Ever notice Kyoto and Tokyo are the same syllables, just reversed?

Ladies and gentlemen, I now hold in my hand the tickets required to get me to Kyoto this Saturday. Well, I assume they're tickets. Since I can't read most of it, I'll resign to calling them "magic slips of paper that transport me to enchanted faraway places." ("mspttmefp," for short) Tim, Kana and I met up in the city last night after my Japanese lesson to head over to the station and buy the shinkansen tickets (Bullet traaaaiiiin!). Again, I must clarify. They set up buying the tickets, I stood behind them like a drooling idiot admiring the floor tiles until they prodded me and said, "Colin, Money. Now." Anyway, the point is we got them. And our 5 day trip to Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe is READY TO START! we'll spend Saturday night through Tuesday morning in Kyoto, Tuesday morning, take the hour train ride to Osaka and stay there until Wednesday morning. Wednesday morning, it's off to Kobe to see a couple things, and then grab some Kobe beef for lunch, and then we hit the train and head back to Ozu that night. I'm expecting some fantastic pictures, since, you know, Kyoto has a lot of that "classic Japan" look going on. (Work it, honey!)

Our english recitation contest looms ever closer, though... specifically, it's the Friday after we get back from the trip. So, 2 more days to practice with the kids before they perform. Are they ready? yes, no, and I don't know. Yes, because a few of them are phenomenal. No, because there are a couple that I have not even worked with once. I don't know, because I haven't been to anything like this before, so I don't know the expected level of each grade... I THINK we're doing great, but who knows, really? I guess the point is that they're really great kids, and we have fun working on the speeches. To resolve the language barrier, and also get them to relax a little more, I've resorted to goofy gestures and over exaggerated expressions. It seems to be working with a lot of them, so... sugoi! I hope. :gulp:

Also, some of my students are dirty. The ninensei were working on a worksheet where they have to introduce a person and use the word "looks." As in, "This is Ichiro. He looks happy because he will play baseball today. He loves baseball. (etc. etc.)" I was walking around the classroom reading sentences, helping out here and there, and I stumbled across a students response (One of the class-clown types... generally a really good kid, but he needs to stay focused!!). He wrote one about the teacher: "This is Ms. Matsuzaki. She looks beautiful." I chuckled and motioned for Matsuzaki-sensei to come read it. She laughed, too, and told the student that he gets 10 bonus points, then walked away. I patted him on the back, laughed, and gave him a thumbs up, then walked to the other students. When I came back around, I checked to see what progress he made. *ahem*

"This is Ms. Matsuzaki. She looks beautiful because she is easy."

I stopped. I re-read that. I looked at the student's smiling, proud expression. I suppressed laughter. I smiled, said "good job!" and walked away. Because she's EASY?? Really?? I know he didn't mean it the way it came out, but it was hilarious, either way.

The next couple days, I started checking the other classes worksheets as they came in. So, I was sitting at my desk checking sheet after sheet and making marks and corrections all over... and stumbled across another one. "This is Maki. She looks happy because she is easy." And then another one. "This is Saito. She looks excited because she is easy." (My personal favorite right there)

I could not figure out if there was something I just didn't get, if the students were making jokes, or if Ozu really IS full of scarlet women (and raaagtime!! Shameless music that'll grab your son, YOUR DAUGHTER with the arms of a jungle animal instinct, MASS-TERIA!! ...er... I mean... 'scuse me).

The answer came later. I was telling this to Tim during the train ride into the city and he kinda chuckled and said, "Ooooh... no no no... Ok, that's because the word for 'easy' is 'yasashii.' Yasashii ALSO means 'nice.'" Oh. OOOOOHHHHHH... Here I was, thinking my students were perverts and in reality, they're just complimenting each other... eh, I guess another one of those lost in translation things. But I refuse to have the lesson where I explain what that phrase actually means in America... who knows what kinds of things the students will say to me in the halls after that?

