Easter!

Even after doing the game show with all the classes, I still had one more meeting with five groups of my first-year students. Ever since trying it with my small group of third-years at my smaller high school back in January, I had been scheming a way to do Easter egg dyeing on a large enough scale for my first-year students to do it. My favorite part of Easter (apart from all the candy) was dyeing the eggs, so I wanted to recreate the fun of that for the kids. I talked it over with the teachers, and they happily agreed to it.

I started each lesson by asking the class what they knew about Easter, just as I had done with Halloween and Christmas. Not surprisingly, this drew many more blank stares than for the other two holidays. Two common responses were "Easter Island!" and recognition of the word "east," though. I gave an explanation that attempted to simplify as much as possible the concept of a man named Jesus being resurrected three days after he died. There wasn't any other way around it that I could think of--the least confusing explanation I found involved first asking the class why we celebrate Christmas. When everyone recalled it being a celebration of the birth of Jesus, I then explained that Christians believe that three (holding up three fingers for the slower kids) days after he died (with a little head-sagging tongue-lolling gesture), Jesus came back to life (raising a hand up). I know it could be done a whole lot better, but that's the best I arrived at, and I treasured those two or three heads nodding in comprehension. The teacher still had to explain it in Japanese, just to make sure everyone was on the same page. I remember wondering if any of the students were reminded of my Halloween lesson when I told the part about Jesus coming back to life. If they were, nobody mentioned it.

Anyway, I explained the second (and, I think, more culturally universal) reason for Easter--a celebration of spring. This required a lot less explanation from the teacher. Trying my best to simplify things and flow smoothly into egg dyeing, I explained that some people in Europe used to give eggs to their friends for Easter. I would ask each class why they thought people would give an egg. (After the first run-through of the lesson, for every subsequent group I would hold up a boiled egg at this point.) I could tell by the looks on their faces (there's a noticeable difference between confused bewilderment and simply refusing to speak up) that most of them knew, but it took a little goading to get one person in each group to speak up, even in Japanese. Once they did, of course they got it--things are born from eggs. They all understood that an egg symbolizes new life in general.

Once I got this far, I knew I was home free. I explained that, while some people paint the eggs, most Americans do it differently. I would then explain that people in America take a cup (holding up a paper cup), and mix water, vinegar (holding up a jug of vinegar), and food coloring (holding up a packet of the powdered food coloring they use here). Eventually I held off on showing the students the vinegar and food coloring, instead making them try to understand based on listening to me. Almost every class got it just fine. I then explained that you put the egg in the cup, wait, and it changes colors (holding up a dyed egg). I further explained that drawing on the egg first in crayon would make the dye set around the wax (holding up an egg so decorated).

At this point, I would ask the students if they had any questions, and then ask if they wanted to try it. After the five seconds of dead air that I usually get when asking the class something like this, followed by a few meek "yes"s, which in turn were followed by me asking again, I got a louder "yes!" from the group. I would then pass out paper towels, and distribute the supplies.

Each table of four students had four cups of different dyes--one each of red, yellow, orange, and green. (They don't do blue food coloring here, since blue isn't the most appetizing color for the Japanese palate.) I also gave them plenty of paper towels, and boxes of crayons. I also gave each student a hard-boiled egg.

That's right: every single student got a hard-boiled egg to decorate. I have twenty students per class, and I gave this lesson to five classes at my main high school. I also did this lesson with my tiny class of second-year students (7 kids), and the English club (10 students). My smaller high school also got a chance, with three classes of 20 students each getting to do it. I also wanted to have an egg for each of my seven teachers. In all, that comes to about 180 eggs.

I've never counted myself as talented when it comes to cooking. I can make sandwiches with the best of them, and I can cook up a respectable breakfast (my pride and joy is flipping an egg, something I've worked on since I got here). I make decent fried rice, and love to pan-fry salmon fillets. With the possible exception of flipping an egg, none of that is difficult. My point here is, I ain't a cook. Despite freely acknowledging this, I thought surely boiling an egg or two wouldn't be that hard.

That's not an entirely fair assessment, though. I can boil eggs just fine. What I wanted, though, was for each student to have a perfectly uncracked egg. I knew most of them wouldn't mind, but I didn't want one unlucky kid to get a cracked egg while all of his buddies had perfect ones, because then the feeling he'd most strongly associate forever with Easter would be shame and inadequacy. This is how badly I blew it out of proportion in my mind. It's not even that the cracks were that bad--they were just enough that dyeing would have made them obvious, which was too much for me.

I learned pretty early on that I wasn't too hot at cooking up perfectly uncracked hard-boiled eggs. I decided to fine-tune my technique. Yes, I researched egg-boiling, learning to make sure the eggs are covered by at least an inch of water; to add the eggs to cold water, never to warm; to add a dash of salt to the water; to bring the water to a boil for just a moment before letting it simmer for about ten minutes. Even after all of this, I found my Perfect Egg Average (P.E.A.) was about 60%. Try as I might, I couldn't improve that average predictably or reproducibly. I tried boiling more at a time (20 instead of 10), fewer at a time (5 instead of 10), bringing the water to a boil more slowly, letting the eggs sit out of the refrigerator for 15-20 minutes before putting them in--and the rate remained the same.

You can see where this is going. I needed a total of 180 eggs for these lessons. I actually boiled closer to 300. I learned to look on the bright side: they sell eggs here in cartons of 10, so I didn't have to spend as much energy counting by 12s to figure out how many I needed. I felt pretty bad toward the end, especially because I couldn't eat the flops fast enough. I brought some extras to school for the teachers (which they loved), and gave ten each to the two local JETs. Even so, my fridge was full of eggs for a long time. Evelyn, a Californian who lives near me, started calling me Hitler, even as she gleefully took 10 eggs off my hands.

The important thing, though, is that the kids absolutely loved it. They spent much more time decorating the eggs before dyeing than I expected--a few didn't even dye them. I learned from this that pencil, ink pen, and marker can survive the vinegar and dye just as well as crayon can. I've got plenty of pictures of all the dyeing here, and pictures of me with all of my classes (many of them taken after the egg dyeing) here.

Oh, and as usual, I was feeling gutsy with the more advanced classes. Inspired by the first student to recognize the word "east" within the name, I decided to give it a shot, and explained that the name Easter comes from the name of a Germanic goddess, and that she is associated with the sunrise, and her name is associated with the word "east." Practically everyone got that (all of my explaining was English), and I could tell that most of them liked being able to make the connection. A small victory, sure, but I'll take what I can get.

Also, I wanted to be able to teach the students when Easter is. I figured it was worthwhile, since every other major holiday I've taught them (Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day) has a specific date. I had to read a fair amount before I felt comfortable with explaining the computus, and even then, I had to settle for the simplest explanation, gutting the bit about the ecclesiastical lunar calendar. The work paid off though, as everyone took the explanation in stride. I also learned the words for "full moon" and "vernal equinox" in Japanese, too! I took a picture of it.

My favorite part of the lesson was telling the students that they could eat their Easter eggs. They all laughed at me--some of them were sure it wasn't safe to eat after dyeing, and the rest of them weren't about to break apart what they'd spent half an hour decorating.

Game Show

After graduation, there was sort of a lull in classes. With the third-years gone, the school was a lot quieter. The students had finals right around graduation, so the term was, academically speaking, over. What confused me was that they all still had classes as normal. For me and all the folks I knew in high school, any class time after the exam was devoted to parties. Fortunately, the other English teachers more or less gave me the freedom to do that--they asked me to prepare something with "fun" being the primary objective.

I decided to have a Jeopardy!-style game show. After a fair amount of planning, troubleshooting, and consulting with the teachers, I worked it out: students would be divided into teams of four or five. Teams would take turns choosing a category and point value (rather than asking the question of everyone, and having teams race to be the first to signal--I couldn't get this to work). The questions would be worth 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 points. The categories included history, music, movies, geography, holidays, spelling, Harry Potter, and Adam. Since none of this would appear on a test, I was able to change things up as much as I wanted to between classes. Thanks to this, the game planning evolved organically, with the last iteration being completely different from the first one. (During the semester, my normal classes have to be standardized, with little to no variation allowed between versions of the lesson.)

For Holidays, I asked the students things like the date of Valentine's Day, or what kids say for candy on Halloween. For Geography, I asked questions about prefectural capitals ("Nagasaki is the capital of Nagasaki-ken. What is the capital of Hyogo-ken?") and neighboring countries ("Name two countries that border Italy," which was for 50 points). For Music, I played a song, and asked the students to identify either the artist or the title, or (for the harder questions) both. I used songs from people like Avril Lavigne ("Girlfriend"), Backstreet Boys ("I Want It That Way"--you'd be amazed at how many boys here like them), Carpenters ("On Top of the World"), the Beatles ("I Want to Hold Your Hand") and Queen ("We Are the Champions"). For Movies, I used my laptop to show the students a Youtube clip from a movie or T.V. show, and asked them something about it. I showed clips from Aladdin ("What's the girl's name?"), Full House ("Name the show," while playing the intro), and Star Wars ("Name the director," which was for 50 points). For Spelling, a student from the group would come to the board and write a word I dictated. The words ranged from Orange to Purple to Christmas to Halloween.

For History, I asked them to name the current Japanese prime minister, the first U.S. president, and the author of The Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, written in Japan. For 40 points, I read the closing paragraph from the Gettysburg Address, and asked them to tell me who gave that speech. For 50 points, I played a clip of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and asked them the same question.

