For the past few years, during spring break, I've also done something with a group of my students. Past activities include a trip to the Higashiyama Zoo and a trip to the Nagoya Aquarium.
This year, due to the unusual cold weather in late March, we decided to go bowling. Most of the kids had only been bowling once or twice before, so I think it was a good experience for them.
For me, I just enjoyed watching them. Check out this short clip of my youngest student named Ha-kun throw a ball as big as he is.
Afterwards, we all went to eat McDonald's hamburgers and fries. It wasn't exactly an educational day, but it when else will I have the chance to throw rocks with a bunch of ten year old nihilists?
A couple weeks ago I went to see Damo Suzuki's Network play in Nagoya. Damo is an ex-member of the '70s German prog-rock juggernaut CAN. He's now on what he calls the Never Ending World Tour.
Damo travels alone to cities all over the world, and he has a revolving cast of musicians improvise behind him. In each city, he assembles a band of local musicians. Thus, every night is new and slightly or maybe even extremely different.
His show in Nagoya consisted of Hiroshi Higashi (Synthesizer), Makoto Kawabata (Guitar), Atsushi Tsuyama (Bass) all members of the Acid Mothers Temple. As well as local Zen musician Kei (Guitar) with pal Ryoko Ono (Sax), and Taiqui (Drums).
I've been messing around with YouTube a lot recently, so I decided to post this short clip from the show.
We stayed in a Japanese style, onsen hotel called Takemine, located on the top of the ski resort. The only way to get there was to take a snow-cat from the parking lot or ski in. After we arrived, everyone changed into the comfortable yukatta's provided for us, and we went to eat dinner in the dining hall.
The hotel served Japanese carp in a variety of different ways. I'd never eaten carp before, and I was shocked at how good it was.
After dinner, we returned to our room for a three-dimensional sound experiment. We played the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka album using two iPods, each connected to an iFusion speaker setup, and two iBooks, each connected to an external speaker set-up. For one night, we had the best stereo on the planet!
The next day we woke up, put our iPods in our pockets, walked out into a blizzard, and went cross-country skiing across a 3km cat track. At the end of the cat track, we strapped on a pair of snowshoes and went trooping through the woods like the March of the Rotten Vegetables.
Eventually, we decided to dig a snow cave. We managed to hollow out a deep snowdrift that provided us shelter for lunch. After eating, we went back outside and noticed all our tracks were snowed over. It took us some time to find our way back to the cat track, but we did it.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off in front of a mirror to have some fun with our cameras.
Pure silliness. Believe it or not, that was the music I was listening to at the time.
All jokes aside, that night I ate one of the best meals of my life; carp sashimi, carp in a kind of sweet miso soup, nabe, tsukemono, fish paste served with a shiso leaf, and a few bottles of atsukan.
Our last day, we woke up to beautiful sunshine and went snowboarding all morning before catching a 3pm snow-cat back down the mountain.
At the end, I concluded that any time Jason, Mark, and I get together hilarity ensues.
It was a bittersweet occasion. I taught these students for four years starting when they were 5th grade at elementary school. I have many fond memories with them; for example, these students wrote letters to my uncle when he was sick, and in return as thank you notes, they received baby pictures of me from my father.
I was very proud to watch them walk and receive their diplomas, but the event also marked the end of my tenure at this school. From April, the town of Jushiyama will merge with a neighboring city, so my contract with the local BOE will be lost.
I enjoyed myself here immensely, but it's time to start moving on...
Less than 24 hours after returning from Hokkaido & Aomori, the mental and physical top of the world, I've descended into one of Dante's icy hells.
My first night back in town I was driving in the rain to a friend's house for dinner. On the way, a Toyota Crown stopped suddenly in front of me; I hit the brakes, and skid into it.
The driver jumped out of the bruised car, stormed up to my door, and proceeded to yell at me in incomprehensible Japanese as I asked him if everybody was all right. The only bright side of the situation was the shock on his face when he realized I was a foreigner; then he started yelling again.
To complicate matters worse, there's been a miscommunication with my insurance company. Evidentially, they still have me insured for a car I threw away over eight months ago. Because of this conundrum, they're telling me I can't use my insurance policy.
