From Monday to Thursday life was pretty normal. It was nice to be teaching more lessons again this week because all the mid term tests are over and done with. I taught mainly lessons about Halloween this week which was quite fun. The best lesson being when one of the students who constantly sleeps and looks near to death most days, smiled and joked with me about a picture of a ghost he was drawing. Honestly I cant explain how great this made me feel. He literally spends every lesson with his head on the desk sleeping, and sometimes he gets up to go to the toilet. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t understand English, I know he does. Apparently there are issues at home for him, which explains his behavior. But for this one lesson he was alert, awake and smiling! Amazing! apart from school, I had the usual tennis and adult English class.
on Monday i went to ozeki elementary school again to participate in an International day. However it was a bit lame! it only lasted 2 hours and involved few activities and english. but it was nice to see Rokina and Michael who are grown up english teachers actually living in Japan. i also love spending time with the elementary school kids as they are much more fun and less inhibited to try speaking english and make mistakes. they are also incredibly cute!
Friday was another day off due to some random celebration or something. When I asked Japanese people why we had a day off, they knew as much as I did – not that im complaining about a day off! No way! So on Friday morning I drove to Ono to meet becca and 6 people from my tennis club. We were off on a trip to the Gifu border to see the changing color of the leaves. This event is celebrated by many in Japan and is talked about a lot too. This is something I really like about Japan. They take a real interest in the seasons and color in general. They also have the British obsession of talking about the weather. Many times do I hear ‘ いや天気ですね” or “厚いですよ” or “寒いですね”. This was my first opportunity to write a little Japanese! I have started learning kanji this week (the third of the three writing systems- but also the very hard one!)
So becca and I met with the Japanese people in a supermarket car park. We then all marched into the shop to find somewhere to sit. There was no restaurant and so we made a makeshift seating area from a few chairs we arranged. This was necessary so that nagata-san could begin his speeches and opening ceremony. Every event in Japan has to have a ceremony of sorts. It is like obligatory! It really is crazy! Nagata –san had spent weeks preparing this trip. He had made 4 pages of speech in English with Japanese translation for the group members who could not understand English so well. He had drawn maps, listed famous products from the area we were going to, and gave a rundown of the history of the area! I know this sounds very sweet of him and I realize he didn’t need to spend this amount of time and effort doing so, but this kind of thing can waste so much time here. I have found it is sometimes just a way for people to show off a little too… any ways…after the speeches were all over we got into 2 cars and drove off through the mountains (each car had yellow ribbon on it- because we didn’t want to lose anyone in this huge procession!!). We drove to kazaryu lake and power plant which is about 30mins british time (50 mins Japanese time) from Ono. It was a beautiful day and this manmade lake sitting in between green mountains did look lovely. We had a big photo shoot and then got back in the car to go to a restaurant. After my last experiences of eating out with Nagata-san I was rather looking forward to this…. However we ended up in this road-side café which was incredibly dirty and smoky! I was very surprised. The food was average too! Not the experience I was expecting! And that was it!! That was the whole ‘watching the leaves day’!! We drove back to Ono after lunch! So all these weeks of planning speeches and maps and ceremonies had been to drive to a lake, spend 15mins looking at the lake and the autumnal leaves on the mountains and then drive back!!! Becca and I found this hilarious. It was nice to spend time with these people though and so I wasn’t really bothered by uneventfulness!
The following evening and few days however were much more exciting…in fact they were AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!
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