For the Adam category, I asked them questions like "Where did I work in America?" (Japanese restaurant, or something to that effect), "What is my favorite video game?" (Guitar Hero), "What state am I from?" (Georgia or Missouri), and "What is my last name?" For the Harry Potter category, I mostly asked them to name a character from the movie, based on a picture I'd show them. The pictures ranged from Ron and Hermione to Lupin, Voldemort, and (for 50 points) Bellatrix Lestrange.

Given all of this, I would have expected the hardest category to be History, and the easiest one to be Adam. Geography didn't faze them (though the neighbors of Italy stumped a few people), they plowed through Music and Movies without hesitating, and even History didn't give them trouble. Each time I started reading the Gettysburg Address, the group that had chosen it would look mortified, but everyone grinned when I came to the part about "government of the people." "I Have a Dream" gave some groups trouble (several guessed the speaker was Obama), but at least one person in every group knew it. Almost everyone avoided Spelling, at least until one group would meekly choose the 10-point question ("pink"), which would embolden everyone.

Although everyone remembered where I'm from, and where I worked (one group even remembered "Inoko"), nobody could remember my last name. I heard from the teachers later that each class was expecting the hardest Adam question to be about Uga, since on my first day I gave a mini-lesson on the proper pronunciation of his name. (Everyone here assumes it's oo-ga, and the schwa sound eludes these kids.) All things considered, though, I'm satisfied--I'd much rather the kids forget my name but be able to identify Lincoln or King, instead of the other way around.

Oh, and Bellatrix Lestrange, which I included for the express purpose of stumping the class and making an overeager team lose points, was only mildly successful. Only two groups chose it, and one of them snapped his fingers and blurted out the whole name as soon as her picture popped up. These kids know the important stuff.

After the round finished (about 5 or 10 minutes before the end of class), we tallied the scores and explained the final round. Basically, it was Final Jeopardy, though that wouldn't make sense to any of the kids here. They immediately caught the gist of it as I explained, even though I didn't use any Japanese--write your wager on a piece of paper, with your answer, and you gain or lose that number of points. I didn't usually have to artificially inflate anyone's score--with the exception of a few 0s (we made 0 the lowest possible score), there was always at least one team mathematically capable of overtaking the leader. The category was music. I played a song, and asked the class to name the composer. I wanted them to try to write it in English (spelling wouldn't count), but they could write it in Japanese if they wanted to.

The first song I chose was Fur Elise. Although practically everyone got it right (the first group I tried it with was one of my higher-level classes), that was okay--that put the importance on the wagering. The attempts at spelling Beethoven in English were amusing--Vetovun and Beitobun were my favorites, and hey, I'm pretty sure there are more people back home who can't spell his name right than can. I was so impressed that, for the next class (a mid-level group), I changed the song to the 1812 Overture. Not a single person got it, so I fell back on Fur Elise, with the same result as with the first class. For the third group (the highest-level class), I played two songs by the same composer--the same clip of the 1812 Overture, and then Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy from The Nutcracker Suite. Fearing the worst, I was pleasantly surprised to see two groups begin whispering and writing furiously. As we checked the answers, I wasn't surprised to see everything in Japanese. I was shocked, however, to see what one group had written. The same boy in the group who knew Bellatrix had written ピョートル・イリッチ・チャイコフスキー, or Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The kid knew the guy's full name. I love these kids.

Here's what it looked like before class, and this is what it looked like in the middle of the game.

Graduation

Graduation was on Saturday, March 1. In exchange for working that day, we had all been given the previous Monday off (which is when I went to Sasebo). The weather was simply gorgeous, especially compared to how cold it had been: it was sunny, with a high around 17. The ceremony was held in the gym.

The entire student body attended. The first- and second-years made up the majority of people there, though there were about a hundred parents and townsfolk there, too. I was seated with the other teachers, but the third-year teachers had a special section. (I actually managed to snap a quick video of the scene.) The graduates' precessional was accompanied by Pomp and Circumstance, just like it is back home. The principal took the stage, and, after everyone stood, bowed, and sat back down, he gave a speech.

The only thing that surprised me about the events up until this point was the lack of difference from graduations I've seen. I was expecting a long-winded speech, which would have been all the more tedious for my lack of understanding. However, after maybe five minutes, he closed his speech, and promptly began the presentation of diplomas.

Rather than have all 216 graduates individually receive a diploma, they were presented to each class section.

I've explained class sections before--each grade level is divided into groups of about forty students, and each of those groups has the same homeroom. Unless a student performs terribly on exams or drops out, those homeroom groups remain the same more or less throughout their three years in school. So by the time graduation rolls around, they've bonded pretty well.

Anyway - the homeroom teacher for a group would approach a small podium and read the full name of each student, who would rise as they were called. (Boys were called first, then girls.) After all were standing, the teacher would call one name again, and that student would bow and approach the stage. The principal would then bow to the student, and award them a pretty framed diploma. The student would then bow, leave the stage, and return to their seat, at which point the class would bow and sit down. This happened for each of the seven groups.

After all the classes had been presented with their diplomas, the principal gave another short speech. After this, a male graduate took the stage. I think he was the student council president--he wasn't the valedictorian, because he didn't come from the highest-level class group. He gave a short speech; I didn't understand it, so I can't say much about it.

The next speech was given by a girl. (She also likely wasn't salutatorian, since she didn't come from the best group.) Though I couldn't keep up with all her Japanese, I understood her clearly. Her voice cracking from the very beginning, she gave a fifteen-minute speech thanking the teachers and parents for taking such good care of them. A few minutes in, I could hear sniffling throughout the gym. Glancing over to the third-year teachers, I saw that all of them were crying. The speaker was fighting through the lump in her throat that everyone could hear, and she held together pretty well.

After her speech, everyone stood, bowed, and sang the school song, followed by the national anthem. The teachers then lined up around the exit and congratulated the students during the recessional.

After this, the teachers came back to the staffroom for lunch. I think the students all went back to their homerooms, with the graduates packing up all their things, clearing out their desks, that sort of thing. After lunch, everyone gathered outside in the parking lot to send off the graduates. When I say everyone, I mean everyone--every single student and teacher lined the parking lot, many holding bouquets and gifts to give the graduates. I've got pictures of it here. Everybody was taking pictures, and the whole affair lasted about an hour and a half. Though I didn't really get to know my third-years, a few of them ran up to me asking for a picture, though this one stopped smiling as soon as we took it. (As you can see, I even succumbed to the V pose.)

Of the third-year teachers, there are four women. While everyone else was dressed in Western business attire--full suits for us guys, pantsuits and the like for the ladies--these four came fully decked out in kimono. I found out that a part of their kimono, called a hakama, was especially worn for the graduation. Of course, they let me take a picture with them.

Anytime there's a big school function (field day, cultural festival), there's a faculty party that night. Graduation was no different. We got together at the same hotel as back in September. There were about fifty of us, including the highest members of the PTA. After a short speech by the principal, and the meal (several courses, all varying degrees of mediocre), the third-year teachers took the stage to give a speech.

It took me a few minutes to catch on--they were sharing their favorite memories from the year. All of them were visibly upset: the least so were simply teary-eyed, while some openly cried during their speech. At first I thought there might have been a connection between this and some teachers being transferred to another school, but I was told that nobody knew who was leaving yet. They were simply weeping over bittersweet memories. One group even sang a song, with one of the teachers playing the guitar.

The whole day blew my mind. I remember not much caring about my actual high school graduation ceremony. I don't think any of my friends cared, either. I definitely appreciated the whole day, particularly my family being there, but the part involving the teachers didn't really make a difference in my mind. Our valedictorians certainly didn't take it seriously--the theme of their address was The A-Team, for pete's sake. After experiencing a graduation here, from the other side of the desk, I wonder how my teachers at Glendale felt, and how American teachers in general feel about it. It definitely helped me understand the mentality of the teachers here, seeing their tears of joy at the fruits of their labor.

Family Park

By the second week in March, the weather had turned around completely. Highs were pushing 20 degrees, the sun was shining, the wind was dying down--it was, simply put, awesome. To celebrate, Mitch, Mike, Joey, and I went to a local family park. I think I've mentioned it before, but if not, it's a city park in the middle of the island, with go-karts, a playground, and a big hill with slides coming off of it. There's one main slide that weaves down the length of the hill, which takes a full minute of sliding to go down. That one's neat and all, but the main attraction for the day was the other slide.

Okay, it's not a slide so much as a hillside meant for sledding down. This is all-weather sledding, too--they've carpeted the area in that green indoor/outdoor grass-ish plastic material. (The best way I can describe it is as the stuff the ground was made of in Alec Baldwin's model's graveyeard, where Beetlejuice was living.) The hill looks like this. You get on your park-provided plastic sled, assume whatever position you want to try, and take off. They even have a spigot for lubricating the sled, which gives you the illusion of more speed. We decided it'd be a great idea to come back when it's pouring rain.

If any one of us were by ourselves, we'd probably try it two or three times, get bored, and leave. But as you get more guys together, the desire to try stupid things and show off rises exponentially. So some of us went down standing up, backwards, or in various tandem formations. Someone almost always wiped out, but of course nobody got hurt. It was awesome. I've got pictures of the hijinks here.

Afterwards, we found an open grassy field (which in and of itself is rare on the island) and threw the frisbee for about half an hour. This marked the first time I'd been able to throw in eight or ten months, and it felt about as great as you can imagine. Easily one of my best days on Tsushima in months.

