English Camp, Tofurkey and The Zen Master

For some reason, I have managed to neglect my blogging duties during the latter part of November and have now found myself in December! The last few weeks have been good and have managed to keep myself quite busy...

22nd November
A few weeks ago I had been introduced to a Japanese girl called Atsuko who attends a local university and lives in Iiyama. She is really fun and has lived in Canada for a year so has brilliant English. I don't need to change the way I speak when I see her and she uses a great deal of English slang which makes her the most non-Japanese Japanese friend I have! We decided to meet up and have a coffee one Wednesday night followed by the long awaited release of The Devil Wears Prada (brilliant by the way!). We ordered a huge bucket of "solty" popcorn which was drizzled with hot melted butter and got comfy in the big bucket seats at Nagano cinema.

23rd November - Happy Thanksgiving!
The Japanese celebrate Labour Day on Thanksgiving and therefore we get another day off! I had planned to make a start at some Christmas shopping and then join some other JETs for a Thanksgiving dinner. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cornbread (?) and buckets of KFC (!!!). It was really yummy and as it was organised though Club Konnichiwa there were lots of Japanese people there too who all loved watching us eat a turkey dinner with chopsticks (I kid you not!). There was a fireworks display on after dinner but I declined the inivitation to walk a few miles down to the river to watch them and decided to carry on with my Christmas shopping. There was actually a prime viewing spot at the station so I managed to catch some of them anyway.

24th & 25th November - Nakano Nishi English Camp
A few weeks ago I had been asked to help with a neighbouring school's English camp weekend, so having helped with a few quiz preparations I was quite looking forward to hanging out with some Japanese kids who actually liked English and could say more than "my name is... I like Japanese food etc etc". The camp was held at a hotel way up in the mountains at a place called Shigakogen and as we were driving there the weather changed from being a bit cold and sunny, to frozen trees and snow on the ground! It was all really pretty and nice to get out of Iiyama again!



(you can't really see it in the picture but this view is actually of a lake - it looked stunning at 8AM!!!!!!)

The students were working on a short film all week and it was our job to help them act it out and film it. I even got a small part! They worked really hard on scripts, costumes, props and of course their English "acting", but we managed to let them all down by not checking the equipment properly and ended up loosing a morning's worth of filming! They pulled through though and everyone was still genki at home time!



(I was Tatsunoshi's new girlfriend!!!)







(the boys are too cool to smile...)

All of the helpers got private Japanese style bedrooms - this is a picture of mine below.



There was also a very helpful picture in the bathroom explaining how to use the western style toilet making it very clear it was different for men and women...



30th November - Mid Year Conference in Shiojiri!

Most of my fellow JETs were looking forward to the MYC as it meant getting out of the office for two days to catch up with old friends we haven't seen since Tokyo. For me however, it meant twice as much work to make sure I didn't leave my teachers without a lesson to teach. I think I am the only ALT in the WORLD who still has to make lesson plans for lessons I will actually be absent for. So, loosing two days of preparation and having to plan twice as many lessons I was a tad stressed come Wednesday night! All in all, the conference was boring and not really relevant to a low level ability school such as the lovely Minami Ko. It was indeed nice to meet up with some familiar faces and see Shiojiri, but it was really just a lot of lectures from Japanese men in Paddington Bear suits...



I did learn one thing though - in America, they have such a thing as "tofurkey" for vegetarians to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with all the usual accompaniments... and I thought it was only the Japanese who loved their tofu!

The train ride home was the best bit of the trip though because we had the privilege of being joined at our seats by none other than the Zen Master himself (well, he was actually one of the 25 Zen matsers in Japan).



He was 81 years old and spoke pretty good Buddism-related English. He had published a book a few years earlier which he took great delight in showing us, which contained plenty words of wisedom and also a photo of him with one of his pupils - Jacques Chiraq! We were all happily taking pictures of him and he was happy to pose, but once we were finished he reached into his beaded bag and produced a camera of his own to take pictures of the four gaijin girls he encountered on his trip. I wonder if he has a blog...

Once we got back to Nagano, Kyla and I hit the shops for a while (actually a bit longer, because they closed us in!!!) and then had some cocktails in a Russian bar. We were not quite in the mood to go home in time for my last train so we decided to hit Nagano's finest nightclub - High 5, via a 35 minute cycle on a bicycle that did not belong to me and a broken mountain bike. The club was tiny but the music was good and once they chucked everyone out (me, kyla, the DJ and about 3 other customers - it really was small!!!), Ky and I decided to grab some food and energy for our cycle home in Doma Doma ( a funky Japanese restaurant open until 5am).

Saturday night was spent in Nagano again for dinner, to welcome Kat's boyfriend James who has come over from Newcastle to spend the winter on the slopes. Kat, James, Kyla, Belinda and I had some beers and a yummy mix of Western and Japanese food in an Izikaya near the station (I forget the name!), but I had the last train to catch at 10.40pm so had to slink off back up the mountains. To my surprise, although probably not really now that i think about it, it was snowing! Ricycle had at least 2 inches of snow on the seat and so I had to walk back through the snow in my party shoes.



I woke up in the morning to find it already thawing out, but to reports that Hakuba (our New Year destination) had 1 metre of snow!



I seem to be eagerly awaiting the snow and getting quite excited about it but I know that come March when we will have had 3 months of constant snow I will be sick of the stuff! It's definitely on its way though - the locals have snow tires on their cars, the shops are running low on snow boots, all the trees have bamboo support fixtures holding them up and 2 metre poles have been placed to follow the line of the roads or any sudden drops in the pavement!