...speaking of which, I think my pirate crew is moving on to another gag... or at least another group of sannensei have found a new phrase. "Because I love you." This has taken the shape of all different phrases... "Sandall-sensei, do you love me?" "I love you!" "I will do it! Ok! Because I love you!"

My greatest fear is that these phrases will combine forces. "Mr. Sandall! I love you because you are easy!"

*sigh*

The Ozu Bike Tour!

I was bored today... took me a few hours from filming to completion, but here it is.

I decided that since not a lot of people will be able to come visit (read: almost no one... *tear*), I'll bring the PARTY TO THEM!!!

I now present an amateur video, The Ozu Bike Tour!!

I got as much as I could with my limited recording time, but I managed to miss some big things, as well. So if I make Ozu seem like a tiny little town, sorry. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke5y9TccS6w

Japan: 2, Typhoon: 0

That's right. For the second time, the threat and worry of an imminent typhoon turned out to be for naught. The sucker passed south of us again. Except this time, we didn't get the awesome weather that accompanied the last one. :(

Anyway, it's been a long week, and lots of random bits to go on about... so let's get crackin'! (Or... crackuhlackin'... if you're into that sorta thing) And it should be noted that I'm watching this cool show right now, while typing this... there are about 12 people dressed in flamboyant clothes walking around a city... there are also 3 or 4 (I can't figure out how many) guys dressed in suits and sunglasses walking around like weird cyborgs ("hunters") trying to catch the 12 people. Like a giant televised game of tag... there's a timer ticking down from an hour, and a money counter going up... it's some weird reality TV game show... nice. :D ANYway...

Strap yourselves in... this is a long one.

After my Friday night spider escapades, I called it an early night to get up at 6:15 AM ON A SATURDAY!! I had to be to the school at 7:20 to meet my ride to go with a student to an English Recitation contest in Kumamoto. It was a pretty good morning and I'm really glad I went! The contest was part of the school's culture festival (Ours is coming up soon... I can't wait!) so the first part of the morning was to go watch the students put on an english play. They did Cinderella with a little bit added onto the end, and it was HILARIOUS! The students acted great, the costumes were delightfully over the top... man, good stuff. I sat with a bunch of other ALTs and they helped translate the few jokes that flew over my head. After the show, we headed back to the contest room and watched 14 students from all over Kumamoto Prefecture perform their speeches (the same speech 14 times that we've all practiced for the past 2 months... I swear, if I hear about Peter getting home from school late ONE MORE TIME...). It was a solid win for Kikuchi Gun, though... First, second, and third place all came from my gun, so all the Kikuchi ALTs celebrated. MY STUDENT GOT 3RD PLACE!!! WOOO!!!! (Not that I did a lot to help her... the girl was pretty much awesome before I got there, BUT I GAVE HER A FEW POINTS OF ADVICE, DANGIT!!)

(Somewhere I missed it... they're down to 8 people... the hunters are catching the contestents... eesh. And everytime it shows the people in the jail who have been caught, they play COWBOY BEBOP MUSIC!! "The Egg and I!" SUGOI!!)

The evening was great fun. I thinkk I'm getting better at Tennis... well, I KNOW I'm getting better, because it's hard NOT to improve from "terrible" after almost 2 months of it... I still feel like I'm the weak link, but my "accidentally awesome shots" are getting more and more frequent (like from once a night to... twice). After that, I headed up to a little ramen shop with a few friends and finally had some real ramen. That stuff is GOOOOOOD. I don't think I can go back to the instant stuff! (Don't give me that. YOU knew what this was all along, Top Ramen... )

...6 people left... 20 minutes to go... 272,000 yen at stake...

