Otsukare sama des

This just in: I have friends. Correction: I have friends here. It turns out that there is another ALT in Kawasaki. Well, to make the story short in favour of more interesting details, she invited me to join her and some other ALTs to a their semi-regular carpool to a fitness gym in Sendai. Never before have I had a group of friends whose main activity is exercise, but I guess now I do. We have also gone to Big Boy(I ordered a bun-less burger covered in shredded unknown and accompanied by dipping sauce, rice, and egg drop soup with seaweed) and the Sendai Jazz festival, after which we went to my first Japanese Karaoke experience. Now, Japanese Karaoke is unique in that unlike most places where the activity is essentially one person singling in front of a group of strangers, Japanese Karaoke parlours have individual rooms for small parties. I sang Country Roads, Back in Black, and tried to sing a famous Japanese song whose lyrics I didn’t know. I can read phonetic Japanese, but not fast enough. It was a blast.





I may have thought I started work before, but I was wrong. This week, I had five days of 8-5 with few open periods. Add to that the nightly preparations, and I have to say I had less free time than previously. My first few lessons were at Tomioka Middle School and were complete busts. So bad that I believe my coteacher started to wonder why I had been hired. The first day, I consulted my lesson plan and mistakenly prepared 60 minutes worth of material for each class. Two minutes before class, my coteacher “reminded” me that I would be doing a 20 minute warm-up. In a mild-to-moderate panic, I chose the most interesting game from my lesson. To my dismay, though, the game required a bit of drilling for the students to be able to participate confidently. As such, I was met by nothing but blank stares and verge-clinging mortification.

I also had some trouble with the Kindergarden. You might think that playing around with Kindergardeners would be easy, but add my lack of exposure to children for the past few years to our language barrier, and you can imagine the bumps I encountered. Nonetheless, “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes” and “The Hokey Pokey” have been wildly popular. If you have any other suggestion for a game that include basic vocabulary with silly movements, please leave a comment.

I know this post is dragging, but I can’t help but share one of my favourite moments of the week: the students wrote English poems which were as charmingly error-ridden as they were strangely poignant. Here are some examples:

Moon
every night
beautifuling, quietly, sading
that’s a very feautiful
Wonderful

Sky
Very blue
this is beautiful
I have looked sky
always







I am sitting here at my desk in the teachers’ room on Friday afternoon. I have just finished a Nashi—a fruit with the consistency of a watermelon that tastes like a pear—and I am reminded of a key phrase that is used in the late afternoon especially on Friday. “Otsukare sama des” meaning directly “You must be tired” is used as a way to encouraged coworkers and is used more as “Thank you for your hard work”. I feel busy, but I despite my full schedule, I am always the last to arrive and the first to leave. I think that my fellow teachers are regularly at the school from 7AM-8PM. They are an impressive group of people.
Finally, let me share some mediocre pictures of two of my favourite views of everyday life. First, a shot of Kawasaki Town coming back from Ogawara, and then a shot coming back from Tomioka Middle School.