Blogs from Wakayama, Japan, Asia - page 6

March 23-April 7... read more

Japanese Vocabulary kyuushoku・給食: School lunch kujira・鯨: Whale tabe-chatta!・食べちゃった: oops! I regretfully ate it! 食べちゃった！ Well, not Willy, but a relative of his, the minke whale. It was a cultural experience!!! I had to! On Wednesday, January 30th, the kyuushoku menu revealed an interesting entree, underlined with squiggly lines...くじらたつたあげ, kujira tatsuta-age....in other words, fried whale. Ick. Before coming to Wakayama even, I had read that they were known for whale watching...but apparently there is a bit more than just whale watching going on! I had heard the rumors from other JETs that sometimes kujira appeared on the lunch menu, and finally after six months of anticipation, my time had come...or rather, the whales time had come. I had decided....to eat, or not to eat? So after an intense bout of internal struggle, I a... read more

Japanese Vocabulary chi-chai: slang for little or tiny yaki-niku: literally grilled beef, but it’s a dinner where everyone sits around a grill and grills their own meat and veggies and dips them in a sauce. It usually includes onions, cabbage, rice and beef. nama biiru: literally raw beer, but refers to any draft beer on tap usually (like asahi, Sapporo, and kirin) dai saizu: large size For our most recent family dinner we made scarves with Tanabe Sensei! She lives at the top of a hill in Momoyama and has a little cabin for scarf making classes. I guess it’s a special technique called saori-ori using a Japanese loom. It’s really really easy to do though and Tanabe Sensei had a TON of different yarns to choose from. It took about 2 hours and you pay ... read more

I caved. I decided to go home for Christmas, but only for a very brief short week. Even though I didn’t really do all that much, like go out and visit people places, it was nice just to be hanging around the house sometimes. This was the first Christmas since bachan had her stroke and the first Christmas even only having Grandma over to Christmas Eve brunch, so the holidays this year felt different not only because I had been living in a different place, but also because it felt like I had returned to a different place. But all in all, it was a happy holiday. California was sunny and clear, the food was abundant and I got to see all of my family. Santa came just like every year and Jichan was, like every ... read more

Here are pics of my other Shogakko! Nate Shogakko is my biggest elementary school and probably has around 280 students...this is where all the bad kids are it seems like...but it's probably just because it's the biggest school and so the class sizes range from 22 students to 38 students per class (the ichinensei/first grader class...chaos everytime...). I go to Nate every Friday and teach around 4 classes, including the special education class. It's funny because sometimes there's 4 kids in the class, but sometimes there's up to 8 kids...they are from all grades and have varying degrees of learning and mental disabilities. It's always fun though because one boy always repeats every word that I say, one boy has ADHD or something and is always trying to take things from other people's desks, one climbs ... read more