I love 自宅
jitaku 自宅 - one's own home. I went to America for really just five days at the end of March, over spring break, it was wonderful. Although really brief, I managed to eat a lot of different kinds of food (Mexican, Thai, American, Chinese, a lot of delicious pizza, and a bacon-maple latte, which is probably the most American thing I've ever had), saw a lot of friends and family at a pretty big/rowdy party, and spent a day roaming around San Francisco. One of the other great things I did was speak at my mom's school about the earthquake. After tripping out on little kids that understood 100% of what I was saying, and not the normal 1-10% that I usually am dealing with, I really enjoyed speaking about the earthquake and my experiences in Japan to the three middle school grades. They were so smart and insightful and asking really real questions about the events on March 11 and the immediate aftermath. As with my entire trip home that week, a major theme was "information control," the discrepancy between what was actually happening in most of the country here, and the way that the American news media were portraying it. Now, that week feels very surreal and dreamlike, and probably won't seem real again and probably won't feel like it actually happened until I am back in America again.
new school year
So I came back from America and the new school year started. For now, I am no longer at any elementary schools, just middle schools, which I love. The elementary school kids are so cute, but the elementary school faculty are generally pretty difficult to deal with. I will probably have to go back to elementary schools in September, though, because the new English teacher that is coming then apparenty doesn't speak Japanese, which would make his job at elementary schools really hard. One great thing I did at school recently was go on the "school outing" at the end of May. The whole school walked to and hiked up a nearby mountain and had lunch at the top, played some games, and came back down. I spent the day chatting with my favorite 2nd year students (8th graders) and then playing frisbee with them.
Spain 2011!!!
I went to Spain to visit my friend Katie! It was amazing! We went to Granada, where she studied abroad, then Cadiz, where she taught English (this past week she just finished and went back to CA), and then to Lagos, Portugal, because Katie had heard really great things about it and it turned out to be really great. Aside from a few really trying moments, Katie and I got along swimmingly. I ate some really great tapas, paella, cheese, wine everyday.... People who study and teach in Europe are so different than the people who come to Japan, mostly because Europe (and Spain and Portugal in particular) are pretty much the exact opposite of Japan. Time works so differently in Spain; there is never a hurry, there is always a siesta, there is always alcohol in the middle of daily life, there is never urgency. But people always seem to be enjoying themselves, which I guess isn't something I can always say about Japan.
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| on top of the Cathedral in Cadiz |
charity musical
I'm not sure how much we ended up raising to build school in Papua New Guinea, but we still had a great time performing our silly little show Shamisen Hero. The last show in Niigata City was by far the best, and the one that was videotaped in Murakami was probably the second best, so for those of you who are lucky enough to see it one day, enjoy.
modelling
I'm really sort of embarrassed about this, but it's a funny story, so whatever. So I met these two photographer guys who live in Nagaoka (15-20 min from me) because they thought I was so cool looking and they wanted me to model for them. So we went to the beach one day and I modeled for them for 2 hours, and they paid me. It was fun but also put me in a weird mood the whole next day, like I felt I was being stared at too much or something. The pictures all turned out pretty cool, which I attribute to Higuchi's photography, because I really hate some of these pictures. Not sure if I will be on the homepage forever, but I'm on the homepage now, so check it out if you want:
http://aasstudio.ifdef.jp/
Kite Festival
I went to a Kite Festival, more like a Kite Battle, in my friend Jennifer's town Shirone last weekend. They spent all year building huge, really huge (60 square feet) kites, and teams would launch them from both sides of the river. The goal was to tangle the kite ropes and pull them to your side, and if you could take down the other side's kite, you won the round. Each round would last maybe two minutes, and this was going on for 4 hours on both weekend days, so we are talking about a LOT of REALLY HUGE kites. You might ask, "why?" but the actual, and very Japanese answer, is "why not?" I thought it was really beautiful to watch something people had worked so hard to build all year get so completely destroyed so quickly, and in such a public manner.
That's all, hopefully it won't be another 2 months before a substantial post.
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