Sunday morning brought our second Kikuchi Gun trip into the Kikuchi Gorge. It was kind of a nice nature walk, but nothing ramarkably spectacular (though the 2 pictures in the post are from there... click to make them bigger). Though, the car I was in went to the higher parking lot that's free, but requires more walking, and got seperated from the lazier rest of the group. So we had a good time with just the four of us wandering around the forest/mountains. Eventually, we found the group and had a big picnic near a stream (in a little pavillion area with modern toilets... yay nature) and chatted for a while. That was pretty much the end of that, so we headed back to the cars and went our seperate ways. It was good the have the evening off to relax. I watched some english TV shows (thank you, SurfTheChannel.com) and saw this awesomely scary spanish horror movie called REC. (The upcoming movie, Quarantine, is the American remake... but do yourself a favor and watch the original one, instead. The trailers for the remake look like it can only ruin this perfect gem of a movie)

6 people, 15 minutes, 360,000 yen... and they're adding more hunters while minimizing the play area. INTENSE!!! Oop... 1 more down. 5 people left.

Monday was a fun day, but it was busy. First of all, I woke up to pouring rain... and since it's illegal to bike with an umbrella up (and since I probably would kill myself trying), I had to walk to school. The morning was busy, and I was looking forward to having some free periods to make up some games for classes later in the week, but it turns out that the last half of the day was a big assembly (Oh the things you miss in the meetings when you don't speak Japanese... :D ). The assembly was awesome, though. A travelling theatre group was hired to come in and perform Don Quixote. I was expecting some little tiny production, but it actually was pretty awesome. we went into the gym to find the front 1/4 of it taken up by their massive, multi-layered set that spanned the length of the gym. The windows were covered (the walls are all glass, so this was a big effort) and the play began. I knew the gist of the story of Don Quixote, so I was able to follow the play pretty well. but I couldn't help but chuckle at how "Japanese" it was. All the knights and princes, and all that stuff looked like characters straight from a Final Fantasy game. The comedy was largely physical humor, and the actors did some amazing acrobatics during the sword fights. The audience laughed, they cried... and a good chunk of my pirate crew was called on to stand in as soldiers in a scene, each of them given lines to deliver. :D

3 people left... one got caught, one actually finished and made it to the phone... and there are 7 hunters out now. 5 minutes left, and 483,000 yen at stake... OO, OO, PURSUIT!!!! oh man oh man oh man... HE RAN INTO ANOTHER HUNTER!! 2 HUNTERS ARE CHASING!!! GAAAAHHH BAM got him. 2 left. Man, that was exciting... can you feel the excitement???

Monday night was great... I got to go shopping!! Finally I bummed a ride to Jusco and picked up all sorts of foods to stock my kitchen. I shall survive on Bentos no more!!! Now I just need to decipher how to make everything... (I think the bilingual cook book I bought last night can help me with that!!) Anyway, I was so excited about having food that the next night, I ACTUALLY COOKED!! Hooray for Yakisoba!! Easy to make, and good, too! (Just not terribly good FOR you... "yaki" - fried, "soba" - a type of noodle... yeah)

oh man... 20 seconds.... 2 left... they;'ve dodged the hunters... just make it to the phone.... THE PHONE...hey, wait! They don't NEED to go to the phone?? They just have to out last the hunters?? Nice!! 2 winners walk off with over 500,000 yen!! (And it's occuring to me that this is a sort of Matrix themed game...)

Last night, I had another english lesson. It was fun, but tiring... reading hiragana/katakana for an hour and a half straight while trying to pronounce it all is hard work... afterwards, I was feeling like my brain was going to 'splode... but all the ALTs there were feeling the same way, so yay. It'll be one big pile of ALT brain mass (wtf, really, Colin? Did you really just say that?). The other ALTs all had to bail on dinner, so Tim and I walked over to Shimotori to try out this Sri Lankan curry place tha he said I definitely needed to try. The stuff melted my face. Seriously. But it was awesome. :D

After dinner, we went to a few shops quickly before driving back home. And walking around downtown Kumamoto, we played a fun game of, "Guess who paid for their date?" Oh man, the prostitutes were out in full force, and the guys weren't even hiding it. Everywhere you looked, there were business men as well as average middle-aged men walking around being closely followed/accompanied by younger girls who looked dressed to go to homecoming (I'd say prom, but come on. They're not THAT classy). As a fun side note, if you want to anger a girl, walk up to her and say, "Ikura desu ka?" (We had to resist the urge to mockingly ask a large group of the homecoming queens this... "How much?" But feel free to use it on friends who don't speak japanese! You'll insult them, and they will have NO IDEA!! It's pronounced "ee-koo-rah dess kah" just to make sure you do it right! (You're welcome!))

