time I said "tomato." This happened with some other objects as well. It was pretty funny.

Eventually I actually did teach a lesson. My first class was the 5 year olds. We sang the Hello Song and played vegetable basket (which is the same as Fruit Basket, a popular children's game in Japan). Next I taught the 3 year olds. We played animal basket and sang Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. Well, I sang it and they attempted to sing it. The words are too difficult for them, but they had a lot of fun and many of them still attempted to sing the song! I liked the 3 year old class better than last time. Last time several of the students were crying when I walked into the room and most of them didn't pay much attention. This time they all paid attention! :)

Next I taught the 4 year olds. When I walked into the room one of the boys had his pants and underwear down to his knees and he was laying face down on the floor. Once the teacher convinced him to get up and pull his pants back up, we began class. We pretty much did the same things as the previous class plus I read a book to them.

After classes were finished, it was lunch time! This time I ate with the four year olds. The students took turns getting their meals out in the hallway and carried them into the classroom. While this was going on I walked around and commented on how cute and cool their aprons were (they wore aprons to keep their clothes clean). One girl had a Sailor Moon apron. I haven't seen any little kids with Sailor Moon stuff because it's old, but I was excited. I pointed to the different characters and said their names and the girl looked clueless. Lol, I knew more about Sailor Moon than she did.

A few of the students fought over which table I would sit at but there was only room at one table so I didn't really have a choice. They still tried to pull my chair (with me in it) over to other tables though. I sat at a ridiculously small table in a very small chair. I'm short, but I still barely fit.

For lunch we had chicken, vegetables (cabbage, seaweed, and mushrooms), bread, and pumpkin soup. I got double servings of everything. The boy who sat next to me probably still ate more than me. He went back for 2 or 3 servings of everything. I was also surprised at how fast he ate! At my other schools all the students and teachers eat fast and I've sorta gotten used to that, but he was just soooooo fast though!

Eating with a bunch of 4 year olds is very amusing. Many of them showed me the super weird faces they could make. They would put their fingers all over their face, in their mouths, and in their noses, and pull their face into really crazy shapes. Some of them were pretty scary!

All the students are supposed to finish their food. Several of the students didn't want to eat the vegetables so the teacher walked around and shoveled the rest of the food into their mouths for them.

After lunch was cleaning time! We scrubbed the floor with washcloths. They just put their hands on the ground on top of the washcloth and push with their feet to scoot across the floor. I'm sure I looked pretty crazy doing this with all the tiny kids with my butt sticking up in the air, lol.

After that the students brushed their teeth and the teachers went through some announcements (I think) and then it was play time again! So I got to spend about an hour and a half making sushi out of clay and building cars of out of lego-ish blocks.

Then it was time for many of the students to go home. The parents picked them up. A few of the students stayed behind because it's also like a day care for the students with working parents. Then I had a meeting with several of the teachers about what to teach the next time I'm there. Sometimes figuring out things at the kindergarten is a little difficult because no one there speaks any English at all. But we still successfully picked a theme for next time... Christmas! :)

Right before I left, it was snack time. We had strips of sweet potato, vanilla wafer cookies, and tea. I loved it! :)

Overall it was a  lot of fun and the kids are SUPER cute! But, now I have a sore throat and a slight fever and I think I'm coming down with a cold. Whatever it is, I'm almost positive I caught it at the kindergarten. The kids are cute, but they are also gross. They pick their noses and cough all over the place and kept touching me and holding my hand. If I still feel like this tomorrow I'm probably not going to go to school. If I had junior high tomorrow it wouldn't be a problem, but I don't think I can handle elementary with this sore throat. :P

But maybe the experience was still worth getting sick... maybe...

Everyday at school I eat kyuushoku (school lunch). It's a lot different than American school lunches. Even though I often don't like something in the lunch, overall it is much better quality than the lunches I had when I was in school. It's healthier too. There is a wide variety in each lunch so I'm getting a variety of vitamins and stuff.

One of the biggest differences though is not the food. All the students have to eat kyuushoku. They don't have the option of bringing their lunch (unless they have an allergy or some medical reason). Everybody gets the same food. There are no options to choose from. Also, the students are expected to eat everything.