English Day

I occasionally teach at a local elementary school. I'm actually one of four English teachers who make appearances there, three of us being Americans. I've learned that this elementary has the best English program on the island, which comes as no surprise to me--the kids learn English starting from first grade. Every time I go there, I feel a little less sympathy for my high school kids: if I'm dealing with 6-year-olds who can say "It's sunny!" and "What time is it, Mr. Wolf?" why should I cut some slack for a 15-year-old who doesn't remember the days of the week? It wasn't until recently that I learned this school is the exception, not the rule--most of the other elementaries don't have English at all. That in mind, I've since backed off my high schoolers.

Every year, the school has an English Day. They invite as many of the island's JETs as they can, and we spend the day with different classes, playing with them and listening to their English presentations. This year, all eight JETs on the island made it. We had a blast.

When we arrived, they gave us a quick briefing over tea. (I still can't stand hot tea, much less green tea. I've learned, however, that black or brown tea can be salvaged with 8 cubes of sugar.) Then we went to the opening ceremony in the gym. This school seems to love welcoming new people, as they're very good at it. The students form two lines, and hold up their arms to make a tunnel for the guests to walk through. It was like playing London Bridge with 75 little bridges. As soon as we walked in, we noticed the wall of the stage had been decorated in our honor. They had spelled out our names in big letters, and had taken a blown-up photo of each of our faces and made a construction paper body for it. It was simply adorable. There are plenty of pictures here.

We finished the opening ceremony, and went on to our separate classes. Each class had prepared presentations in English about various bits of Japanese culture: cooking, flower arranging, calligraphy, etc. I was with the 6th graders, and they taught me about flower arranging (ikebana), calligraphy (shodo), and tea ceremony (sado). It was all in English, and I could tell they'd been practicing for a while. They did a very good job.

Afterwards, we had lunch with the kids. After that, we had the customary hour-long recess. I simply love this part of the day. Even though I never quite get to play the sport I want to (it seems like I always miss out on dodgeball and baseball), and even though they always run me to death playing tag, I just love it. This is the view of the playground's surroundings. It's a shame that the kids likely never think twice about how pretty it is here, since they see it every day. Anyway, we played some variation of cops and robbers--the swingset is jail, and robbers can break other robbers out of jail--which basically meant I ran around for about 45 minutes nonstop. It was still freezing in the classroom, so I was wearing my usual four layers, which made physical activity so much more enjoyable.

After that, we had the closing ceremony in the gym. We played a game that required us to practice English introductions, then play paper rock scissors, then give the winner a card. Naturally, the kids loved it.

Of course, we all had a blast. A week later, I got something in the mail from the school. Enclosed were pictures from the day, and this letter:

Dear Adam Shirley,

Thank you very much for joining "English Day" on the 1st of February. "English Day" was able to ended safely with the favor. Our students had a valuable experience and a cheerful time with you. Next year if we will plan for a "English Day", please join us again. We will send you pictures in recognition of "English Day" Still cold days continue. Please take care of yourself.

Fukuoka, Sasebo, and beyond

The graduation ceremony takes place on a Saturday, which makes that a regular work day, so in exchange, teachers got the previous Monday off. That gave us all a three-day weekend, and I wasn't about to spend it freezing my butt off on Tsushima. I quickly planned a trip to Fukuoka with Joey, the other high school ALT on the island. We flew out together on a Friday night, met a friend in town, and had Mexican food. While he found a hostel, I decided to pamper myself with a night in a hotel. (Imagine how luxurious central heating and a bed--any bed--are when you're used to sleeping on the floor in a 50-degree room.) Saturday we just milled around, doing our own thing. I spent about four hours reading War and Peace in the subway station's McDonald's, of all places. Taken out of context, I know that sounds pathetic, but I've missed being able to curl up someplace warm with a book and just read. Silent places put me to sleep, so the din of a subway station restaurant was perfect.

As I wandered around Fukuoka, I found mayonnaise-flavored Doritos (which I couldn't stomach buying), an amazing looking guitar, and a few nice examples of Engrish. Two of them are here and here, but the last one warrants a bit of explanation. Joey pointed it out to me. Japan has its own professional basketball league. I don't mean to suggest Japan should copy America--I don't need to; they do it most of the time anyway. In this case, then, one would expect such a league to be called something like the Japanese Professional Basketball Association, the Japan Basketball League, or just the Japan Basketball Association. Instead, they went with this. I also found a water show put to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.

That night, we met up with three of the nearby Fukuoka JETs that Joey had met at orientation. As usual, it was fun to hang out with other anglophones, especially the single girl variety. We ate at a Thai place for dinner, which was great fun (Joey and I had to tell the bartender how to make a Black Russian for me), and spent a while just talking about the adventures each of us has been on so far. Some of Joey's Japanese friends met up with us, too.

It had been raining off-and-on all day, but by the time we left the restaurant, it was sleeting. As the rest of the group went on to a club, I decided to call it a night, and on the taxi ride back, it was officially snowing. It's not all that common around here (think of northeast Georgia--snow happens, just not very often), and it was my first experience with snow in Japan, so I liked it.

The next morning it was snowing steadily. None of it was sticking, though. I'm such a geek that I deemed the event videoworthy, but when I try to upload it, the quality gets so grainy that you can't even tell it's snowing. Joey had been planning to go snowboarding nearby with some of his Japanese friends, and I was gonna tag along. His friends forgot to bring their gear, though, so the trip got called off. On a whim, then, I decided to hop a bus to Sasebo, where a few friends of mine live. I took the subway back to the airport (five minutes from my hotel) and hopped on a highway bus for the $20, hour-long ride.

Sasebo is a decently big port town with a naval base nearby. Being there is the closest to America I've felt the whole time I've been in Japan: the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the bus station was a Baskin Robbins and a Seattle's Best Coffee. There were English bookstores, KFCs, and Mountain Dew everywhere. Anyway. The reason I went to Sasebo was to meet up with Mutia, Zoe, and Rachel, three girls I met at the Nagasaki Orientation back in September. We've been scheming for the past month or two on taking a trip somewhere at the end of April. We've decided on Indonesia.

Mutia's parents are Indonesian, so she's fluent in the language, and knows the country very well. That takes care of my trepidation about the language barrier, which put such a damper on my Taiwan trip. The group isn't too big (four of us), and... it's freaking Indonesia, folks. I didn't exactly need to be talked into going.

So I wanted to meet up with them to talk about the plan, and go see the travel agent they found. The whole trip will take eight days, with an overnight stopover each way in Taipei (maybe it won't rain this time! woohoo!). We'll be flying from Taipei to Denpasar, Bali, where we'll stay a couple of days at the Hyatt (thanks to one of them having some accumulated frequent flyer miles). From there we'll go to Yogyakarta and Borobudur, before heading to Jakarta. Someone in Mutia's family is apparently getting married, and we've been invited to the reception, so we'll get to see the part of a traditional Indonesian wedding.

My favorite part of the trip, however, is a little side quest we've plotted. Mutia isn't in on this, leaving just Zoe, Rachel, and me. We're trying our best to go to Kalimantan (that's the Indonesian part of Borneo) for a three-day, two-night... orangutan tour. That's right. We'll take a boat down a river through an orangutan rehabilitation center, watch a feeding, and soak up the humidity and the rain forest (and a few thousand mosquito bites, I'm sure). I can't even begin to describe how excited I am about this, but it's not finalized yet, so no more talk about it until it is.

We all met up to talk about the trip, and we all agree it's going to be the coolest trip ever. After adjourning the meeting, three of us decided to celebrate over tex-mex food. I had an enormous chimichanga and some nachos. It was simply amazing. Afterwards, the girls showed me around a little more, taking me through what's apparently the longest open-air mall in Japan, though I might have heard wrong.

They had to leave early (they aren't high school teachers, so they had to go to work the next day), but I was perfectly content entertaining myself. I found a local theater, checked the showtimes, and had just enough time to check in at a hotel and drop off my stuff. I wanted to see the kids movie about the Loch Ness monster, but it only played in the morning, so I contented myself with Sweeney Todd. I was the only one in the theater, which made the whole experience remind me of sneaking into a matinee back home, complete with smuggling in a Snickers bar and Mountain Dew. I loved it.

I caught the bus back to Fukuoka the next morning, and met back up with Joey to catch our flight back to Tsushima. All of this in a normal three-day weekend, no vacation time taken. Thanks to this, I'm determined to use other three day weekends (like in September, when we get three of them in a row) to make quick excursions to places like Hiroshima, Kumamoto, and Beppu.

Last normal lesson before graduation

After we finished the restaurant lesson, we only had enough time for one more lesson before final exams for the term. I decided to do the weather. The students here learn the weather in English from at least middle school, and practice it by being asked "How is the weather today?" when their English class begins. I even ask that of my elementary kids, and they get it with no problem. With that in mind, I was glad to have a lesson that wasn't focused on new material. I was able to build on the basics they've already learned.

Instead of using a dialogue, which I'd done for my other lessons, I decided to present two basic patterns and give the students different vocabulary to use with those patterns. Those two basic patterns were a question and an answer: "How is ~?" / "It's ~." The standard question, then, would be "How is the weather today?" with the standard response being "It's" followed by one of the adjectives they know. We reviewed sunny, cloudy, windy, snowy, and rainy, and I added stormy. I spent at least a little time with each class reviewing the roots of those words--sun, cloud, wind, snow, rain, and storm. With the help of the other teachers, I hoped to help prevent the students from ever saying "It's rain," something I'd heard in the halls a couple of times. It went pretty well. I gave the most advanced classes more food for thought, teaching them different ways of saying a few of them--It's rainy/It rains/It's raining, with "snow" and "storm" fitting there too. Though they gulped this down (my best two groups aren't remotely intimidated by English, which makes things so much easier), I didn't have enough time or gumption to teach them different verb forms for the other words: the sun shines, the wind blows, etc.

