Future Comic Book Authors

Just a short one tonight. I wanted to share some funny things some students turned in. Only in Japan do you take pictures of your students' work.

In our 2nd year English class, we are doing a lesson on Problems and Solutions. The 2nd year classes have been a bit boring so far this school year due to several things. The textbook is not very good for one thing. Also, we only have each class once every other week and since there are two ALTs, I actually only see each class about once a month. We used to see these students every week. Finally, there is something that happens when students become 2nd years. They seem to lose all of their excitement and energy. The classes with them become almost painful.

So I decided with this lesson to try to give them something creative to do. So instead of just talking about Problems and Solutions, we are having the students draw their own 3-frame comic strip about a problem situation and how it is solved. Some are pretty basic, but some are very creative. There were two from a class today that I thought were really funny. So I took a picture of them to share! Here you go...

The problem:

Notice it says "Lun over the person" at the top? It never gets old.

Tension mounts:


The Solution:


Glad to see everything worked out okay. I like how the one guy is breathing a sigh of relief. I think I would too.

And the next one...

The problem:

Cat is plump. That is definitely a problem.

What's he gonna do???

Oh, of course!

The solution:

Now that's one good-looking cat!


These made me happy. :)

Happy Memorial Day!

I was thinking last night about different American holidays that I've missed this year or had to work on. And when I thought about all of them, I realized that I almost feel more upset about working on Memorial Day than any of the others. I worked on Thanksgiving which was strange of course, but we did celebrate it with people a few days later, so it wasn't like I missed out on Thanksgiving altogether. I didn't work on Christmas and although I wasn't with my whole family or family-in-law I was still with Kelly and Caspian and we had a family Christmas. I worked on Labor Day but that wasn't a new thing. I've worked on Labor Day many times and used to have football practice on Labor Day every year. But Memorial Day was always one of my favorite holidays. I liked it because it kind of marks the beginning of summer. There would usually be only a little more school left or it would be completely out. I spent many a Memorial Day weekend at the lake swimming and jetskiing. It was a good way to get my first suntan (or burn) of the summer. The food is good, it's relaxing, it's warm, and altogether a great day/weekend. So, it was a little disappointing being at work today. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever worked on Memorial Day. Thinking about all of the people who will be spending the day grilling, watching baseball, swimming (unless it's raining of course) etc. makes me a little jealous. But, it's like I tell Kelly quite often when we think about things we're missing back home, we have a whole life worth of Memorial Days to enjoy, but right now we're enjoying Japan. I don't always say Memorial Days of course, I fill in that blank with whatever fits the situation. Kind of like an English class.

But I guess the main thing I realize with missing Memorial Day is that there is no clear marker for summer here. I will keep working all summer and am actually at the beginning of a pretty busy few weeks. So while the random weeks here and there with no classes that I spend just sitting at work are a nice break from the regular class schedule, nothing beats summer vacation. I'll have to get my summer fix in different ways I guess. We need to get to the beach before rainy season starts.

Well, I guess this post hasn't been very deserving of the exclamation point in the title. But I do mean it. To all of you lucky people out there with the day off today, Happy Memorial Day! Have a hot dog, take the jetski for a spin, and watch the Astros lose for me.

Our apartment

We don't make claims of liking our apartment that much. In fact, we're pretty open about the fact that we don't like it. It's old and not well cared for. Really the only positives are that it's cheap, close to Kelly's work and bigger than our other option, which is my school's apartment. Nevertheless, it's our place and as I was talking to my friend James on Skype the other day, he mentioned that he hasn't really seen many pictures of our apartment to the point where he knows what it looks like.

So, earlier this week I walked around taking pictures of the apartment with my phone and now I will share those with James and all of you. (Warning: I did not clean the apartment at all before taking these pictures.) So here you go. This is what we see every day...


What we see when we open our front door and walk into our apartment:


The front door from the inside. And our new shoe shelf. Makes the genkan much tidier.


