What happened in May

So after an amazing golden week of sakura, castles, flowers and kites, I took it easy for the remainder of the month. Worked on getting into my groove at school (which I have at last managed while keeping up with 23 classes a week) and beginning to redirect my thoughts towards writing. The results: well I grew me first ever flower, went shopping in Tokyo, visited the Edo history museum with Sheena and her new friend Kenichi, saw my first solar eclipse, starting feeding the local finches food and made friends with them, helped Kevin level the weeds in our garden, went to a festival in Saruhashi with taiko drums, went for a hike in a random forest in Hachioji and got caught up in this beautiful bamboo thicket, finally did start writing and was at last pleased with the progress of my adorable little garden (it has tomato plants, a strawberry plant and some flowers.) What follows is my evidence! XD

 

And that, I think, brings me into June. Soon the rainy season will start... but in a few weeks time Kevin, Sheena, Kenichi and I will travel a bit north to go see this amazing temple on a mountain and pick cherries so that is something to look forward to.

Miso soup for the eigo sensei's soul

Year two: I feel I need to remember to post all these stories so I don't forget these moments in the years to come. They are little moments when I realize living here, despite the occasional homesickness, is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done, if not the most.

At the end of last year I received an overflowing amount of messages from my students thanking me for teaching them, you know all the boring usual stuff that the teacher's make them say, but among the notes there were a few comments that really stood out. Like saying that before my classes English wasn't fun but now they will try harder, and the enjoyed the atmosphere of my classes, oh and they think I'm pretty XD okay so not so inspirational but adorable none-the-less! They said I made English easy to understand and they always looked forward to my class! ,^_^, I should make a point to translate it all so that when I'm older and rusty at my language skills I won't forget what they wrote. In addition to the lovely cards, my favourite sixth year class had a photo of us printed out and I will always remember how great they were. That class could take a crappy unit and run with it so we all giggled and in our last class they all pretended to cry and my favourite students snapped at anyone who tried to reply 'I'm happy' to 'how are you' time! X,D

Moving into the new year. My favourite fifth year class is now my favourite sixth year class and they are still completely brilliant and a pleasure to teach for they seem to get all my jokes and participate all the time and work hard to be cleaver and play the games. They are so rewarding and fun to be around! They are attentive but know how to have fun and I never have to shout at them to shut up! I like to think they both like and respect me.

Riko, a fifth year from Nishi, drew me a picture of me last year and this year gave me a little mameshiba wrapped up in special paper with my name on it!

It took a bit of time to warm up to my new students but the ones that have warmed up to me, including my new ichinenseiers from my old schools, are totally adorable and drag me around the school all the time to show me things or race to my car when I get there in the morning to say 'hello' and inspect my trunk full of toys! And a few of them from Nanaho once picked up on the fact that i despise squid and disposed of it before the teacher noticed!

More to come!

In which flowers bloom and kites fly

And then it was golden week again and four days stretched out before me. The first day was spent resting from my exhausting first weekend and it didn't help that it had rained all day so it was relaxing cool day curled up at home. Day Two found me on my favourite 5:40 train to Tokyo with Sheena and Kasia to go see some flowers on a little day tour. It was a pretty awesome day when the downpour subsided and we had a lovely time with azaleas, wisteria (the amazing purple flowers that look like they belong in a magical realm) and these brilliant blue flowers that cascaded over a green hill with little spots of orange poppies and a ladybug! The wisteria was definitely the highlight of the day and the smell, of words cannot capture the smell, I wanted to bottle it up and lose myself in it on future warm afternoons. The flowers hung from bridges and trees in yellows, pinks and the purple. The oldest of the trees were something like 165 years old!

 

 

 

 

It was actually an early night and we headed back to Otsuki with the sun to get some sleep before the next day's adventure. I must point out that my usually poor luck cleared twice for golden week, once for the sakura, and a second time because the only fully clear day we had was the day we went to Hamamatsu in Shizuoka to watch the kites fly for children's day! If it had been raining like it has done every other day, it would have been cancelled... As it was we got up early to a brilliant blue sky and Mt. Fuji looking magnificent as I took of to the Yosh to pick up Sheena, Mershon and Kasia and we all went south for three hours to the beach to watch these 173 giant kites (they were like the size of my bedroom!) soar in the sky and battle each other and occasionally fall from the heavens in defeat. It was brilliant! I was standing in the middle of this field listening to the cheers of the kite fliers, the chants, whistles, and drums, the warm breeze and the distant surf on the sand. After we set up a tarp on the grass and watched some guys untangle a kite and ate festival food in the shade before climbing about the sand dunes by the oceans and feasting eyes on the kites above. Pretty fantastic day!

