The Yen

Bad news everyone. Today was a sad, sad day in the teachers' room of Yoshiwara High School. The 51 yen...is gone. Yes, someone finally decided that they needed that 51 yen badly enough to take it. I can only hope for the sake of humanity and all that I believe in, that the person who took it was the original owner of the money. If not, may God have mercy on us all. The spot where it used to be just was not the same. Here is a picture. WARNING: This is not for the faint of heart.



Brings a tear to my eye.

So now I'm thinking that I might put another 51 yen back there. How much would that freak everybody out? What do you think? Should I do it?

Tonight I made a good dinner if I may say so myself. I got the idea for the recipe from a student. We were doing a class on writing recipes in English. Most of the students wrote things like miso soup and scrambled eggs. But one girl did Salmon and Broccoli Cream pasta. The recipe she wrote and the picture she drew made me immediately want to eat it. So tonight I made the recipe almost exactly except I added garlic (of course) and substituted scallops for the salmon. I cooked the pasta and the broccoli together. Then I sauteed mushrooms and garlic. I then added the scallops until they were cooked. I removed the scallops and added some alfredo sauce (I still need to learn how to make a cream sauce from scratch) and mixed in the pasta and broccoli. I put the scallops back on top and garnished with rosemary. Served with some salad on the side, it was great. Kelly recommended that I do lessons like this more often.

In other news, I'm very mad at the Texans. Kris Brown is Houston's new Brad Lidge.

Never a dull moment

We've had an interesting past few weeks. Last week was full of Halloween craziness of course. Halloween has become a bit of a big deal around my school so I felt obligated to decorate and do some cool stuff. It's funny because I never really paid much attention to Halloween from about age 12 until last year and now all of sudden it's become a big deal. Emily and I had some students make decorations and were surprised as always by how creative they can be. We had ghosts and mummies and jack-o-lanterns and bats and spiders hanging all over the LL room. We pinned up our green cobweb thingy and some other spooky things and had a pretty nicely decorated room. It's nice to have a room on campus that nobody else really uses because you can do whatever you want and most people never even know. I didn't get any good pictures of the room or the decorations so these will have to suffice.





As for the classes, we had Halloween parties in our International Course classes and our Elective English class. The activities varied. We did a mummy wrap (always a crowd pleaser,) pin the wart on the witch, scarecrow stuffing, and pumpkin basketball. For that we had some little soft pumpkin toys that the students had to shoot into trick-or-treat jack-o-lantern buckets full of candy. If they made it they got 2 or 3 pieces of candy, depending on which one they made it into. Not many made it, but everyone got 1 piece for trying. We also did an activity with two classes called Mummy Body Parts. We had boxes at the front with stuff inside. The students had to reach inside and decide what body part was in each box. We had tofu for brains, udon for intestines, canned asparagus for fingers, little quail eggs for eyes, yarn for hair, and jelly for snot. It was pretty gross and smelled pretty bad though, so we nixed it for the rest of the classes.

I did my jack-o-lantern carving again. Here is this year's creation. I also dressed up again this year. Please none of the "where's your costume?" comments.

Last weekend we went to Tokyo to watch a Rugby match between the New Zealand All Blacks and the Australia Wallabees. These are the national teams for their countries. It was a great time. We sat with some Kiwis so we were going for the All Blacks and they came away with a victory! We also got to see them do the famous Haka before the game. This is a tradtional Maori war chant that they do before every game to psych themselves up and intimidate their opponent. I guess it worked. Here's a picture from afar of them doing the Haka.



And since that doesn't help with understanding the Haka very much, here's a video so you can all see what it's like. Note: this is not from the game we saw.



As for the rules of Rugby, I can't help you much with that. I did a crash course a few days beforehand and got to where I had a basic idea of what was going on by the end of the game, but for the most part it all looked like chaos to me. I guess that's probably what football looks like to most people who aren't from America.

Yesterday I had a unique class. Our school had a visiting dance troupe come and perform for all of the first years. The principal thought it would be neat to have them sit in on a class. The interesting thing about these people is that the group consisted of Chinese adults and Australian children. So along with some supporters like directors, parents, brothers and sisters, and other random people, I had my class of 20 students plus about 8 Australian kids, 3 Australian adults, 16 Chinese young adults (20-23ish) and another 5-7 older Chinese adults. And we all took part in an English Oral Communication class. It was pretty fun yet very crazy. We were able to get everyone involved, even the Chinese girls who for the most part could not speak English. I gave stickers to them if they answered just like I do with my regular students and they were very appreciative. All in all, it was good experience. And one that I'd prefer not to repeat.

And for the crazy things I see every day section of this blog, here are a few pictures of some posters in the teachers' break room at school. I can't figure out why they're in there, but I don't really try.

This one is about safety on the streets.


As you can see, they advise you to wear your seatbelt, wear bright shiny things when you are out at night, and watch out for drunk drivers if you are an old lady crossing the road. Here are some close-ups of the faces.


His seatbelt clearly is very comfortable.


She definitely sees the shiny things and thinks they might be aliens.


Not only is he a red-faced drunk but apparently he was blowing bubbles in his car right before this photo was taken. I love the fact that his can says "BEER" in English.

And the next poster...


As you can see, these mikan are very hot. Of course they are! The kotatsu, and two heaters are running at the same time. What's wrong with these people? Not only are they running up their electric bill and harming the environment, but they're ruining some perfectly good mikan. Mikan don't taste good hot!


Poor little guy. I know how you feel.