I also had them practice the past and future tense with the patterns--"How was ~?"/"How will ~ be?"/"It was ~"/"It will be ~"--which I don't really consider a new pattern, since they learned this a long time ago. That they're already familiar with this made practicing it so much easier. I would happily devote all my lessons to practicing old material instead of learning new stuff, if it meant the kids would grow more comfortable and confident with English.

After that, I decided to throw some new material into the mix by adding temperature to the lesson. That included temperature, high, low, degrees, and Celsius. When I asked the students what "temperature" means, about one student per class would get it right. Working from there, "high" and "low" took only a little bit of gesturing to convey. I'm proud to say I didn't use any Japanese to get the point across--though I knew the answer in Japanese, and figured out how to explain it in Japanese, I wanted to prove to myself as much as to everyone else that the kids could understand it in full English. "Degrees" worked more or less the same way, though we hit the same snag as with "dollars," involving plurals. The longer I spend immersed in a language that doesn't require subject-verb number agreement, the more I empathize with them in struggling to learn English.

I finished the lesson by using an honest-to-goodness Japanese extended weather forecast for question-and-answer fodder. We looked at it together to practice the patterns, and by the end I was asking students in turn to describe the weather on a certain day, eventually getting a full answer: "The high on Saturday will be twelve degrees Celsius." (This is why I taught some of them "It rains," though nobody ever really uses that tense--the past and future tenses are used a lot.) Even the worst class caught on pretty well by the end. I chalk this up to so much of the lesson being review--tenses, weather adjectives, even days of the week and numbers (for temperature readings).

Once I figured out how to spot the more astute students in each group, I would teach them a little extra. For example, I ended up teaching most of the classes "It will be ~ in the morning, but it will be ~ in the afternoon," also with the past tense option for describing yesterday's weather. They learned that without even slowing down, so I taught them how to omit the paralleled structure for simplicity's sake--"It was rainy in the morning, but sunny in the evening."

I even threw them a curveball by including 0 and negative temperatures on the forecast. Each student who was asked that question looked mortified, but every single one of them recovered and nailed the answer. Granted, the deck was sort of stacked--I asked the question of one of the better students in each class (not wanting to embarass a slower one), and I also had learned from the teachers that the Japanese word for the - is taken from "minus," so it sounds more or less the same. Still, it was for me a controlled experiment that allowed me to isolate how well the students would adapt and think on their feet.

I love these kids.

Chorus Concert!

February 19, Tsushima had an island-wide chorus concert. There were about ten groups in all, from all over the island. There were several school groups, including my high school's, and a few adult groups, including Chorus D. (Today it stands for Decrudescence!) I believe we were technically hosting the affair, so we had to help with the grunt work in setting up tables, flyers, programs, etc.

The day's schedule was crazy. The concert began at 2:30, but we wanted to have time for a last-minute rehearsal that morning, and we also needed to do some setting up. So we agreed to meet at 8. On a Sunday. Ugh. What made it worse, though, was that, after a fifteen-minute run-through of our set, and about twenty minutes of setting up the program table and flyers and such, we were done. By 8:45 we had done all the setting up that was needed until 1:30. You can imagine how delighted I was when I figured this out.

We spent the rest of the time chilling out in one of the conference rooms in my town's shopping center. I use the term conference room for lack of a better one. The complex has an auditorium (where the concert was held), and on the third level there are meeting rooms. Most of them are typical classroom fare--white linoleum floors, tables and chairs, maybe a whiteboard and a lectern--but this one was more or less a traditional Japanese home. All the flooring was tatami, the traditional Japanese thatch flooring, and the rooms demonstrated traditional Japanese architecture. I don't say this out of pretending to be an expert on Japanese anything--Nagato, the tour guide bass, told me lots and lots about it. Tatami and traditional Japanese housing almost certainly means sitting on the floor, which almost always means sitting on nothing more than a cushion for however long the group decides to sit there. Since we had a full four hours to kill, I wasn't looking forward to it.

I just can't get used to sitting the way they do around here. The traditional, formal Japanese way of sitting is called seiza, and involves sitting on your shins and feet. While most Japanese are growing more accustomed to western-style seating, they will still sit seiza style during formal events. When sitting on a cushion at a table, it's socially acceptable for Japanese men to switch to sitting Indian style after a few minutes. Women, though, will sit seiza-style or otherwise very very close to seiza-style for the entire meeting/party/event. With all the parties I've been to thus far, ranging from formal principal-is-giving-a-speech-sit-up-straight to just-the-English-teachers-having-fun, I have yet to see anyone pause to stretch their legs out. Short of getting up to go to the bathroom, they'll sit with their legs tucked in, one way or another, for upwards of four hours. I simply cannot do this. I respect them for being able to, and I don't criticize them for any perceived danger of back pain--they've been sitting this way for as long as if not longer than we've been sitting whatever way we sit. That doesn't change the fact that I just flat-out can't do it. Luckily, foreigners aren't expected to adhere to those rules, so I stretch my legs whenever I can get away with it.

Anyway. As each group takes the stage, someone from the group introduces them. Not surprisingly, the group unanimously chose me to give our introduction. One of the guys quickly wrote up something, and I memorized it. I wasn't nervous at all about the speech, which kind of surprised me.

The concert was great. Almost all of the groups before us sang songs in Japanese. One women's group, however, began with Country Roads. It's apparently been translated into Japanese, though, because the only lyrics in English were the phrase "Country Roads" and a quick solo at the beginning. Bless their hearts, their sound was good good, but their English pronunciation was awful. The "r" sound eludes all but the best students around here. That group went on to sing Oh Happy Day, which I only know from Sister Act. They did a great job with it, but I don't think the soloist put enough soul into it.

The high school chorus also sang, and their set included a medley that strung together Summer Nights with In a Rich Man's World. I had never heard the second one before, but apparently it's by Abba, who I've almost never heard of before. Their English pronunciation was adorably bad (the chorus's, not Abba's), but their sound was great.

Our set went just fine. The bass parts weren't very challenging, especially with four of us singing them. We're light on tenors, but our sopranos can wail. All in all, it was great.

We went to a party afterwards, because that's what you do after any special occasion around here. Hanging out and doing karaoke is so much more fun when you're with non-smokers who don't go out with the express purpose of getting blitzed.

Chorus D

As I mentioned a while back, I've joined an a cappella group. After a few weeks, I learned that their official name is Chorus D. I haven't yet asked what the D stands for, since I rather enjoy thinking of a new D-word each time I go to rehearsal. (My current favorite is Daphnomancy.) The group consists of approximately twelve folks, with more or less the same number of men and women. I say approximately because we pick up new members every now and then (much like me), and not everyone can make it every week to rehearsal. The chorus is four-part mixed, so it's S-A-T-B, which is a first for me. I'm used to being in a four-part men's group, meaning the basses and tenors are subdivided into higher and lower parts.

They're all simply wonderful people. The conductor, Noguchi, is also the conductor of the high school chorus, and is also a math teacher. I'm not sure what most of the girls do, but I know they're all just local townsfolk--Noguchi and I are the only teachers in the mix. Of the guys, there's a member of the coast guard, and the guy who runs the Fujifilm shop and does most of the photography on the island. One of the other basses has a son at the elementary school I teach at, and it's scary how similar they look. The other low bass is Nagato, and he's a 72-year-old tour guide. He seems to love giving me random bits of trivia about Tsushima, or Japan in general, from explaining kanji to describing the mountains on Tsushima to Japanese architecture. Our only full-time tenor (Noguchi spends most of his time conducting, and only sings with us during rehearsal) is Ushijima, the priest at the local church. His wife sings with us, and is the really good soprano I think I've mentioned here before. (I also found out their church is Anglican.)

I learned very quickly that the chorus isn't tied to the church at all. I wouldn't have had much of a problem with it had they been--my favorite part about the whole church experience is the music. New songs are arranged and proposed by the conductor, and the group talks it over and decides together whether to include them in the repertoire. Our current set list consists of the themes from Mononoke Hime, Astro Boy, and Space Battleship Yamato. All of these are anime in one form or another, and are all classics in their own right. At least, that's the feeling I get from people here.

The entire group is laid back. It feels in many ways like the glee club did back at UGA--no pressure or elitism, but still an earnest desire to make good music. They love to make jokes, and we spend a good chunk of time just laughing during each rehearsal. It's really interesting to hear the conductor give instructions in Japanese. I still can't understand most of the finer points of his directions (I usually choose some bit of Crowell's advice at random), but they use the same Italian words we do for music--forte, piano, legato, soprano, alto, tenor, bass.

The group speaks more English than I was expecting, but that's still not much. It's been great not having an English crutch, having to fend for myself, and I imagine it's helping my listening and speaking a lot. It's still kind of frustrating when I can't get the specifics on things like how the conductor wants us to shape a certain phrase.