Oh the whole reason for the kite festival was because some lord in the area a few hundred years ago flew a flag in honour of his first born son and now it's customary on children's day to do such. In the evening, we headed into downtown for Italian food and to watch the lit up floats in city streets as the sun set. The music and lights were pretty cool. Before the crowds all headed home we beat them to it and drove the three hours back to Yamanashi in time to see the full moon high above Fuji on a glistening night so Mershon and I wandered up to the pagoda at midnight to snap some shots before heading home to bed.

The rain returned on Sunday so it was another day of rest for it on and off stormed all day and then Monday it was back to school. Rainy season is coming soon so not many travel plans are in the future until late June. Oh and in early July I'm taking a Japanese test which should be really hard... then a visit to Canada for summer holidays!

Sakura of the north

Sunday morning we were off to see the three great sakura spots of Tohoku! But first we had to ride the shinkansen! Riding the shinkansen is a specialty that requires all the right circumstances to line up as it’s very expensive, so when Sheena proposed a tour that included three prefectures I wanted to see, a castle, sakura and a ride on the bullet train, I jumped at the opportunity. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, it did not look like we would see sakura for the weather had been foul and all the expected dates of blooming had been pushed back. Resigned to enjoy ourselves anyways we were amazed by the transformation of the land. Summer came in a single weekend and turned winter trees to cotton candy. Our first stop after the shinkansen was Kitakami in Iwate, famous for its tunnel of sakura over a kilometer long. Also as it was nearing the children’s festival, strings of koi streamers were bound across the river and there was a beautiful horse and cart and daffodils along the path. It was so lovely I found myself walking in circles just to enjoy it all!

 

 

In the afternoon we found our tour in Kakunodate in Akita, where there was a beautiful well preserved samurai district with swaying sakura trees that wept into the streets. We wandered around a bit but were eventually drawn to the river side where two kilometers of trees lined the shoreline. We were told that in the morning most of the trees had still been buds but by afternoon, in the summer heat, they had erupted! We were so lucky! Oh! Also, the panda is the embodiment of Rhee I promised to take it places and at last it got its chance to shine!

On the way to the hotel for the night we made one last strange stop that was completely unexpected. We stopped for a flower called mizubasho in Japanese. When Sheena looked it up we found we had stopped for skunk weed! I giggled about it for a while until we descended these stares and I found myself in the most beautiful swamp field that could ever exist. The light was dimming and the sky was cool blue, the trees were still bare but at their base nestled in the clear water were the flowers that well resembled those I grew up with in the ravine, were more beautiful for being appreciated such as they were. And the best part was the series of narrow boardwalks that crisscrossed through the garden, it was surprising fantastic!

The hotel was a lovely stop in its own way! Dinner was included in our trip and it was a fantastic buffet of marinated chicken and spring vegetable, asparagus and bacon, pasta, salad, soup, shabu shabu, tempura and sashimi! It was so delicious paired with an umeshu on the rocks and sweet cakes for dessert. Followed were a few fireworks in the parking lot, a luxurious bed and then sleep! It was the perfect early night until a little earthquake woke us up. But all was well and we drifted off again to wake up early for the next day in Hirosaki.

Another original castle to cross off my list! Hirosaki is one of the younger originals being that it was built in the 1800s but it was still lovely, made more so by the sakura and a pretty little red bridge. (I have discovered that I am quite fond of bridges, as my friends say, I should have realized this ages ago lol!) Near the end of sakura season the moat is said to flow with petals but I was kinda happy it hadn’t for there were more reflections to enjoy. We spent two hours just floating from tree to tree and playing with the flower, our cameras and the views of the castle. It was better than I imagined!

The best was over and having found ourselves in Aomori prefecture, the furthest one north on the main island, there was nothing left to do but wind our way to Sendai to meet the shinkansen. On the way we climbed up mountains in the bus, while enjoying a bento lunch of food from the area, and twisted our way through a mountain path where the snow towered as high (and in some place higher) than the bus. Then we descended into a river valley and drove along a gorge with this nice little river which is famous in autumn and finished by driving along a famous caldera lake.

We made it safely to the shinkansen and then home for in the morning on Tuesday I had to go to school. The strange thing about golden week is it’s not quite a week just a bunch of holidays that hang out together. So in the end I had to work Tuesday and Wednesday but got a four day weekend in return. More on that to come!