Visiting in Iwami, Adventuring in Hyogo...

Sailing the sea of Japan, departing from the Port of Iwami-cho.

The waterfront is often very rocky, but it makes for some great formations.

They're big on squid here. This guy spins and air dries the scallywags.

They sell squid ink (or maybe octopus ink) ice cream. Tastes just like Vanilla, but...

...it blackens the tongue.


Later, we went to the beach, and got to catch a beautiful sunset (as well as throw the frisbee around, which was much needed).

On our way to Takeda castle...but somehow we wound up lost. Adventure, huzzah!

Aha! Found it!




There's many a great view to be had from this mountaintop castle.

Here's the layout of Takeda castle. Totally worth the trip.

Buddhist meditation, mountain climbing, and Soulja Boyin'

I climbed a mountain and learned about Buddhism this weekend.

Mitokusan (Mt. Mitoku if you got your map in the US) is a fairly easy climb--there's some steep parts where you should probably know a thing or two about climbing to get through easily, but it's farily short--and there are a lot of temples on the way. We (about 40 JETs) slept in one of the temples at the base of the mountain the day before (and had a half-hour session of zazen meditation the morning after), and we were inundated with Buddhist culture and perspectives by the monk who was in charge of us. He gave a few explanations in Japanese, which were likely woefully translated given our translator's continual need to have somebody else in the group translate the specialized Buddhist-related terminology (the "main" translator is French originally, so translating from one second language into another had to have been hard on its own)...at one point we traced what I'm pretty sure is a Buddhist Sutra...which was all chinese characters...it took a while. And we had to do it sitting Japanese-style on our legs, so...well. It took me a good five minutes before I started feeling my feet again after a good 25-30 minutes of focused tracing.

Highlight was definitely the evening--as part of the weekend, we do an "international exchange" with the Japanese there...they do some traditional dances and perform for us, and each of the countries represented by the internationals present (we had the US, England, France, South Africa, and the Phillipines, among others) gave their own performances.

For the US, we did Soulja Boy. Not even kidding. We practiced and introduced it as "a traditional American dance," did the dance, and then proceeded to teach the Japanese...there is video of me doing Soulja Boy with probably an 80-year-old Japanese man behind me. When I can send a link, I shall, but for the meantime you'll have to settle for the picture attached. They actually learned super-quickly, very impressive.'

A package came for me today.

There was a note inside my door, asking me to let them know when to drop it off again (all in japanese, so I just called the number assuming).

Guy picks up...I explain I can't speak Japanese very well...

He goes, "Oh! gaijin-san!" ("Oh! Mr. foreigner!")

"Hai. gaijin-san desu."

The package was at my door about 5 minutes later.

Rosham Tray

All you Dartmouth Ultimate people should know that the students do rosham tray here--it's not even a question. Stack the trays, group rosham (Jan-Ken-Pon! Aiko deshou! No primes between throws), loser takes them all up for cleaning.

I'd like to note that I am 1-0 in rosham tray thus far in Japan. ("Rosham" is Rock-Paper-Scissors for the non-ultimate folks on this list.)

Work Impressions, So Far.

This week has been pretty easy so far--outside of a bit of help for a couple students who are participating in speech contests, and giving a couple classes where I did a more in-depth self-introduction, with Sports Day being this weekend the kids have a reduced class load to begin with and many of these first classes back are actually tests, leaving me with little to do. Far different from the Trips/orientation experience at Dartmouth, no?

Sports Day, incidentally, is a day (Saturday for my middle schools; Sunday for my elementaries) where the various grades compete by homeroom in a variety of activities. Today I got to watch some of the practice--in addition to learning and performing a dance that seems suspiciously like contradancing, I saw them do a giant version of jump rope where the homeroom has to all jump in time to clear the rope (there are about 25 students to a homeroom) and a task that involved handing a ball down a line from one end of the field to the other, with students dashing to the end of the line as soon as they handed off to continue the flow. Pretty entertaining stuff, and actually rather fascinating as far as understanding Japanese culture goes. I'm not sure I can put it all into words just yet, but if I feel sufficiently capable I'll indulge my rambling urges with a long bit on that at a later point.