There isn't a cafeteria, so they eat in their homeroom classrooms. There are no lunch ladies (though the tea lady prepares the lunch trays for the teachers) so the students carry the pans of food to their classrooms and certain students each week serve the lunch to their classmates.

Lately I have taken some pictures of kyuushoku. I'll show a picture from each day and explain what it is. I want to give a good description so someday I can look back at all the unusual things I ate! I have already had some very interesting lunches so I'm sure I'll get some interesting kyuushoku pictures. None of these have anything that was super strange, but maybe whale meat will be served again. Yeah... I ate whale. :(

Just for fun I'll give it a rating from 0-5. This rating wont be what I would give it in a restaurant or something. It's just a comparison of each lunch to how they generally are.

Here's the monthly lunch menu.

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September 15, 2010



American Pork: It's always interesting what the Japanese call "American." This American pork dish had pork, beans, and onion in some sort of tomato-ish sauce. I haven't had this in America, but it tasted like something I could have in America.
Cabbage and Lemon: a mix of cabbage, carrots, seaweed, and lemon
Rice
Tougan Miso Soup: Tougan is a type of gourd. If you don't know what miso soup is, you can see here.
Grapes

Overall, I really liked this lunch. My least favorite part was the soup. I love tougan (I didn't know what it was called until just a couple minutes ago when I looked it up the kanji in my dictionary) and I usually like miso soup, but this one had an odd taste to it. But I still didn't hate it. So since I really liked a couple things and could tolerate everything I give this one 4.5/5.


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September 16, 2010


Potato Korokke (Croquette): It's fried and has mostly potato inside with some other things which I may or may not want to know, but I did see carrots in there.
Mixed Vegetables: I can't figure this out from the menu. It says "marine" which when I looked up the Japanese means "marinate" so I'm just confused. Basically I just want to know what the nasty nasty white chunks are. It tastes awful so I'm guessing it's probably made from fish. It was mostly seaweed and cucumbers with those nasty white chunks and gross slimly purple stuff (seafood of some sort I think). It was nasty, but not totally inedible. Though I think I found it a little tolerable because a couple days before we had a whole huge chunk of that nasty white stuff. I took one bite and gagged. I wanted to be able to eat it all but I took another very tiny bite and gagged again. I gave up and didn't eat it.
Bread The bread had bits of apple inside. :) I love bread days because the tea lady usually gives me extra to take home. :)
Mixed Fruit with Aloe: bananas, peaches, mandarin oranges, and aloe
Edamame: soybeans

This lunch would have been awesome if it weren't for the stupid gross vegetables. Because of those stupid vegetables, this lunch was only 2.5/5. I would give it a 2, but the edamame just made me happy. :)


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September 17, 2010



Shiitake Rice: rice with shitake mushrooms and carrots
Saba Gomayaki: saba (a type of fish) with with some sort of sesame seed seasoning
Konbunoitame: This is some sort of seaweed. It's thin and tastes better than seaweed usually does (I don't like the kind of seaweed used for things like sushi and the slimy kind that's usually mixed with the lunch vegetables). I get tired of it after a couple bites, but I don't hate it.
Zunda Mochi: mochi with a soybean and sugar sauce
Pear


I loved the mochi. I had this same kind the first day I ate kyuushoku. It was my first time having mochi. I thought it was OK then. I liked the mochi, but the sauce was just OK. This time I loved it! My tastes have definitely changed since I moved here. Also, I really liked the pear. I never liked pears before, but I like them now. I think it's because it's much better than many things in the lunch. The fish and rice and seaweed were OK, but there was too much of the seaweed stuff and I got sick of it towards the end. But overall, this lunch was OK.
3.5/5


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September 22, 2010


Chicken and Potato with Ketchup Sauce
Bean Sprout, Nira, and Tuna: Nira is called "garlic chives" in English. Here's an article.
Shrimp Rice: It also had peas and mushrooms in it.
Pumpkin Soup
Orange