Also, the group has an official drinking song. Maybe drinking song is the wrong term... Anytime we all go out, we have a song that we sing as a toast before drinking. It's in four-part harmony, it's done a cappella, and it's done wherever we are, regardless of the restaurant or the otherwise quiet atmosphere. I've recorded the full song, and I'll get around to posting it one day, but it's about 200 megs, which will take a while to upload. Suffice it to say, it's a lot of fun whenever we go out.

Last class with third-years

The school year around here begins in April. Graduation, then, falls at the beginning of March. A month before graduation, the seniors are cut loose to take care of whatever business they have regarding their next step. For the university-track students, this means foregoing sleep for about 30 days in order to study their butts off for the college entrance exams. For the commercial-track kids, this means securing a job and taking it easy. This meant that my last class with my third-years was at the end of January.

I didn't see this coming, but it really was a blessing in disguise: their class has been by far my least favorite. It's not that the kids are bad or anything. It's just that the deck is stacked against me: there are 40 of them in each class; they've been bottom-of-the-barrel for two years in high school, meaning they haven't had any English oral communication practice; and they have absolutely no desire to learn English. I'm not trying to make excuses--I've definitely regarded the class as a challenge, not a lost cause. I just can't get anywhere with them. The teachers who work with me are pretty much my favorite English teachers, and they're very helpful with the lessons. They're honest enough to acknowledge there's no need for pushing the kids with textbook-related lessons, so they don't give me any pressure on that front. That leaves me with 50 minutes to spend literally playing English games with 17-year-olds.

Anyone in their right mind would be thrilled about that, since you'd expect the actual meat of a lesson to be the stressful part. With me, though, it's actually the other way around--I'm pretty comfortable creating and teaching the meat and potatoes of my lessons. It's the games that have given me fits. The English games I have the most fun with--charades, pictionary, catch phrase, taboo--are pretty straightforward word games. I've successfully sold a few of my upper-level first-year classes on pictionary and charades (taboo is in the works), but those have a maximum of twenty students. No matter how hard I try, I cannot figure out how to play one of those games (or many other games, for that matter) with forty low-English-ability students. If any of you can suggest anything, I'm all ears.

Anyway. Most of the games and activities in those classes wound up being activity sheets--word searches, crosswords, scrambles, etc. They dig those pretty well. For the last class, we did a mini-lesson on jobs. I made a handout with "What do you want to be when you finish school?/I want to be a __" and plenty of blank space. We had them choose something, write it in the blank, and then draw a picture below. I've been leery about doing things like that with the seniors--I know for a fact I and all the guys I knew were too cool to do stupid things like draw pictures when we were seniors. (Of course, I've since discovered the error of my ways.) As it turned out, though, they simply loved it. While a few of them didn't do much of anything, most of them spent the whole time on the drawings, and a few of them even went so far as to ask me how to say a job in English. "Airport baggage screener" was tricky, but I used enough caveman Japanese to get the point across. A few of the guys chose "army" (as in, "I want to be a army") and drew a scene more or less straight out of Rambo. Afterwards, we collected all the drawings. I've still got them in my desk drawer, bundled up. I take them out every now and then, when I need a laugh.

I was lucky enough to get a picture with them.

Recap: January

Back from my visit home, I jumped right back into lessons. My first lesson back was a continuation of a restaurant unit. Having already taught the students vocabulary and dialogue related to a fast food joint, I decided to take on the topic of a full restaurant. There are a couple of key differences between most restaurants in Japan and most restaurants in America. First, in Japan, you almost always get up and pay at a register, while back home you usually pay at the table. Second, tipping a waiter simply does not happen in most of Japan. If it does, I've never heard of it, and I can only imagine it happening in big city restaurants that are accustomed to foreign patrons. These two tidbits added a nice element of cross-cultural education to the lesson.

Preparing for this lesson made me realize that probably 90% of the stress I feel at school is self-inflicted. I could have very easily drawn up a dialogue and some vocabulary, and maybe even tossed together a plain menu for an activity. However, I wanted to see how much better it would be if I made the experience as realistic as possible, under the circumstances. To that end, I created a handout with vocabulary and dialogue, a full-color menu with seventeen items (including main dishes, side dishes, drinks, and desserts), and an accompanying guest check. With a lot of help from the teachers, I made eight color copies of the menu, laminated them, and folded them to make them book-style menus.

The dialogue covered checking in with a hostess, ordering with a waiter, the delivery of the food, asking for the check, and paying at the table. I got kind of worried that this would overload the students, but, surprisingly, the teachers gave me the green light. For the vocabulary, I made sure to include the terms "main dish," "side dish," and "dessert," and grouped the corresponding foods under those headings to try and get it across to the students. (I did this because, for the fast food dialogue, my requiring them to order three different things--failing to specify any further--led several to order "a hamburger, a cheeseburger, and a chicken sandwich" or "french fries, onion rings, and apple juice.") One of the teachers suggested including steak on the menu, which I had thought of, but had shied away for fear of opening the can of worms that is steak temperatures. She was positive the students could handle it, so I went ahead with it.

The new food and drinks gave them almost no trouble, since most non-Japanese foods take their names from English, French, or Dutch, and so sound similar in Japanese. Grilled chicken took a little bit of explaining, as did baked potato, but that led to an impromptu and largely successful mini-lesson on "grilled" and "baked." Steak itself was easy, but rare-medium-well done by themselves produced blank stares. When I grouped them together on the board under "steak," the bright kids in class made the connection, and everyone else caught on quickly. Terms more on the technical side--like "order" and "check"--gave them a little trouble, but I got the point across with some careful charades and demonstration, plus the occasional bail-out from the teacher.

The dialogue was an adventure, but with a demonstration from the teacher and me at the beginning, we largely prevailed. "You can pay here whenever you're ready"--vitally important to learn, but unexpectedly difficult for the students to understand, given the cultural difference--was only solved by students who took the sentence one word at a time. Instead of having the dialogue deal with menu prices and making change (something we covered in the fast food lesson), which would have added another 5-7 lines to the dialogue, I opted instead to teach the students "I don't need any change." It certainly cut down on the length of the dialogue, and the face-value meaning was clear to the students. The subtler, keep-the-change meaning eluded most, however. I had to give another mini-lesson on tipping, which included the part about American servers not being paid full minimum wage, and that you should therefore always leave a tip. I'd like to think I'm helping combat the stereotype that foreigners don't know how to tip, one class of rural Japanese students at a time.

During the next class period, I had the students give performances of the dialogue in groups of four or five. One student in each group would be the server, and the others would be customers. This is where the props came in handy. As an afterthought, I gave each group a different denomination of dollars that I'd brought back with me. I gave one group ten ones, another two fives, then two tens, and a twenty. I even let one group in each class use a hundred dollar bill, something I know would be just stupid back home. Of course none of the students kept the money, though a few jokingly made a big show of folding it and putting it in their pocket. I encouraged the groups to perform the dialogue off-book, and to my delight, most of them did. Everyone was simply thrilled at the props, especially the money.

The performances were... endearing. Several groups did very well, but there were many mistakes, especially things I hadn't thought to tell them about. The most common had to do with ordering. The dialogue gave an example of one customer and the waiter, so each of the waiter's questions--order, steak temperature, drink, dessert--was answered. I broke the students into three- and four-customer groups without thinking anything of it, and lo and behold, the waiter in many groups performed the full ordering dialogue with each student individually. Because they didn't know it was wrong, of course I didn't make a big show of correcting them, but I did mention it at the end of each class, without specifying which groups did it. All in all, though, they enjoyed the activity.

Emboldened by their fascination with the currency, I asked some of the higher-level classes if they knew who was on the one, and every single student replied "Washington" without hesitating. The five produced mostly silence, but when I mentioned Lincoln, several students brightened up. A few began quoting something in Japanese, and all I could pick up was the repetition of a word that sounded like "people." Sure enough, they were quoting the last part of the Gettysburg Address--"government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I love these kids.

Outside of school, January was pretty fun. I spent a weekend hanging out with the guys in the middle of the island, just staying inside and playing Guitar Hero. Another weekend, I had everyone over at my place for a poker night. We also had a get-together in the middle of the island with some teachers and local folks who have an English conversation group. Of course, anytime there are Japanese in the mix, the night eventually leads to karaoke. The next weekend, we went up to the north part of the island to hang out with everyone. I stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning playing Monopoly with Evelyn.

A little about the cold

When I came back to Tsushima, I was prepared for the bitter cold and wind. Well, as prepared as one can be for having to teach classes without being able to feel one's fingers. Anytime I think of complaining about how cold it is, I look down at myself, wearing three full layers of clothing, then I look over at the students. The girls have to wear their knee-length skirts year-round, and many of them walk 15-30 minutes to school. They have full-length stockings they're allowed to wear, but most of them opt for the knee-high socks. I asked one of them why they would willingly expose their knees and thighs to the bitter wind. She said the socks are thicker, and they'd rather be able to feel their toes than their knees. My first thought was, why not wear the socks over the stockings, or vice versa? I say that because I'm a guy, and because for me there comes a point at which you sacrifice fashion to avoid hypothermia. When I suggested this as a solution--wearing both instead of choosing one--she giggled and told all the other girls in the class about it. Girls are weird.