Turn right after entering and you see the guest bedroom. Otherwise known as "the place where we throw all of the stuff that we don't have room for anywhere else and then try to clean and make livable when someone is staying over." Those clothes would usually be hanging outside to dry, but it was pouring down rain the day before so I hung them up inside.


Our wardrobe:


Turn left after entering and you see the bathroom area:


Behind that door:


The shower (across from the sink):


Turn right after entering (and after the guest bedroom) and there is the kitchen. That bag hanging is the recycle bag for プラ: Pura - everything plastic you could possibly imagine. We don't have a trash can for it yet.


The kitchen sink. And some newly purchased Dr Pepper.


Open the shoji doors on the left side of the kitchen and you have the living room:




The underside of the kotatsu table:


Turn left when you enter the living room and you see the bedroom:


Our futons (without sheets)


The view from our bedroom window. That's Mt. Fuji in the distance:


The view the other direction:


The door you saw in the kitchen leads to this, the balcony (equipped with washing machine and clothes line):




The view from the balcony:


Kelly's school, also from the balcony:


Go out the front door and you have the stairs. We're on the 3rd floor:


Fuji-san from the stairs. Getting harder to see every day as we near the summer:


The other direction:


Our local neighborhood rice field. Since I took this the field has been flooded because apparently that's how you grow rice. That's also how you attract thousands of frogs to croak all night long.


So there you go! I hope you enjoyed the picture tour. No more writing for tonight. Goodnight!

Rainy Sunday Ramblings

Pretty normal stuff lately here. Golden week was a few weeks ago. We didn't do much. Karaoke one night, the Hamamatsu Kite Festival one day and a lot of resting. Then school got started back up and it's been pretty routine the past few weeks. Mid-terms are next week, so it should be an easy week with a lot of grading. We're leading up to our school culture festival which is at the beginning of June. That is supposedly one of the busiest times of the year, but I'm looking forward to it. I have a feeling it'll remind a bit of preparing for a show although English club is not really doing anything all that big. But it'll be fun to be a part of a big event like that at school.

Other things going on: I recently got a membership at a gym. It's on my way home from work, so it's not hard to make myself go. My deal has always been that if it's convenient for me to get to the gym, then I'll go. But if I go home first or have to go past my home to get to the gym, I won't go very much. But I've been going there after work very consistently and it's making me feel a lot healthier. I run everyday and lift weights. Everything is pretty much the same as a gym in the states other than the fact that all the weights are in kilograms instead of pounds. But I know that 1kg = 2.2 lbs, so I can get a pretty good idea of how much to lift.

Here's an interesting development I've been noticing at work. A few weeks ago I noticed 51 yen sitting in the corner of the teacher's kitchen on the ground. I didn't pick it up because I didn't really have a reason to, so I just left it there and went on my way. Then, last week I noticed this same 51 yen had been picked up and put on a table by the door to the kitchen. So someone took the trouble to bend down and pick up this 50 yen coin and 1 yen coin and rather than keeping it, they put it on that table. What's funny to me is that in America, if 50 cents was laying on the ground, it probably would not last a day. And I don't really think there's anything wrong with that. If I was in America, I probably would have picked it up the first time I saw it and kept it. Maybe not the 1 yen (or penny - in America's case.) But here it was just a natural thing to leave it there. What else is funny is that because people use so many coins here, it's likely that whoever it belonged to in the first place probably never even noticed it was missing. Yet, someone put it on that table as if the person would see it and say, "There's my 51 yen! I wondered what had happened to it." I'm interested to see how long it sits there. At what point do I take it? Will I take it? Will anybody take it or will it still be sitting there a year from now? I'll keep you posted on the happenings of that 51 yen.

Finally, I have recently discovered that after all of these years of saying I hate tuna fish sandwiches, it turns out they're not so bad. I actually bought cans of tuna at the grocery store a few weeks ago and have made a few sandwiches. I'm not sure why I thought they were so bad before. Maybe it was just the smell. Or maybe I really didn't like them and my taste buds have just matured. Makes me wonder what else I might like now that I didn't used to like. Meatloaf? Surely not. But I guess I owe it to myself to try it again someday. We'll see.