We made it back to the parking garage and drove down the 8 floors (yes, we drifted... this IS Japan, after all) to head home.

I think I covered all of it... I left a few things out I wanted to say (to save you from being here longer than you already have been... Gomen nasai) so I'll catch them another time. Basically, my students continue to be awesome, and a certain teacher continues to be terrible... but more later!

Things to consider before visiting me in Japan

Exhibit A: Yesterday was a pretty nice day. So, once I got home, I had about 20 minutes to go out biking. I figured I'd head south instead of north, like I usually do. It wasn't until recently that I even noticed there were houses back there. Seriously... an entire neighborhood that I didn't know existed literally around the corner from my apartment.

So I took off biking and enjoying the awesome fall weather and brought my camera along. It was a neat little area... a little more rural than the spots I usually pass on my way to school. I was kinda shocked that I lived so close to some older style houses with their amazing architecture (I'm a nerd, so sue me). But, as I said, it was a bit more inaka (countryside, rural... pretty soon, I'll stop translating this word, so pay attention, kids!) than most of the town I'd seen so far. I came to a crossroad and looked down to the right and saw a row of driveways emptying into it... but the cool thing was, running next to the street and under the driveways was an irrigation canal. Sweet, I'll go that way! I thought.

I stopped for a picture and cringed at the idea of coming home late, tired, and not in the best of driving conditions... and missing the driveway, only to fall into the canal... but still, it was neat, so I snapped the picture. :D

I biked down a little further, whizzing down the sidewalk, enjoying the breeze and loving the sunset. pretty much, I was in my own little world. And that's when it happened.

I looked ahead and saw one of the last driveways before that side of the street became rice fields. Above this, stretched between the light post on the other side of the canal and the guard rail on the driveway, was a pretty massive spiderweb. It seriously looked amazing in the light. So I got a little closer, all excited to take a picture of it. As I got closer, though, I noticed the big hulking mass sitting in the spiderweb. Inside of this pretty massive spiderweb was a pretty massive spider. I slowed down since one hand was busy collecting my jaw before it tangled in the bike chain. "...sugoi..." I thought ("cool/fantastic" ...ok, so I didn't think this... I don't think in Japanese... yet ;) )

I pulled my bike into this driveway and got out my camera. I was maybe about 7 or 8 feet below the web and had a nice clear shot of the spider. I moved around closer to the guard rail to get an angle shot that mght show off the web a bit...

...and then I looked immediately to my right.

You guessed it, folks. This driveway wasn't infested with one massive spider, but two. I jumped back a bit and gasped. Luckily, though, this one was in HIS web just chillin' there... though he was MUCH, MUCH CLOSER. His web was in the corner of the guard rails from the sidewalk to the driveway, so he was right at hip level, only about a foot off the sidewalk. A friend once told me that there are no poisonous spiders in Japan (a fact which I have since found out to be false... grrr) so I wasn't terribly afraid of getting closer to snag a picture. After all, he was just sitting there. So I got as close as I dared... maybe a foot or two away... and hit my zoom. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the monster spider. (Arachnophobes, don't click the thumbnails... seriously. You've been warned.)

First shot:


Second shot:

I have NEVER seen a spider this big without the protection of glass before... in fact, I thought these things only existed in sci-fi movies... Since it's hard to judge scale, the abdomen was about as big as the first 2 knuckles on my first finger, and each of those front legs were about as long as that same finger. He didn't move once while I was there, though, so that's good.

Since it was getting late, and I had to be home by 6, I decided to turn around and bike back the way I came. You know that "realization moment" in a horror movie where something suddenly happens to the protagonist and he begins to see the evil things everywhere? Like, the hero walks deep into a dimly lit house, and suddenly the light clicks on, revealing body parts and stuff that he missed on the way in, and he has to now leave the way he came, through a mountain of gore? Or else the hero finds a pair of sunglasses and realizes the aliens are all around us, and backs out slowly to avoid causing a disturbance (until he runs out of bubblegum)? Such was me with the spiders.

