Back to Normalcy

Lots of things going on lately. We are nearing the end of Sakura season. For those that don't know, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) bloom every year in Japan around the end of March/beginning of April. They are very beautiful and bloom almost all at once, causing quite a stir in Japan. They are only in bloom for about a week or two and then very quickly and suddenly the petals all start to fall off until they are all gone. It's a time that a lot of people here wait for all year. People go to parks with friends, sit under the Sakura and have picnics, etc. This is called hanami (looking at flowers) and is extremely popular. We did our own hanami last weekend with some friends at Iwamoto Yama Koen. There were cherry blossoms everywhere and a lot of people and it was a very nice day. We've been lucky because after the weeks and weeks of rain we had, it has been very nice since the cherry blossoms started blooming. We took some pictures at the park which will be on Flickr soon, but until then here are some I took with my phone to tide you over.







Here some petals fell on my leg while I was sitting. I thought it was kind of a peaceful moment.


The group getting ready to leave. It started raining a bit while we waited for the bus.


Now the petals are falling and that's very pretty also. It makes the ground under the trees look pink. And when they are falling sometimes it looks like snow. It's very nice. On my way home today I saw a little girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old sweeping up the petals under a tree. At first I wondered why she was doing it, and then I noticed that she had a little bag that she was putting them in. She wanted to take some home which I thought was very sweet.

Things were extremely slow at work the past few weeks until this week. In Japan, many teachers get transferred to different schools at the end of the school year, so my school had about 8 teachers leave (which from what I hear is not that many.) We had a farewell ceremony at school last Monday to see them off, so all of the students had to come up to school even though it was the middle of their official spring vacation. Then that night we had a farewell party complete with the leaving teachers being picked up and thrown in the air by all of the male teachers. It was pretty funny.

We went to my school's brass band concert a couple of weeks ago. It was really good! I had only ever heard them play the school song and the Japanese National Anthem, so when they played things ranging from Mozart to Disney to Gershwin to J-Pop, I was very impressed. These kids work hard and work long hours and it shows. I'll definitely go again whenever they have another concert. It's good to see the students in a different light.

The new school year started this week and the new ichi-nensei (first-year students) came on Tuesday for the first time. We had a welcome ceremony for them and then today we had a ceremony where the new ichi-nensei were paraded in front of the ni-nensei and san-nensei and then all of the students had to take an oath of friendship and respect. Ceremonies are funny here. Today was also club introduction day where the new students got to see all of the different sports teams and clubs and then walk around and see the clubs in action. We had a good number of students come to English club. We were doing an Easter day, so they got to decorate and eat Easter cookies and dye Easter eggs. Hopefully we'll get some new students. Right now we have like 12 and two of them are leaving in July to go to America and Canada to study abroad for a year. So we could use some more.

Other than that, I have my first class of the new school year tomorrow. It's going to be nice to get classes going again and get back to normalcy. This last month with no classes was pretty boring which made the days go by slowly. But now I've got new students, new classes, new teachers, and I'm ready to get going.

Two more pictures:

The Sakura outside my school. A bunch got cut down to build a handball court (which coincidentally got its first use the week that the cherry blossoms started blooming) but these were left.



I thought this was so funny I had to take a picture of it while riding my bike. Don't worry this guy was riding so slow I didn't have to ride fast to keep up, so I was being safe. I just think it's funny how small his bike is. He's a grown man and this is like a little kid's bike. Maybe he hijacked some little kid for their bike.


That's all for now. Happy Easter!