Now, I have an irate Japanese redneck pretending he hurt his hip in the accident calling me several times a day demanding he get compensated for his car and hospital bills and a Japanese auto insurance company who I've been paying money to for three years telling me they're not gonna cover me.
If that's not enough, I had to teach twenty-eight English lessons last week as my penance for taking time off to go to Hokkaido and Aomori.
Dear God... have mercy on a poor soul that just got back from vacation and looked down for a split second to turn the Stones up on his car stereo.
I meant to get this post up about my snowboarding trip to Hokkaido and Aomori much sooner, but last week was really busy.
Powdertopia is an annual snowboard/ski trip organized by JET teachers. This year my friend Tyler organized everything and invited me to come along. It was an offer I could not refuse.
I took a slow ferry up to Hokkaido and met everyone at the lodge. We had four tremendous days in Hirafu Village. Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted some of the best pictures of the trip, but some managed to survive.
The second part of Powdertopia took place in Aomori Prefecture at Mt. Hakkoda. Our group members changed around a little bit, but it was just a continuation of the same kind of fun. We had three days on Mt. Hakkoda and stayed in a great lodge called Sansou.
Saturday was one of those days when everything just worked out perfectly. My buddy Ethan and his friend Takeshi came to my house just before 10am. We had a cup of coffee and then drove down to Seibu Elementary School for a mochi festival.
I used to work in Seibu Elementary School last year, but it'd been a while since I was there. The kids were happy to see us and we got pound rice into malleable putty… then eat it.
On our way back to my house, we stopped off at my friend Fumio's place to pick up a small gas range stove. He served us a nice ramen lunch; we grabbed the stove and were on our way.
Next, we stopped at the grocery store to pick up some fixin's for a Japanese Nabe. We bumped into my elder purple haired neighbor named Kato-san who walked us through the store and instructed us on the best ingredients to buy. She even advised us not to buy certain veggies because she had them growing in her garden patch next to my house.
After buying some beer, we got back to my house and Kato-san was waiting for us. She took us into her garden and started unearthing a bunch of daikon, carrots, & green onions.
That night a few more friends showed up and we cooked a tasty vegetable soup flavored with Korean kimchi, drank a bottle of Imo-shochu, listened to records, played cards, & tried to watch Blade Runner before passing out.
Sunday, my buddy Jason showed up and we went into Nagoya for a night of food and fun. We had dinner at a dirty yakitori-ya named Kadoya where my other friend Toku ordered every part of the chicken most Americans never eat. Liver, ligaments, intestines… hell, he even ordered suzume which is a small Japanese sparrow served on a skewer with it’s head still attached.
Last, but not least, we saw an insane Japanese band called Turtle Island. Their name sounds like some relaxing beach resort, but their music was quite the opposite. It was part jam part punk part p-funk and all aggressive! The band consisted of about 14 members (mostly drummers) while the crowd was full of black leather jackets, mohawks, and crowd surfers.
It's a new concept to me, so I'm not exactly sure how it's gonna work, but supposedly anyone that has an RSS reader can subscribe to this photo stream and view my pictures whenever I update them.
For Mac users, my photos should appear in your iPhoto Library.
For Windows users, an RSS reader is required. Bloglines seems to be a quick and easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds.
If anyone gets this working or has some problems with it, please let me hear from you. Like I said, this is new to me, but it's got great potential for sharing photos with family and friends.
I recently saw a couple really interesting documentaries that I believe are worth checking out.
The first, Why We Fight, came to my attention after seeing it mentioned on the Daily Show. The Internet Movie Database describes it as so:
In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961 he said: "In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Director Eugene Jarecki's documentary, Why We Fight, examines America's relationship with the privatized military corporations of today and how they influence American foreign and domestic policy. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival Why We Fight includes interviews with John McCain, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, and Gore Vidal.
The second, The Future of Food, was recommended by my friend Daniel in a very funny email message. Evidently, he made contact with the writer/director Deborah Koons Garcia who was once married to Jerry Garcia.
The IMDB describes this one as:
An in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled grocery store shelves for the past decade.
Both these movies will incite debate into the current state of affairs inside the USA and hopefully get people thinking.