As I was biking back down the sidewalk, I realized I passed about 3 others of those things right next to the sidewalk. The webs were strung up between signs, posts, blades of grass... but those massive spiders were EVERYWHERE. I completely missed them when I first went down the road, but now I found myself seeing every single one, and gasping and unnecessarily swerving everytime. I even saw a different, but still massive spider apparently floating in mid air about 10 feet up. One of those big abdomen spiders with the short legs.... his body seemed to be the size of those rubber bouncy balls you get out vending machines... but he was so far away, and he stood out so starkly from the clear blue sky, that he seemed to be flying along. (The picture is on the photobucket... check it out. :D)

I made it back safely and managed to lose any spiders that may have been chasing me (I swear I was chased 5 or 6 blocks by a praying mantis once...) and immediately uploaded my pictures to my computer to confirm that, yes, they really DID look like that. And yes... it seems they really did.

I should note that this was maybe a good half mile or so away from my house, so it's not like I have these spiders just hanging around my place all the time. It was more of a rural section, and I have yet to see one indoors... hopefully it stays that way... And I've even had people tell me, "Oh, it's just a garden/banana spider. We have those all over where I'm from!" Well, SO WHAT!!! We don't have these in Nebraska! "Garden spider" to me is a little fuzzy thing the size of a quarter that just hangs out like "sup?" in your garden, happily eating flies and tiny insects and not threatening the destruction of an entire small japanese town.

Yeah, I see spiders all the time here. They're seen as guardians of the home, and I guess it's bad luck to kill them... I don't have any in my house (that I know of... *shudder*) but the steps going downstairs outside have a few that hang out there all the time (The fuzzy one is named Nigel). I was a little scared of spiders before getting over here... but you just kinda get used to them.

But still... I don't think anything could have prepared me for walking into this massive arachnid den (though it WAS cool lookin').

"My favorite food is lice,"

Ok, I know I usually am an advocate of not mocking the Japanese accent (katakana accent?) but I was helping grade papers today when I stumbled across a kid who wrote that. I had to work pretty hard to stifle a laugh, and the teacher next to me kinda smiled and looked at me like I was insane. I just shook my head and went back to checking. Seriously, though... imagine you're sitting there for 15 minutes checking sentence after sentence of different student's introductions... and you suddenly come across that little gem. And I really hate that I find it hilarious, but IT WAS HILARIOUS!! I think I have a pretty good handle on the pronounciation of the language, I even understand why the katakana accent sounds like it does (i.e. why the Ls and Rs sometimes switch, why there's often an "oo" added to the end of words), but when you see a gag straight out of about 18 different movies played out in real life, you can't help but chuckle. (I don't even wanna hear it, mom...)

Overall, my students are great, though. Despite the usual grammatical error, most of them actually try really hard to get it. Of course there are the glaring exceptions. I mean, what class wouldn't be complete without a kid who sits in the back with his emo hair pulled over his face and stares at his textbook while the rest of the class is up doing the activity? But aside from that, there are enough nice, interested (and interesting...) kids (and/or pirates... yes, they're still at it) that make it fun. There are always times when you completely misjudge a student, too. For one of my ninensei classes, I walked in the first day and saw a couple of guys in the front looking like the class clowns, like they were too cool to be there. I kind of rolled my eyes, "Oh boy, here we go..." and just went with it. But one of the boys has turned out to be the most active student in that class, if not still a big class clown... BUT AT LEAST HE MAKES HIS ANSWERS LOUD, STRONG, AND MOSTLY CORRECT! (The other kid... well... yeah, he's what I said above)

There are several big language projects this week I get to participate in, speaking of which. The ninensei are doing an oral reading test, meaning I get to sit in another room and the kids come in one by one and recite a passage for me. It's great because I really get to know the students this way. I watch for the ones that come in all shy and nervous, and give them a big (sometimes goofy (Okay, often goofy)) smile and make some genki American joke to helop lighten the mood. Usually, they exhale and crack a smile, and they loosen up. I think that's still the problem. I'm still the new guy, so a lot of kids are nervous because they haven't figured me out yet... but that'll change with time, and it's projects like these that help with that.

