Finally, all is not lost when it comes to wacky Japanese TV. I found this weird Gladiators-esque show while eating dinner today - it involves people of different ages and professions trying to complete an obstacle course which looks ridiculously difficult, but being Japanese involves dramatic pauses in between breaks, action replay for falls, and showing people's reactions to what is being shown on TV... awesome!
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
sushi train!
I don't know who to blame it on, but while I'm here, I've felt the urge to eat excessive amounts of sushi - I'm not too sure if it's just the fact that i'm in Japan, so it seems like the thing to do, or if it's because I've been telling my students that it's my favourite food, and so to not eat it would be a disservice to them - It's hard to explain to kids who can't speak English that good (and want to learn other stuff good too) that I like a variety of foods, and my favourite colour depends on what day you ask me, and that I don't actually like sport that much, but feel the need to pick one because I'm asked all the time, which is why I say "tennis"... So this pressure makes me feel obliged to like sushi more and contemplate actually playing tennis soon.
But anyways, I'm really just looking for any excuse to try new foods, or eat more sushi, so I was uber excited to find a sushi train restaurant within biking distance of my place. I think one of the cool things I've found out about Japan is that I have little to no knowledge of what makes a good Japanese food here, so I've found I've hardly been disappointed with any food adventures. It may be because I have little to no knowledge of what constitutes a good restaurant or good Japanese food here in Japan, so I can't be disappointed.
So surprisingly, the sushi restaurant we visited the other day was awesome - Me & Kiri had a day off from school so decided to trek to our beloved sushi place. I'm a huge fan since they have fairly fancypants sushi at ridiculously cheap prices - only ¥105 per plate for 2 pieces of sushi, and with types of sushi like sweet prawn, raw octopus, squid, pan-fried salmon, scallop carpaccio, I can't find much to complain about.
I figured trying some of this fancy sushi I've never tried before would fulfil my Japanese quotient of the day.
The best part of the restaurant is that it's meant to be a family-friendly restuarant, so in between the wasabi-flavoured scallop and sea urchin, there's plates of takoyaki, hello kitty juice boxes, and hamburger sushi for kids as well!
The sushi place, being a chain, is completely automated - apparntly they use machines to prepare the rice and cut the fish for the sushi as well, but I so can't taste the difference so I'm not too fussed. Along with the fast-food-like sushi comes with the automated intercom, so you if there's any type of sushi you want to order, you can just use the intercom to request specific food from the people in the back...
And they put it on a special plate for you on the conveyer belt! This one's what we ordered from our table number 24...
10 plates later, and completely full from sushi, but totally worth it.
Finishing's also pretty cool, since you press the special button to summon a waiter to count how many plates you ate and to give you your bill - only ¥1050 all up! I love Japanese culture...
Monday, September 17, 2007
tyhoon!
Aaah, what a wonderful day to have a day of sports in Motosu.
But despite the crappy weather, the school still attempted to continue with the sports festival, even during the torrential downpour.
Like everything else Japanese, it started with an opening ceremony and address by the principal, which in turn, resulted in approximately 10 minutes of bowing at random people as they got on and off the stage, before the seriously sports began.
I seriously feel that if sports days and stuff were like this in Australia, I may have actually liked sport. Rather than just do lots of running and cross country and obligatory sprints that everyone had to do, there was skipping rope, related games, a three-legged-race like thing, only involving the whole class in a row, and year level-specific sports. My favourite sport was the 1st years, who played a game called "tyhoon".
Sigh. If only sports were like this in Australia. But the sports day was eventually cancelled after lunch, when they realised it was probably a hazard to have people running on the school ground while a couple people's sole job was to shovel dirt on puddles to help avoid slippage uring the relay. Sadly, they decided this after everyone did their relay, which unfortunately, included me running on the teacher's team. I would have liked to brag here about how I beat the arses of 12 and 13 year old boys and girls, but sadly, I didn't...
But despite the crappy weather, the school still attempted to continue with the sports festival, even during the torrential downpour.