From an absolute perspective, it doesn't get all that cold here, especially considering I'm at roughly the same latitude as Missouri. I think the lowest the temperature got all winter was -3 or -4 Celsius, which is in the mid-twenties for those of the Fahrenheit persuasion. I saw it snow twice, and both times it melted by 10am. Considering all that, the wintertime temperature range here is comparable to Georgia. As I've said, though, that comparison isn't worth beans, because people here spend most of their time in air that's the same temperature as outside. This might have something to do with the rural nature of the island, of course, but I get the feeling from other ALTs--even the ones posted in the main cities--that it's pretty common throughout Japan. Commerce--malls, stores, restaurants--and government offices have heaters, but even they don't all have central heating. Most restaurants here are literally the downstairs of a two-story house, so the customer area is small enough to be served by a (yes, one) heating unit.

At school, though, the only heaters are in the staff room and the main office. Every other space in the building is only as warm as the sun makes it. The classrooms are pretty bad, but they at least are sealed off from the outside and store the warmth from the sun. The corridors are the worst. Valuing (wisely, I think) fresh air over a few degrees of warmth, my schools leave windows cracked open in all the hallways, which makes for a wonderfully frigid walk to and from the classrooms. Again, anytime I think of complaining, I walk by a few pairs of shaved, skinny, trembling little legs, often bare from the mid-thigh to the calf.

If anyone reading this is like I was before I came here--if you've never spent a day or two running through your regular routine in temperatures that hover just north of freezing--then you simply don't know what I'm talking about. I try not to make concrete judgmental claims like that, but I'm willing to bet that most people born and bred in America cannot fathom what it's like to be cold to your core, and to know you won't be warm until you go to bed. As a teacher, it's miserable because you can't feel your fingers, which makes writing on the chalkboard an adventure, and your students spend the entire class shivering. I'm sure a few of my students couldn't follow what I was saying over the sound of their teeth chattering.

When it first got this cold, I spent a fair amount of time grumbling about how backwards it is to stubbornly refuse to install heating units. In fact, I'm pretty sure one of the more popular winter sports among ALTs is cursing Japan for its barbarous negligence of what we regard as such a basic human need as climate control. I know it was a common dead horse topic for us on the island. It isn't even about our suffering--we've had several discussions about how unhealthy it must be to force the students to wear uniforms that subject them to such bitter cold.

However, after thinking about it some more, I'm not as incensed about it. I've realized that bitter cold is just what the people here are used to. It's all they know. They have no more conception of life spent consistently at 70 degrees Fahrenheit than we do of taking our outdoor shoes off when going inside, or of staying at school until 7 or 8 in the evening six days a week to make sure our students are prepared for their college entrance examinations. They don't know any different, and--which is more--this is the way of doing things that works for the Japanese. Just like Calvin's dad told him: it builds character. It may seem outrageous to outsiders that the students are subjected to such conditions, but they don't know any differently. After high school, when they all settle
into adult life, they'll get to enjoy the creature comforts of cushioned chairs and central heating, and be able to look back with pride on what they suffered through.

So about Christmas... Part 4

Going home for Christmas was something I decided to do as soon as I got to Tsushima. There wasn't any deliberation on my part; I just knew I was going home. I didn't do much thinking as to why; I didn't articulate that I was going home because I missed my family. I think the closest I came to justifying it was imagining how my parents would feel if I didn't come home for Christmas. It's not that they would have pressured me or given me grief over not coming home. I'm almost positive that, if I told them I had decided for whatever reason not to visit, they'd take it with a straight face and accept it. All the while, though, I would know it was devastating them--and that's the part that got me.

So I decided to go home, I booked the flights, I made the arrangements with school and everything. As I was doing all that, I didn't really think much on why I was going home. Even as I stepped off the plane in Dallas, I didn't feel like I was coming home. I'd been away for so long, and I was staying for such a short time, that I was technically just visiting America.

It wasn't until the ride to the airport with Mom and Dad, on the way to catch my flight to Atlanta, that I realized how much better I felt in general than I had before coming home. I haven't been miserable during this whole stay at all--I've enjoyed the teaching every single day--but I felt like I'd forgotten what it feels like to be at home with family. I'm pretty sure my forgetting was a sort of defense mechanism, to stave off homesickness and culture shock and whatnot (which has worked quite well, so far), but it's still a little scary to forget to miss home.

Anyway, I decided while I was back home that, no matter how much I travel, I won't be staying away from home for long. No matter the cost, no matter the hassle, I simply will not go long without seeing my family. I just need them to feel whole.

By the way, when I was planning this trip home, several people involved in JET cautioned me about it. They said that many people go home for the break, return to native English, central heating, and chairs with backs on them, and then they come back to Japan at the darkest, most bitterly cold part of the year. This apparently breaks the spirit of many JETs, resulting in many people deciding not to recontract, though they may have loved the place before they went home. (My predecessor was one of these.) I listened to this advice, acknowledged it, and paid close attention to how I felt about Japan before going home, while I was at home, and when I got back to Japan.

So far, I haven't felt any differently toward this arrangement. I accept that there are some things that are simply fundamentally different about life here. It's cold, dark, and dreary in February in Japan, and I've spent most of my spare time huddled next to my space heater playing videogames. I've never in my life known cold the way I know cold now. Yet despite this, my love for my life here wasn't lessened by going home. If anything, I came back more determined to stay another year. I know it breaks Mom's heart to see me leave again, and I know I'm missing out on many things I could be doing with friends and family. But I feel the same way Cord did when he left us all behind for 18 months to go to Australia: this is just something I've got to do. I love and miss everyone, and I spend more than a fair amount of time wondering at all the memories I'm missing out on making with the people back home. That doesn't change the fact that I feel more mentally, psychologically, and even spiritually satisfied right now, with where I am, than I have yet in my life.

And besides, I still need to try out for Ninja Warrior.

So about Christmas... Part 3

So I finished up my visit to Springfield, and Mom and Dad drove me to the airport. I found out two things at the check-in counter: 1) my bag was overweight, and 2) my flight had been delayed for an hour. The bag part was easy: I had to pay $50. The delay was actually great, because it gave me a bonus hour with my parents. The goodbye went like it's gone every time I've said bye to my parents for the past eight years: I'm fine, Dad's fine because I'm fine, and then Mom starts crying, so I start crying, and then Dad tears up, and the whole thing falls apart.

We said our goodbyes, and I had an otherwise uneventful flight to Atlanta.

At the airport I met up with my bestest polyglot friend, Ashley. We spent about two hours just catching up, talking about random things over cheese fries and Coke. She gave me a dictionary of Roma (a gypsy language), written in Hungarian, that she bought while she was teaching in Budapest.

After saying bye to Ashley, I rented a car and drove to Toccoa to see my grandparents. Nothing big happened that night--it felt like I'd never left for Japan, and I was dropping in for a visit like I've done for the past seven years. Granny and Papa are doing just fine, and I spent the evening just catching up on family news with them, and telling them bits about Japan.

Saturday we had a get-together that was, I guess, held in my honor. Before everyone arrived, I walked down to the lake. (My grandparents live on Lake Hartwell, on the Georgia-South Carolina border.) Northeast Georgia was in an awful drought most of the summer and fall, and I took this picture to illustrate just how low they drained that part of the lake to keep that part of the reservoir filled.

Back at the house, I got to see my cousin, my uncle, another aunt and uncle, and another aunt and uncle. We also had this for lunch. Pictures very rarely do barbecue justice, but that's brunswick stew, pulled pork, and ribs from the best barbecue place I've ever eaten at.

An aside: does anyone else have relatives who use the term "dinner" for the meal you eat at around noon? My grandparents have done that for as long as I can remember, but I don't think I've heard many other folks call it that. Oh well.

Anyway, visiting with all of them was great. At around 5, I said my goodbyes, and headed on to Athens. I would dare say that, in the past seven years, I've driven that stretch of back roads between Toccoa and Athens almost as many times as Dad has. It's amazing how little the countryside along that road changes.

Once back in Athens, I headed to the house Cord just bought. It's a fixer-upper very close to where we lived last year. There I met up with Cord, Cord's friend Katie, Chuck, Marissa, Clay, and newly wed Jeremy and Brigette. Just as with my family, it felt like I'd only been gone a week or so. Apart from Cord buying a house, Chuck and Marissa breaking up, and Jeremy and Brigette getting married, I mean.

We all went to Cali N Tito's for supper, and oh my goodness I loved every bite of it. Cali N Tito's is a Cuban restaurant in Athens that serves the best sandwich I've ever eaten: El Cubano Especial. You grill steak, hot dogs, and onions, and you put that on a hoagie with a fried egg, cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes. On the side you can get maduros, which are sweet fried plantains. The whole ambrosial platter looks like this. We met up with Meredith and her boyfriend there, too.

After supper, the group moved on to Copper Creek downtown. While there, I ran into Ski, Madeline, and Caroline, though I didn't take a picture of them because I foolishly thought I'd get another chance to see them before I left.

After Copper Creek, we walked to Clay's new place, which is about a ten-minute walk from downtown. There we played cards for a while, until a few people started falling asleep. Most of the folks--Cord and Katie, Jeremy and Brigette--were calling it a night, and Jeremy asked if I wanted to play Guitar Hero and Rock Band with him. I had been secretly hoping for just such an opportunity, so I took him up on it. We played around until about 3:30a.m. I'd forgotten how much I miss playing videogames with Jeremy.

He gave me a ride back to Cord's, where I made a pallet on the floor. The next morning (Sunday), I woke up at about 8 in order to make it to church to see Katie and Michael. Along the way, I stopped at the Waffle House I used to work at. Almost all the same first-shift waitresses are still working, and they all remember me perfectly. A few of them said something about how great a waiter I used to be, though I know for a fact I never waited tables with any of them--I always came in on the shift after theirs. I didn't complain about the praise, though.