Another project is working with students individually for the oral recitation contest next month. 3 ichinensei, 2 ninensei, and a few sannensei (I don't know how many, because I hahve yet to work with them) are all learning a passage from their textbooks to recite for judges at a Prefecture-wide contest next month. And I'll be danged if I haven't gotten to know these students pretty well, too. But again, it started out with nerves. The students were embarassed to attempt english around me, so I'd try and make jokes and be goofy just to break the ice. It's worked so far, and now out practices are actually FUN and PRODUCTIVE! And it's almost just like giving a voice lesson, so I'm able to apply teaching techniques from vocal ped. into it. We can communicate with almost no Japanese, too... I use examples, modelling, visual aids, big elaborate hand gestures, and it all seems to work. Again, though, it's about 5% me, and 90% these students applying themselves (The other 5% is the teacher getting in the way... grrr... but I shouldn't go into much detail... it's a public blog, after all). Overall, a great time, and I'm excited to see what happens next month.

ON another language note, I started going to the International Center to take free english lessons. Tonight was my first night. First off, it was cool to get into the city a bit more. Really helps break up the inaka life (countryside life... for those of you playing the home game, that was a 4 point word). But the lessons I think are going to be great. Tonight I worked one on one with a language teacher, so if that format continues, I hope to make some decent progress on my japanese. We covered the basics... repeating a lot I already knew, but uncovering a lot I didn't, or skipped over in the process. Also, I feel like I can completely read hiragana and katakana now! The entire lesson, I don't think I read one bit of Romanji out of all the worksheets she gave me.

...and.. just between you and me... my ego was a little bruised when it came to learning nouns... and out came the Baby Einstein flash cards... :( ("Ohana" means flower! Eff you, Lilo!!)

...shut up. :(

Anyway, the lesson was great, and it's something to do every week rather than jog across the street, grab a bento, and watch internet TV on a boring night. :D

(...wow that sounds lame...)

I best be off now. I've got some great pictures I need to upload, but I continue to be lazy, so you'll have to wait. Until next time!

PS: Oh, next month, we're planning a bigger trip... it's either going to be 5 days in Tokyo, 4-5 days in Korea, or 3 days in Kyoto... we're leaning towards Kyoto, simply because of convenience and timing... so, expect an update soon about that!

PPS: Special thanks to Mary for pointing out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog... I can't believe I missed this when it came out. Seriously, everyone go look for it. Hulu has the entire 42 minute thing, but if not, it's in pieces on Youtube.

"Colin, go to bed!

...since I'm up entirely too late.

It's been another lazy weekend, and I'm realizing something. I've hit routine, methinks. I could write about everything I do in a day, but I'm sure after a month of that, I won't have many readers left (*zzzz*). I do try to keep updated on big, amazing things that happen throughout the day, or things that I can remember... but that only gets me so far.

So what do YOU want to hear about? What sort of things are you interested in that you wish I would have gone into more detail about? Places I've talked about? Life in general? Students? The town?

If I get enough, I might compile another FAQ or something like that. Feel free to send me an e-mail at csandall@hotmail.com with whatever you want to know, or just add a comment to this post. (I tried opening the comments to anybody who wants to, blogger member or not, but I don't know if it worked)

See you all later, and Happy Autumnal Equinox Day tomorrow! (Yet another holiday we get off of school for! But it's right in the middle of the week. :( )

I swashbuckle on American time

It seems the inner pirate in me is stuck in the American time zone... since I didn't celebrate yesterday...

But Happy Talk Like a Pirate day, everyone!

I wish it were a big deal in Japan, especially for my pirate crew at school... ah well.