Like everything else Japanese, it started with an opening ceremony and address by the principal, which in turn, resulted in approximately 10 minutes of bowing at random people as they got on and off the stage, before the seriously sports began.
I seriously feel that if sports days and stuff were like this in Australia, I may have actually liked sport. Rather than just do lots of running and cross country and obligatory sprints that everyone had to do, there was skipping rope, related games, a three-legged-race like thing, only involving the whole class in a row, and year level-specific sports. My favourite sport was the 1st years, who played a game called "tyhoon".
Sigh. If only sports were like this in Australia. But the sports day was eventually cancelled after lunch, when they realised it was probably a hazard to have people running on the school ground while a couple people's sole job was to shovel dirt on puddles to help avoid slippage uring the relay. Sadly, they decided this after everyone did their relay, which unfortunately, included me running on the teacher's team. I would have liked to brag here about how I beat the arses of 12 and 13 year old boys and girls, but sadly, I didn't...
Friday, September 07, 2007
One week of kanchouing down, only 47 more weeks to go!
So, this is my first week of teaching done! Huzzah! I made it out alive, despite not having any clue about what I’m supposed to do or what if I’m doing it right either, but I’m getting used to resigning all control I have over my day to people at schools. On Tuesday, at around 5th period, everyone in the staffroom gets up and collectively go outside, along with the rest of the students putting on their outside shoes and moving to the oval. It took my a while of wondering around outside trying to talk to students to realise they were practising for their sports festival Saturday week.
But so far, I’ve only “taught” 3 different classes – so most of which just involves me doing a self-introduction about where I’m from and my hobbies, and answering questions have about me. I was freaking out about my lack of preparation (and blogging instead) but after my first class, it didn’t really matter much – there’s not much I have to study or do when I just have to talk about my likes and dislikes (and if anyone Japanese asks, my hobbies are swimming and tennis – I don’t want to shatter their image of sporty Australians and stuff) Today I got into the real meat of the teaching, where I just read out a story aloud from a book as students copied what I said. Fun!
Thursday was also my first day spent at a pre-school. I find it a little strange that I’m trying to teach English to kids when the oldest is like 4 years old, so the teaching by myself thing (and not knowing what the hell I’m supposed to be teaching) was a little meh, but I spent 2 hours beforehand playing with the kids, which was pretty awesome. Sure, I was sweating ridiculously from the bike ride there, and after all the kids insisted on getting piggybacks, but it was pretty fun. I love how like the simplest activity seems amazing from the eyes of a 4 year old, like trying to play catch (I forgot that it takes ages for kids to throw and catch a ball) or just running and chasing people and stuff. It was a little less fun when they decided to play “Let’s all throw balls at the English teacher” and I was bombarded by like 8 or 9 balls at a time, but a little more fun than the kanchouing that I had been prepared for.
I had no idea that this constituted a game, but all the primary school kids and elementary school kids love kanchou, which main involves clasping your hands together so only your two index fingers are sticking up – kinda like a gun. Kids then precede to play this game by seeing how far they can stick up their index fingers up an unsuspecting victim’s arse. Despite initial thoughts of being an extremely isolated activity, apparently sometimes there’s a scoring system involved (double points if you can stick it up until your middle finger joint, or up to the knuckle) and apparently at school, some teachers routinely get into kanchou fights with kids. Meh, chalk it up to a culture difference I guess. Maybe it’s just me - Maybe I find it hard to understand since I’m too old, or like, you know, normal.
But so far, I’ve only “taught” 3 different classes – so most of which just involves me doing a self-introduction about where I’m from and my hobbies, and answering questions have about me. I was freaking out about my lack of preparation (and blogging instead) but after my first class, it didn’t really matter much – there’s not much I have to study or do when I just have to talk about my likes and dislikes (and if anyone Japanese asks, my hobbies are swimming and tennis – I don’t want to shatter their image of sporty Australians and stuff) Today I got into the real meat of the teaching, where I just read out a story aloud from a book as students copied what I said. Fun!
