good moment

this happened tonight after dinner. i'm sitting on the floor with the girls and my hostmom, talking. i say,

"tomorrow i'm meeting a tutor."

koko-chi says,

"is it Pooh bear?"


i have no clue what the connection was there.

tonight i also learned that bubbling food goes "gutsu-gutsu" and young people and shrimp are both described as being "pichi-pichi", or in their peak, fresh. besides that, the teacher i was following at my field placement today took me to the elementary's cooking club after school. mothers and other locals lead the school's clubs, thus the name "mama club". together with them and some fourth and fifth graders we made a sort of Korean savory pancake out of tuna, eggs, rice, and leeks called "kawari chijimi". every surface and object in the room was scrubbed clean afterwards.

friday i'll be going to ueno with my architecture class and sketching buildings for the first time. i have a sketch book and some scented pens, but i don't really know what to do with them. it will be interesting, for sure.

until later, (and yes, eventually i will backtrack, i think!)

photo update--

go here.


In the morning I'm leaving the house at 6:15 am to teach children all day! Or observe the teaching of children. Let's hope my sponsor speaks slow enough for me to grab one or two words of what she says!


And I'm off--!

at the end of the day...

Today was busier than I expected and also came bringing a surprise - homework. Tomorrow I might also be wiped out after class, considering I'm going to have to leave the house Wednesday at/before 6:30 am to be at my placement school by 7:45am to greet every school child individually alongside the principal. It is going to be a long week.

Come Friday afternoon, however, we unexpectedly get a five day break, deemed "Silver Week" here in Japan, since it does not quite merit the same excitement that the blooming cherry blossoms do during the "Golden Week" of May. Actually, there's nothing really even to celebrate as far as I can tell, since I still wind up sweaty and sunburned wherever I go. When will the fall colors and weather show?

small delay

It's been a busy week, finishing up orientation, trekking out to my field placement for the first time for an interview, registering for classes, and so on. Plenty of fun and tasty things happened somewhere in there, too. And today I went on the first IES field trip to Asakusa, the home of a large temple with a long line of small stalls and shops leading up to it, and then on to watch sumo wrestling at the Kokugikan. I have a few stories and pictures to share, but right now, I'm beat. So tomorrow, after my first official classes.

Until then, anyone see the connection between a devil and shaving?

The semester begins

So, I made it! I’ve been here outside of Tokyo for almost a week now, and everything’s going more than well. Makuhari is precisely how I remember it – hyper clean, hyper polite, and hyper busy— and the same goes for what else I’ve seen of Japan as well. The highlight of my long but manageable flight was the dinner tray set on my table.

Very Japan, very early in the game. The largest turbulence I encountered was the American flight attendant garbling the Japanese announcements. The Japanese members of the crew stood by politely and listened, of course.

Some of my program’s epals met us at the airport to walk us through the process of changing money, shipping luggage, and not passing out from time difference/new country shock. Then we headed to a training center in Makuhari where we would be staying for the next couple of days until it was safe enough to cut us loose into real Japanese society.

When others readily speak your native language, as the Japanese do, it can be difficult to jump in and speak your secondary (or tertiary) language. I know I felt foggy and hesitant for a while about the whole speaking thing in general. Luckily, the epals here from IES’s two partner universities are very, very eager to speak English and meet English-speaking people. So they don’t really care whether I speak any Japanese or not. Instant friends!

Thursday, the long-awaited homestay family reveal took place. Okaa-san (Izumi) and her two girls (Yuzu and Coco-chi) came to pick me up. After listening to the housing director discuss swine flu prevention while the girls with the white face masks on playing in the back, we headed off to Ichikawa City. As it turns out, they’re wonderful. More than wonderful. Here are some pictures for proof.

They, along with their hard-working dad of late hours, live in a normal house in a quiet neighborhood about 20 minutes east of Tokyo by train. They have a pet hamster with a stripe down its back that they keep in a pink plastic bubble in the living room. His name is Purin-chan – Pudding. Basically all I’ve been doing since I came to stay with them is draw pictures of vaguely Disney characters, build stuff out of wooden blocks, and accept the many pink, scented trinkets they bring me every ten minutes or so.*

Besides spending time with my homestay family, I’ve mostly been trying to eat every new Japanese food I find and soak up as much of the language as possible from any source available: ads, menus, overheard conversations, Sunday morning cartoons. You name it, I’m probably scrutinizing it.

My goal is to be able to make at least junior-high level conversation, without all the pimples and giggles, by the end of December. We’ll see how that goes.

Until next Sunday, じゃあまたね！

*(These trinkets include: 1 bandaid, 1 eraser shaped like a milk carton, two holographic buttons with a winking bunny on them, two pieces of stationery, and two letters including pictures of stick-figure-us holding hands, with hair down to our ankles in pigtails.

I’ve been with them three days.)