Some more general work impressions/factoids: the kids all have the same uniform, down to the shoes they wear in class and in the gym. Girls wear the sailor suit, which you might be familiar with; guys wear white collared shirts with long pants. The kids are wonderful by the by--really cute. They're all a little timid and a little intimidated, I think, but in a fascinated kind of way that will lead to some fun connections, I think. In contrast to America, where teachers have their own rooms and the students go to them, in Japan students stay in their homerooms the entire day (outside of going to the gym, or needing to use art supplies, ec) and the teachers come to them. We teachers all share a teacher's room, all the desks organized into a few groups. With few classes and little lesson prep to do at the moment, I've spent most of my time there idly sitting at my desk on my laptop (thank god for the internet!). I can speak a bit of Japanese, which is helping my entering a new community somewhat as the language barrier is not so high as to be insurmountable without the aid of one of the Japanese Teachers of English (JTE's, the teachers who I work with in the classroom)...but I'm still often left to my own devices and wind up bored with some frequency as the rest of the teachers seemingly have a far more vast workload than I. And somehow I get paid more than they do...go figure.

Oh, and so far none of my classes have recognized me with long hair when I show them a picture of me and my family at graduation. And Mom, you and Dad might be pleased to know that, in addition to being very impressed with how young you both are, one kid in my class today mistook Dad for an older brother. Yep.

Skype!

I have it. You should, too! You pay for a mic and optional camera (or have it already installed on your computer), and pay nothing else to make computer-to-computer calls from anywhere to anywhere. You can find me at username: frizbninja or search me by my email address.

My Baby

I think her name will be Betty.

The Rice Cooker

Wonderful. Savior of my stomach, appeaser of appetites! The rice cooker.

Of course, what's a rice cooker without rice? A few handfuls will do me pretty well. Add a cup of water, push the button, and wait...

...and voila! God's gift to hungry bachelors.

Travels to the Beach

Beautiful Kozomi Beach.

Sea Urchin? But she's too far away!


Apparently you can break 'em open and eat them! How cruel. Also, it's a lot of work crushing that tough guy shell to get to the sensitive urchin interior, and there isn't much to be had for it.

I have a waterproof camera. Whee!

This weekend I went to the beach for a party there--one of the Japanese girls who is apparently pretty good friends with a lot of the JET guys invited a bunch of people to the beach to camp out. There was a pretty good mix of JETs and Japanese, so it was nice to have some new people to talk to and to work a bit of Japanese practice in there. Fireworks were lit. We camped out (despite the rain. Tottori just dealt with the remnants of a typhoon) and the next day it cleared up a bit and we spent most of the morning and afternoon on the beach. I finally got to bust out my disc and throw for the first time in a month or so, too, which was remarkably liberating despite my being terribly rusty/out of shape.

Meeting the Staff

Today I started "work" proper, which meant going to a few schools to do introductions with the staff (more of the jiko-shoukai; I've repeated the phrases giving my name and where I'm from and "Nice to meet you" more often than i can remember). Josh, the other JET in my town, and I went with our supervisor to the various schools, hitting mostly elementary schools (Josh is teaching at 5 elementaries and 1 junior high; I've got 3 elems and 2 JH) along with one of my junior high schools. The kids are adorable. A lot of clubs practicing and whatnot happening these days before class starts--seems every school has a gym and/or a dirt patch which is apparently the Japanese idea of a practice field--so there were a fair number of the little kiddies running around, offering a "konnichi wa" or a "hello/good day" depending on how confident they were feeling. Apparently they're a lot more open when they're young than when they get to high school and become too cool for school, so they should be fun to work with.

Meeting the staff itself was kind of an awkwardly formal affair; we were universally interrupting some meeting or another for introductions, and after stealing somebody's thunder would proceed to stammer through basic introductions (we were applauded after our introductions by the group, which was kind of cool. I think they appreciate the fact that Josh and I can speak the language with some competency, as neither of us have the glaring foreigner accent). The best was when one of the schools' directors turned to her staff (seems the staff always feed off of however the kacho (principal) or whoever is the highest-ranked person available for initiative on what they should do) and told them to introduce themselves, in English! Usually we just introduce and bounce so as not to interfere too much with meetings, but this time it was fun to see the tables turned and watch THEM stammer through an introduction in a foreign language (most of them didn't know more than "my name is" and even that was with prompting from the head).

On the plus side, I'm getting really good at introducing myself!