Thursday was also my first day spent at a pre-school. I find it a little strange that I’m trying to teach English to kids when the oldest is like 4 years old, so the teaching by myself thing (and not knowing what the hell I’m supposed to be teaching) was a little meh, but I spent 2 hours beforehand playing with the kids, which was pretty awesome. Sure, I was sweating ridiculously from the bike ride there, and after all the kids insisted on getting piggybacks, but it was pretty fun. I love how like the simplest activity seems amazing from the eyes of a 4 year old, like trying to play catch (I forgot that it takes ages for kids to throw and catch a ball) or just running and chasing people and stuff. It was a little less fun when they decided to play “Let’s all throw balls at the English teacher” and I was bombarded by like 8 or 9 balls at a time, but a little more fun than the kanchouing that I had been prepared for.
I had no idea that this constituted a game, but all the primary school kids and elementary school kids love kanchou, which main involves clasping your hands together so only your two index fingers are sticking up – kinda like a gun. Kids then precede to play this game by seeing how far they can stick up their index fingers up an unsuspecting victim’s arse. Despite initial thoughts of being an extremely isolated activity, apparently sometimes there’s a scoring system involved (double points if you can stick it up until your middle finger joint, or up to the knuckle) and apparently at school, some teachers routinely get into kanchou fights with kids. Meh, chalk it up to a culture difference I guess. Maybe it’s just me - Maybe I find it hard to understand since I’m too old, or like, you know, normal.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
quiz time!
Is this:
a) A piece of sports equipment for some random and inexplicably wacky Japanese Sport,
b) A gogo gadget pole used to grab and support things that are out of a vertically-challenged Japanese person’s reach, or
c) A suspicious person-handling pole, used to immobilize suspicious people (and police officers looking suspicious for role-playing purposes) by surrounding the person and using the poles to pin them at the waist, thereby also making the pole handlers out of suspicious knife-slashing range?
a) A piece of sports equipment for some random and inexplicably wacky Japanese Sport,
b) A gogo gadget pole used to grab and support things that are out of a vertically-challenged Japanese person’s reach, or
c) A suspicious person-handling pole, used to immobilize suspicious people (and police officers looking suspicious for role-playing purposes) by surrounding the person and using the poles to pin them at the waist, thereby also making the pole handlers out of suspicious knife-slashing range?
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
japanese quotient
While I was sipping on my Frappucino and checking my emails in Starbucks a while ago, I decided that I should try to do at least one thing everyday that's Japanese that isn't usually found in Australia – my Japan quotient. It started off really well, with bubblooning, and going to a Japanese festival, and eating tofu and stuff, but kinda deteriorated to just ordering a lemon green tea or green tea frappucino in Starbucks. I think one day I found myself just eating Pizza Pringles, which techinically, filled my Japanese quotient since I don't think you can find them in Australia, so to me they were something I associated with Japan and thus adequately Japanese.
Anyway, with my Japan quotient in mind, I decided to see Noh performance in the city – which, after watching it, should be my share of Japanese culture for at least the next week – It's this ye-olde Japanese theatre that's performed outdoors, and with the words sung in a really slow way. It's supposed to be one of the official, national forms of drama in Japan, so decided to check it out.
It was pretty cool… for the first 15 minutes. That's pretty much all the time you need to see what's going on, appreciate it, and then want to move on. Fortunately I showed up late so I apparently missed all the boring bits. Well, "boring" is all relative I guess, but apparently the bit I saw was the better part.
After being culturally enriched the adequate amount that day, we headed off to soak in Japanese culture at this place called Sekky's – it was the traditional Japanese place that took the shape of a retro 50's diner, so I ordered a chilli cheeseburger with fries. That also counts as Japanese right? I mean, how many other retro 50's American diners run by Japanese people are there in Australia? Plus I've never seen a chilli cheeseburger in Australia, so come on, that must be Japanese…
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