Waffle House has biscuits and gravy now. One more sign the world is getting more and more messed up.

After breakfast, I scooted on to church, making it about fifteen minutes before service started. Snooping around, I succeeded in finding Michael. He promptly gave a bear hug like only Michael can give, led me straight back to the choir loft to meet Fish (Katie), and they both asked me if I wanted to sing with them. I sort of stammered, which they took as a yes, so they gave me some extra robes and an extra folder of music. We warmed up together, and I tried to learn the music as well as I could from those five minutes of rehearsal. It went fine, and I got to hang out with Fish and Michael a lot more than I was expecting.

Afterwards, we teamed up with Joel, Nathan, and a few others, and went to lunch. I promise I had nothing to do with the decision to go to Cali N Tito's. Honest! The place is much more photogenic in the daytime. This is the inside, where the ordering goes on, and this is Fish, Michael, and me amid some of the outdoor seating. Note the Fish's fabulous shades.

We spent about two hours just talking, and man, I had been dying to do just that with Fish and Michael. Any of you who have ever hung out with them or their friends know exactly what I'm talking about. Fish, Michael, Joel, Liz, Nathan, Alan, Nathan--talking with any of them one-on-one is tons of fun. What's more, as you add more of them to a conversation, the amazingness goes up exponentially. I dream of one day being able to see all of them on a regular basis again, because... man. They rock.

After saying goodbye to them, I moved on to Inoko. I had it all (sort of) planned out: Jean, my old boss, works Sunday lunch, and Mr. Inoko comes in to help for that shift too. They both stick around until the beginning of dinner shift, to close out lunch sales and make sure dinner gets started right. I figured, therefore, that the ideal time to visit would be at around 3, which would catch some of the lunch servers leaving, the dinner servers coming in, and I'd get to see Jean and Mr. Inoko, and maybe even Tetsu, the sushi chef who trained me as a manager.

It sort of worked. I got too caught up with having fun with Fish and Michael, so I missed Mr. Inoko by about fifteen minutes. I did, however, see the last of the lunch servers go, and got to spend some time with Jean. Just as with everyone else, it felt like I'd never left--I picked right back up with Jean and the servers who knew me. I got to see Khanh, Erica, and all the chefs. Going back to the place was exactly the way I wanted it: all of the resentment and negativity I felt while I worked there has washed away, leaving only the good memories and the friends I made.

After telling them all goodbye, I went and visited Jenna and Chase. I know I'm saying it a lot, but jeez, I'd forgotten how much I miss my friends. I've known Jenna since sophomore year (02ish), and Chase for only a little less time, and they're both two of the most caring people I've ever met. Because I'm terrible with time management, though, I only had about an hour to spend with them.

My next stop was trivia at Wild Wing with Jeremy, Brigette, Cord, Jonny, and some guy. Jeremy started a team about a year ago with the original name "Laser Beams - Pew Pew!" The announcer for the trivia, when he reads the team names, makes "Pew Pew!" sound like a high-pitched laser beam, so it's always satisfying. I know--we're lame. However, for the first time ever, our team won first place that night. I'd like to think my guest appearance had something to do with our good fortunes.

After that, I said my goodbyes to everyone, except Cord, who I lingered on with for a while. We didn't get a chance to chill out and catch up one-on-one, but there weren't any hard feelings. We did a little preliminary scheming for some traveling next year, and I was off.

The next part of my plan was to meet up with Khanh, my favorite Vietnamese Inoko server in the whole world, after she got off work. One of our haunts last summer was Choo Choo, one of the local hibachi express restaurants, so I thought it'd be awesome to continue the tradition. Alas, she called me after work and said she didn't feel like coming out. So instead we talked on the phone for a while, I grabbed food for myself from Choo Choo, and went on about my way.

I stopped at both Wal-Marts in Athens looking for candy to bring back to Japan as gifts for the other teachers. (Chocolate especially--it's the best time of year to travel with meltable things.) While there, I bought my first piece of Georgia paraphernalia: a red hoodie, with "GEORGIA" emblazoned across the front.

My flight back to Japan left the next morning (Monday) at 8am. Allowing for check-in, customs, and turning in my rental, I had to be back at the car place in Atlanta at 5:30. I decided that $70 for five hours in a hotel was silly, so I drove as far as I could toward Atlanta until I got tired, then I pulled into a gas station and napped.

I woke up with plenty of time, checked in the car without incident, got to the airport, checked my bags (paying another $50 in overweight fees), got to my gate, and napped. The flight to Dallas was uneventful, mostly because I slept. My flight to Tokyo was nowhere near as fun as the one coming the other way had been, though I did get to see ice floes around Alaska and the Bering Strait--a first for me. The movie selection on the flight was terrible, so I watched the same episode of CSI three times, then gave up and tried reading. When that got old, I read the newspaper. When that got old, I started writing theorems. No, seriously. Sure, it won't change the world, but I'm pretty certain I found a shortcut for multiplying any two 2-digit numbers. I went on to expand the formula to 3-digit numbers, and succeeded, but forgot to take a picture.

Getting back to Tsushima was largely uneventful, though the overweight fee for my bag on the last leg was about $10. The guy at the desk was very sheepish when he tried to tell me, too, like he was breaking the news about a dead relative.

So, in summary, I spent a full two weeks in Springfield with my family. I flew from Springfield to Atlanta on a Friday afternoon. I visited a friend and drove to my grandparents'. Saturday, I visited my family in Toccoa, then drove to Athens, where I had supper with friends, then hung out downtown, then played videogames until 3:30. Sunday, I went to church with more friends, ate lunch with more friends, visited work friends, visited more friends, then visited more friends. I then talked on the phone with a friend while I did last-minute shopping, drove until 2am, slept until 5am, drove to the airport, and flew back to Japan.

In 64 hours I visited 35 people. I'm definitely satisfied with that, but I still didn't get to see everybody. Kieu, Kelly, Tetsu, Mr. Inoko, Yuliya, Liz, Dr. Benedek, Professor Crowell, Dr. Magnani, Christine, Kristi... Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I take consolation from the knowledge that I'd be hard-pressed to visit all those people in two weeks, much less two days.

So about Christmas... Part 2

Having acquired a Wii, I played it only a little, and calmly boxed it up and put it in my suitcase. I knew that if I dove in all the way, I'd spend my entire vacation playing Guitar Hero. This was one of the few times I can remember successfully exercising willpower over videogames.

There really weren't any adventures with my family in Springfield. That's actually exactly how I wanted it. I definitely miss going on trips with them, seeing places, and other monumental things like that, but what I miss more is just being around them. The same thing happens with my close friends, too--the better I know someone, and the more I like them, the more I enjoy just sitting around with them.

I've been keeping a mental list since August of all the food I miss. Near the top of that list has been Pizza Hut. More specifically, Pizza Hut lunch buffets. For $4.99 you get warm--not piping hot--pizza, which is how I prefer it, and Mountain Dew to boot. I thrived on that for lunch last summer during my 14,000-mile cross-country journey, and man, I miss it. It's the perfect travel meal, too--cheap, amazing pizza, and you can be in and out in 10 minutes. So as soon as restaurants opened back up after Christmas, I made a beeline for the nearest Pizza Hut and gorged myself.

I also promised myself back around October that I would feast on movies at the theater when I came home. Prepared to go by myself if I had to, I actually lucked out and got my family to go with me. We saw American Gangster, I Am Legend, and National Treasure 2. I liked all of them, but then, even Transformers was beautiful to me, so starved was I for mother culture. I tend to like almost every movie I see anyway.

Toward the end of my visit, I met up with the lovely Mary, and while we were downtown at the Mudhouse drinking our Elvises (peanut butter smoothie = heaven), she stopped to say hi to a high school friend of hers. Glancing at the other people at the table with this friend, I did a doubletake at one guy in particular, just as he did the same to me. Come to find out, this was Nick, another high school buddy of mine. He had blue hair and wore duct tape pants back then--thus the hard time recognizing him.

I also caught up with two people I hardly expected to see: Brian and Eric. We were buddies senior year, mostly due to Mr. Sly's, Mr. Fotsch's, and Mr. Collins' calculus, programming, and AP English classes. We skipped lunch more or less every day spring semester, bringing little wide-eyed freshman Mary along to Taco Bell, Pasta Express, or Lucy's. The summer after graduation, as Brian, Eric, and I were preparing to ship out to college, we hung out at my house. We wound up talking about random deep things--my favorite kind of stuff to talk about--until about 3am, standing at the foot of my driveway. This time around, we went to Mud Lounge, Steak & Shake, and Jimmy John's, then wound up back at my driveway at about 3am. This time we talked a lot more about politics and ecology, and it was every bit as much fun as last time.

Every time I go back to Springfield, if it's during the school year, I make it a point to sneak back into Glendale to visit any teachers I can find. This is my way of getting back at the school for becoming ridiculously uptight about security while I was there (ID badges and such), but mainly to catch up with my teachers. The only one I found this time was, as it turned out, exactly who I needed to see--Sensei. She has a real name, but when you learn Japanese in a Midwest high school from a Japanese woman, "Sensei" suffices.

Oh, and what visit home would be complete without seeing Buster, Todd and Cuddles?

I went to bed at about 10:30 on New Year's Eve. Exciting, I know. On New Year's Day, however, I watched football aaaall day with Dad. As the savvy among you know already, the day's festivities culminated with the Georgia-Hawaii Sugar Bowl, at which Georgia beat the ever-loving snot out of Hawaii. This marked the first UGA football game I watched all season. Watching Georgia football on New Year's Day with your dad is something everyone should do at least once.