I'll be getting up at 4:30 Monday morning to watch the Rockets game. Hopefully if they lose it won't ruin my Monday. But I'll still be proud of what they've accomplished. I have a good feeling about it, though. Hopefully. Go Rockets!

Baseball, Broadway, and Blood

Sorry for not writing much lately. Busy times.

The highlights: New school year started this month. This just in: I love new students! They are so happy and energetic and eager to please. They have been the highlight of the last month by far. I can't wait to get to know them better.

We went to a baseball game in Tokyo last weekend. We saw the Yomiuri Giants (the Yankees of Japan) against the Chunichi Dragons (Tom Selleck's team from "Mr. Baseball".) It was quite an experience. When it all boiled down to it the game itself was the same. I admit I had a much harder time paying attention to the game than usual. I think this was for several reasons:

a) There were many new things going on around us. The surroundings were just so different from what I'm used to. For example, you won't find many cheerleaders at American baseball games, but the Giants definitely had cheerleaders. Very interesting.

b) Each team had an official cheering section. The Giants section was bigger because they were the home team, but the Dragons also had a section in the left field bleachers and they meant business. As in all Japanese baseball games, each player had their own cheer so the cheering, drums, and chanting went on constantly. Very entertaining.

c) I didn't know many of the players at all other than the few who had recently played in the MLB. (Edgardo Alfonso being one for those of you who follow baseball.)

d) All of the loud speaker announcements were in Japanese. I never realized how important the PA guy was to keeping the crowd in the game until I couldn't understand him. I can't even honestly remember if there was one actually.

We were Giants fans that night because why not. So anyway, here is how the game went. An early solo homerun by the Giants (Alex Ramirez, obviously not Japanese.) The Giants added a run later to make it 2-0. It stayed 2-0 for quite a while until the Dragons got on the board with a solo homer around the 5th or 6th. Then they tied it up in the 8th. In the top of the 9th the Dragons took the lead on a 2-run blast. It was not looking good for the Giants. But I have seen too many comebacks in my day (being an Astros fan) to lose hope. Bottom of the 9th: First batter singles. Second batter draws a walk. Third batter: 3 run walk-off homerun, game over, Giants win 5-4. In typical Kory form, I gave high fives to the couple sitting behind me.

We went and saw West Side Story in Gotemba the next day. It was a pretty good performance. It was all in Japanese but I know the songs well enough that I could keep up. It was interesting to hear Bernstein and Sondheim done in Japanese. Jerome Robbins' language is universal though, so the dancing was quite good.

And for a completely anticlimactic ending to this blog, we had medical checks at school today. I did good in my vision test where you have to say what direction the thingy is pointing. Right, left, up, or down. Of course the people giving the test speak only Japanese so I had to say migi, hidari, ue, and shita. No problem. I then had some things attached to my ankles, wrists, and chest to measure something. Not really sure but I did as I was told. Blood pressure followed that and then the final step, the dreaded blood sample. They took three tubes of blood. The good part is that they only inserted the needle once which is the worst part. I have no problem with shots, but I hate having blood samples taken. I guess it's just bad memories from when I was on Acutaine and I had the most painful blood samples every six weeks. If only ProActive had been invented already. So hopefully it looks good and I don't have to do it again.

We are now at the beginning of Golden Week. We had a holiday on Wednesday for Showa Day but then had to work the last two days. But now we get the weekend and the next 3 days after that off. So it's a 5 day weekend. No big plans other than possibly going to a kite festival in Hamamatsu. It's going to be nice to rest though.

Here are some pictures from the baseball game. No zoom because I took them with my phone so...yeah.

The game in progress


The outfield


The 7th inning stretch cheerleaders


The Giants cheering section

Mount Fuji Climb

Check out the video Kelly made of our Mt. Fuji climb at http://www.vimeo.com/4129654 !

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!