I really liked the chicken and potato stuff. The vegetables weren't bad. I used to hate tuna, but now I actually like it. I really really really hate shrimp, but there were only a couple in this whole bowl of rice, so it wasn't too bad... still pretty bad though. The pumpkin soup was OK, but I had no clue what it was. As I was eating it I kept thinking of all the weird things it could be and was disliking it by the end. The worst part of this meal was actually the orange. It's called mikan in Japanese. The flavor is really good. I would love it if I could just sit there and squeeze the juice out of it. Unfortunately I could not do that. I hate all the white stuff on oranges. It tastes horrible and has a horrible texture. It takes me forever to eat and I gagged on it a couple times. Seriously. Of all the weird stuff I eat at school... oh well...
2.5/5


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September 27, 2010


Miso Tonkatsu: pork with a miso sauce
Ohitashi Vegetables: Ohitashi is boiled greens, such as spinach. It had cabbage, nira, and bean sprouts.
Rice
Tofu and Seaweed Soup
Vanilla Ice Cream Flavored Yogurt: I've never had just plain vanilla yogurt so I'm not sure how the ice cream flavor compared to regular vanilla yogurt. So I'm not sure how ice cream-ish it was, but the name of the flavor just made it much more interesting.

Everything was pretty good. I've started to really like chunks of tofu in soup. I liked tofu before, but not in big chunks. Now it's often my favorite part of the soup. The tonkatsu was really good, except that part of the meat was really fatty (that's typical with almost any big piece of meat in these lunches). So that was a bit gross. But overall this was a good meal. 4/5

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September 29, 2010


Tofu no masago... followed by some kanji I can't figure out: I found a recipe for this online and translated it with Google translate. It has tofu, eggs, shrimp, and other vegetables. I think this one had carrots.
Nimame: That means "simmered beans." They were a bit sweet.
Sansai Rice: "Sansai" means "mountain vegetables." That's pretty vague, so I'm not sure what the exact vegetables are.
Cabbage Miso Soup: It also had mushrooms and carrots.

I was enjoying the tofu/egg thing until I came across a shrimp. There were only two in there so it wasn't as horrible as it could have been. So really I didn't hate it. The rice was OK. The soup was also just OK. I loved the beans though! Too bad there weren't very many of them. :( Also, on the menu that day was an orange, but luckily we didn't actually have them.
3.5/5

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September 30, 2010


Pork Steak with Applesauce
Corn and Potatoes
Bread
Egg Drop Soup: cabbage, ham, carrots, seaweed, and of course egg
Orange Jelly: Orange Jell-o-ish stuff (kind of inbetween Jell-o and jelly) with mandarin oranges

Everything tasted really good! I loved this lunch, except that the meat was fatty like usual. There's not much to say about this one since I pretty much described it above. 4.5/5

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Those are all my pictures of kyuushoku for September. I'll take some more pictures this month and post them at the end of the month. I had a lot of fun doing this post. It was interesting to read the menu and actually look the things up to find out what I had eaten.

There are many things I don't like in kyuushoku, but I'm still glad I signed up to eat it. It's not too expensive. It's 4300 yen each month. I had 22 meals this month so that's about 195 yen, or 2 dollars per day. That's really cheap for what I get. Plus, I like not having to make my own lunch every day. I'm getting more nutrition this way because I'm not eating peanut butter and jelly every day, lol.

This has nothing to do with kyuushoku, but it does have to do with food. I just saw a commercial for the Tamago Double Mac. It's basically a Big Mac with egg on it. Yeah, it's random that I'm writing this, lol. I just think it's always interesting to see the things that McDonald's has here that aren't available in the US.

After writing all those posts about my summer break, I haven't posted much. But interesting things are still happening!

On Friday the 3rd, the junior high school had a party for a teacher who transferred to another school. I thought it was just going to be a dinner party, but that day a teacher told me it was at an onsen, which means "hot spring" in Japanese.

I had kind of wanted to go to an onsen, but kind of not because you have to be naked. It just seemed like it would be really awkward. However, it was a lot of fun and really wasn't bad at all.

Before entering the onsen you have to scrub yourself clean and rinse yourself.