All of this got done in about 10 days. After a dentist appointment (at which I found out there's a pretty good reason Japanese people brush their teeth after every meal--rice sticks to your teeth something awful, and will give you two cavities despite your brushing twice and flossing once daily), I packed up, slung my Gibson over my shoulder, and set off for a brief stop in Georgia...

So about Christmas...

Back in October, the other JETs on the island started talking about their plans for the Christmas holidays. Two of them were planning to go to Okinawa, one was planning a trip to Kumamoto, and three were talking about going to Thailand or Cambodia. I had decided to go back home for Christmas as soon as I got here. Back in October, I was the only one who was sure he was going home for the break. As it turned out, almost everyone else went home too. How's that for being a trend-setter?

My first major flight was from Fukuoka to Tokyo Narita. That flight left at 8am, and I wanted to be there about an hour in advance. When I tried to check with the airport about what gate I should use, they told me that because of my carrier--American Airlines--I would be flying out of the international terminal. From Fukuoka--in Japan--to Tokyo--in Japan. I should have known better, but I'm used to common sense being foreign to the air travel industry, so I got up an extra hour early to allow myself time to get there. That meant waking up at 4am to catch a cab (they let the subway sleep in until about 6 on weekends). So I arrived at the international terminal crusty-eyed and cranky at 5, to discover the entire terminal pitch black and locked.

I took the cab back to the domestic terminal to discover that, in fact, American Airlines was running what's called a "code share" with Japan Airlines, and that, therefore, I would be flying out of the domestic terminal. Grr.

Apart from that, there wasn't any drama coming back. I say that, even though my flight from Atlanta to Springfield was delayed by an hour. Anyone who's flown out of Atlanta knows how abysmal that place can be, so an hour isn't that bad.

I've met some pretty interesting folks standing in line at airports. When I was waiting for my connection to Geneva back in 2005, for example, I met a Japanese man who taught in England before becoming a self-described pilgrim and using his credit cards to travel the world. This time, in Tokyo, I met a Japanese teacher from Kyoto who was flying all the way to Asuncion--that's Paraguay, folks, 20 hours of flying and the opposite season away--and a 16-year-old half-Japanese half-American kid who was flying to New York to visit family he hadn't seen in twelve years.

My Tokyo-Dallas flight--all twelve hours of it--came equipped with one of those little touch-screen TVs with on-demand movies. I gorged myself on American culture. I had time to watch Ratatouille, Stardust, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers, and then read 150 pages of Michael Crichton's Travels. I think I got up to pee once--that's how glued I was to the TV. I recommend the first three movies. Transformers is fine, but only if you're in the mood for an awesomely bad comedy.

There were five or six flight attendants, about half of them Asian, the other half white. It being a flight departing Japan, I don't think it's out of line to assume those Asian attendants were Japanese, or at least spoke the language. Despite having three presumably native speakers on board, all of the flight announcements were made by an American guy with an abysmal Japanese accent. I make no claims to being fluent, or having impeccable diction. Though I try my best to be a stickler when it comes to my own pronunciation in a foreign language--something that's gotten me compliments on my Hungarian, Japanese, Spanish, and Cantonese pronunciation--I know I'm far from perfect. Far be it for me to imply otherwise. Power to him for learning the language in the first place (everything except his diction was fine). However, this guy was being paid (presumably well) to speak Japanese in a professional capacity. I can't understand why he didn't just hand the mic over to the native speakers (all of whom were probably dying a little on the inside listening to him). Bah.

My flight departed Tokyo at noon on Saturday, December 21. It arrived in Dallas at 11:30am on Saturday, December 21. I stopped thinking about that after about five minutes, because it made my head hurt.

I hadn't gone through U.S. customs and immigration since June of 05, but man, a lot changed in 2 1/2 years. I'm positive they weren't fingerprinting and photographing every single foreigner visiting the country last time. I can't help but feel like it's a little bit demeaning to be put through something usually reserved for criminals. It's not just the U.S., though--Japan is doing precisely the same thing to non-native Japanese entering the country.

Anyway, I got back to Springfield, and was thrilled to discover that my luggage did in fact make it. I'm serious--it was like opening a big blue 40lbs canvas Christmas present with wheels and a handle. The baggage screeners even went in and rearranged everything, so it looked different.

On the drive back home from the airport, having been with my parents and my sister for all of ten minutes, I decided that I'll never be able to spend Christmas away from home. I'm positive that I'll go nuts if I don't see my family around that time of year.

It's amazing how different it is to have central heating again after going six months without. It makes my apartment in Japan feel like it's on a completely different planet.

This was the first time in about six years that I didn't work at Waffle House on Christmas Day. Everyone laughs and tells me they're sorry whenever I mention that, but it really never has bothered me. Dad's worked every Christmas since my sister and I were born, so we've never known any different. We were always stoked that we could open our presents at 6am before Dad went to work. Once we moved to Missouri, and Mom started working on Christmas too, the options for my sister and I were to a) work at one of the shops with Mom and Dad, or b) sit at home alone on Christmas.

One of my missions for my visit home was to acquire a Wii and Guitar Hero 3. Folks laughed at me on December 26th when I asked around about one. On the 28th, though, I went to Best Buy, Circuit City, 2 Wal-Marts, Target, and Gamestops. Each one of them laughed sympathetically and told me no. Discouraged but not ready to give up, I tried Toys R Us. I walked into the electronics department, right up to the register with a sign that read "WE ARE OUT OF WIIs - DON'T ASK," to the girl standing behind the counter. I looked her in the eye, and as I asked her if they had any Wiis, I noticed she was holding a cell phone in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other. She leaned in conspiratorially, grinned back at me, and whispered "We just got a shipment of twenty." She was talking to the guys on the loading dock with the walkie talkie, and texting a friend with the scoop. So I casually waited while she went to the back, wheeled out a case, and handed me the little white box with those three magical letters. After paying, as I walked out of the store, I heard the girl announcing to the store that they had 19 Wiis that had just arrived.

Guitar Hero 3 took a lot more searching, but I eventually got it too. Those two acquisitions satisfied the nerd in me.

Tsushima rookie latest to accept one-year extension

IZUHARA, Japan (TP) -- After weeks of unsuccessful talks, Tsushima High School today announced they had reached an agreement in principle to the terms of a one-year contract extension for rookie starter Adam Shirley.

Tsushima made the announcement at special press conference. Team officials were present, including manager Ko. Sensei. Visibly pleased at the agreement, the manager remarked, "学校へジェーンさんは行ったりんごさるカーバレーター。" Tsushima Press' interpreter translated this as "To school Jane went, apple monkey carburetor."* The manager then guffawed, slapped a nearby reporter on the back, and began a stirring rendition of the school song.

The agreement comes after four months of negotiations. Asked to respond to rumors that he delayed in order to entertain offers from rivals Iki and Goto, Adam scoffed at the claims in a public statement, going on record as saying "Scoff, scoff."

Among the issues discussed during negotiations were: being allotted more vacation time, having the freedom to award more participation points to the students, and having to deal with fewer mukade. While the team flatly refused to budge on the first two points, they ultimately complied with the final request: a three-person hunting party was organized and successfully slew three of the fourteen-inch-long centipedes, known for their nonlethal but excruciatingly painful stings.

The agreement comes after similar extensions were given to fellow rookies M. Kuriyama and J. Joyce, as well as journeyman reliever O. Murray.

Despite these key re-signings, Tsushima still has four question marks on their roster. One was created by the loss of promising rookie M. Lloyd to free agency. Two-year veterans E. Chin and R. Rice also left, citing exhaustion, and three-year stalwart A. Dilliplane announced his retirement at the end of the most productive year of his career.

Adam got off to a rocky start last year, disappointing many hopefuls in his September debut. In only two hours of work, he struggled with his command, failing to explain where Georgia mascot Uga spends the night before home games, and beaning three students in the process. After this, he fought back, receiving what he calls "invaluable" assistance from coaches R. Iwase and M. Satomi.

"They spent the first few weeks just going over fundamentals with me. I had to accept that I didn't have the slightest clue what I was doing. Once I did that, they let me stop taking grounders."

After those disappointing first seven weeks, he persevered, salvaging what would otherwise have been a dismal season. By the end of third term, he was receiving almost no glazed-eye looks, and his V.C.I.**--which by his third start had ballooned to a laughable 16.77--was down to a much more respectable 4.39.

Many commentators point to his October 27th outing as the turning point of his season. On that day, in four hours of work, he was simply dominant, clearly explaining Halloween in English to 80 students by employing clips from Harry Potter and Nightmare Before Christmas with devastatingly comprehensible results. After successfully explaining the difference between "witch" and "wizard" through the use of pictures of Dumbledore and McGonagall, it was clear he had found his stride. He also gave up only two extra-base hits that day.

In preparation for next year's season opener against archrival Isahaya, Adam says he's been working extensively with catcher S. Kurokawa and bullpen coach D. Murahashi. While all three are mum on what they've been developing, insiders say the southpaw's sophomore season will feature more fun and effective warm-up games, fewer sloppy handouts, and a knuckleball.


*The official translator for Tsushima Press is AltaVista's Babelfish.

**Visible Comprehension Index. This is calculated as the number of cocked-head, glazed-eye faces per class per nine innings.