I tried many of the different outdoor baths. The first one I got into was a tea bath! It smelled really good! Next we went into a large one (big enough to kind of swim in!) with waterfalls. There were rocks to sit on under the waterfalls so that the water massaged your back. After that I tried one where you lay down. The last outdoor one I tried was one that was really white and smelled a bit like sulphur. It's supposed to do nice things to your skin.
After that we went into one of the indoor baths. It had a bunch of bubble jets. Fun! :)

Then we went to a room upstairs to meet back with the rest of the teachers and eat dinner. We had nabe. There was a burner on the table with a pot. In the pot we boiled dashi, which is a soup stock made from kelp and fish. Then we added various ingredients including thinly sliced beef, chicken meatballs, hot dogs, carrots, bean sprouts, mushrooms (the really long thin white kind that I actually like), and udon noodles. It was sooooooo good! I didn't take a picture, but here is one that will give you a general idea.

For desert we had a piece of cake and grapes. I found out something interesting. Japanese people typically don't eat grape skins. It's fine, but it surprised me since I often feel like Japanese people will eat anything. They'll eat whole fish with heads, eyes, bones, and even eggs inside them... but they don't eat grape skins.

On the following Wednesday afternoon I was sitting in the staff room and the teachers had a meeting. It's odd for them to have a meeting in the afternoon like that. I couldn't understand a lot of what was said but I did catch that a typhoon was coming. Then several of the teachers were asking various questions like, "What about cleaning time?" "What about the speech contest practice?" So I figured it out... the students were getting out of school early!

So, the students got to leave at 2:30. They were very excited of course! I didn't get to leave until 3:30, which was my scheduled time, but I was still happy. I had planned on staying late to practice for the English speech contest (and the day before I had stayed until about 7:00) so it felt like I was leaving early!

The typhoon was actually a tropical storm, but it hardly even seemed like that by the time it reached here. At 3:30 I went to the grocery store. It was raining a bit. The worst was going to arrive at 5:00 though. As I walked home from the grocery it was raining a bit harder and the wind was blowing, but it wasn't bad. My umbrella never even attempted to flip inside out. When I first moved here there were rainy days where I didn't even attempt to carry an umbrella. Some days (even without rain) were so windy that it was hard to walk. This storm probably doesn't even rank in the top five storms since I've been here.

I arrived home and 5:00 arrived and it didn't get any worse. I was a bit disappointed. It wasn't exciting at all.

But, I didn't like that the electricity kept flickering. I really didn't want to lose power. Luckily, it never went out for more than a second.

Other ALTs said that in their towns they saw lighting and that the storm was stronger than it was here. Awww! I want to see lightning! Since I've lived here, I've heard thunder once when I was shopping in Gotemba. One night in Toi I saw quite a few flashes of lightning beyond the mountains and another time while I was running. It was all way in the distance though. Thunderstorms are a LOT rarer here than in Kentucky.

Last Friday was the junior high English speech contest. My students did really well! Four first graders (7th grade in the US) did a skit. They seemed a bit nervous, but I was glad that they remembered all their lines! The 2nd grade student also remembered all her lines. Just a week before she only had about half of the speech memorized and had trouble pronouncing many words and didn't have much emotion. She improved a LOT though! The third grade student did very well, but I knew she would! None of the students from Toi moved on to the next level, but the 3rd grade girl did get an honorable mention.

The speech contest was a lot of fun. I was afraid that it might be a little boring to sit through so many speeches, but it wasn't. I liked seeing the students from the other schools, especially since a lot of them are students of my friends.

The other day I saw something very strange at the grocery store... not surprising. It was a Cream Soda Sandwich! In Japan, cream soda usually means a melon soda ice cream float. I couldn't resist. It didn't sound great, but I just had to try!

It's kind of cool how shallow it is. I kept going a little bit further and it didn't really get any deeper. I am actually sitting in this picture here.



Later after I had been out of the water for a while I saw a big fish jump out of the water near where I had been. I'm glad that didn't happen while I was in the water. I would have freaked out.









I did NOT take the time to make this picture myself, haha. So don't think that I have too much time on my hands.

Here are more pictures of our time around Izu:
IZU PICTURES!!!!!