The Lighthearted Wanderer

Thought process throughout the day:  Wouldn't it be cool to join Nanowrimo this year? I mean, I love writing, and since I haven't been in Archi writing circles I don't seem to write creatively as much as I want to. How awesome! The website lets you pick a Home Region and you get updates if there are any writer events in your area! Hm...I wonder what I should write my novel about? It probably doesn't have to be very long, the point is to finish the story, because I basically never finish a story. Oh hey why don't I write about that plane transition thinking/flash moment event story that I talked to my Fiction prof about senior year? Yeah yeah, that sounds good.  Oh man I also have to write my personal statements this month. No avoiding it now. Well at least I'll be in a writing mode.  Hm...what should I write for my Author Bio?  Nice, they have all this info about past Nanowrimos and how many people sign up and complete it. Hm too...

 On a super rainy July 1st in Kyoto, my friend Kasie and I made the trek from Kobe to partake in a time-honored gaijin (foreigner) tradition--getting dressed up as maiko and have our pictures taken. The experience overall was really enjoyable. There were 3 ladies rotating between the two of us to put on our makeup, the powders, lip and eye makeup, and the super red lipstick. After that, they gave us time to choose our own kimono from a selection of about 70. There were kimono of all different colors, patterns, and fabrics. I ultimately decided on a turquoise-green kimono with white flower accent, partially because my friend decided on a pink sakura and I didn't want to clash/contrast with her, and also because I knew that the background was black and I thought that the turquoise would pop. After picking the kimono, one of the lady assistants wrapped me in a red under-kimono and tightened everything up with some ties. They she looped around a red board (for flattening the bum...

For the past two weeks, I got caught up in a whirlwind job interview process that brought me from public high school Japan to private Catholic elementary school. Before I could even unpack and settle in my room, I found myself with twenty-five new loves with very different faces and backgrounds from the loves I left back in Japan. Life in first grade is fun, so different, and really tough and full of energy :) This is my self-portrait as a princess. Someday I will have blue hair and blue lips and a pink crown.  This is our classroom, it's circus themed! 

"Why is it better to be a child of God than a prince or princess?" "You get to play around more." ;) They make me chuckle...

Since I've come back Japan, I've been looking a lot more closely at the google reader feed and twitter and Facebook feeds of articles that come my way. If I find anything interesting I'll post it and give a little tidbit I got from it...sort of like building up my American random knowledge repertoire. "Best" Cities for Singles I was mildly amused to see Redondo Beach on the list, but it looks like CNN just took the statistical view...percentage of singles and median family household income. Should those things be related? In general, they came up with the typical, "It's not the big powerhouses like New York and Los Angeles, but the cities next  to these," which is still kind of funny to me... AA youth in the 626 This totally makes me think of my buddies in Arcadia/San Gabriel Valley. It doesn't really say much but more of an explanatory feature type article. Definitely makes me wanna visit some boba and tofu soup and yum...

This month moved by so fast, and I have so much to catch up on. I know I will, I have the time, and the desire to look back on the adventure-filled last couple of weeks. Just know that I am safely at home, still a little off in my sleep schedule, but ready to adjust to life back in LA. First problem...job interview tomorrow and I'm pretty sure I packed most of my work and interview-appropriate clothes in the boxes that are currently making their way across the ocean. Whoops... 0_0

A physically exhausting day...started with cleaning my apartment, throwing out a lot of garbage, and moving my extra things to my friend's apartment nearby. I thought the day was going to turn out badly/bad karma when I brought down my first set of garbage and the garbage lady proceeded to chew me out in Japanese because I put my plastics-type garbage next to the appropriate cage as opposed to inside the cage since it was locked. I played the foreigner but I felt super guilty :( But only guilty enough that I went looking for other garbage areas without mean ladies. All of my utilities got turned off one by one and I had to pay all the month of payments I...skipped...or more precisely, didn't bother to pay because I would soon be leaving anyway. Bad karma continued as the water lady quoted me ¥901 but upon calling higher-ups realized I needed to pay for June and July -> ¥5031. I had given her ¥1001 originally, but not having enough smaller bills for it to be exact cha...

(Just because it's fun to remember...and because I got so much help from my friends, I might as well post it here in case it can help someone someday.) The teachers and students were super surprised and super excited that I spoke so much Japanese in my speech. Obviously I didn't write all, or even most, of the Japanese in this speech, but the students and teachers appreciated the gesture so much that I am really glad I just asked for help from as many Japanese-studying/speaking friends as I could.  ------------------------------------------------------------- Mina-san, konnichiwa/ohaiyogozaimasu.  Good morningeveryone!    I have been in Japan and teaching at Ikakita (my school's nickname) for one year, and it has been very enjoyable. Ima made watashi wa ichi-nen-kan Nihon ni ite, Ikakita de oshiete imashita, taihen tanoshikatta desu. It's a shame that I have to leaveIkakita. Ikakita o sarukoto ni nari, zannen desu. Kocho-sensei, Kyoto-sense...

(this is my version of an "update me on your life" email that I've received from some of my friends over the past few months) Dear Friends, I write to you from my work desk at one of the schools I have worked at over the past year. It is my last day of work here, and I feel compelled to update the world about my life in a rather concrete fashion. (Well, as concrete as it could be, posting on my blog with an audience of about 10.) It has been almost one year since I first arrived in Japan, and my time here has been filled since day one. Not simply filled with excitement, but with emotion, reflection, and a lot of evenings at home opting for sweets instead of turning on the stove for a proper meal. Over the past year, I have been teaching English to students at two Japanese high schools in the city of Kobe. One of my schools was very close to my house, and I'd frequently find myself waking up with only a few minutes to get ready before running to wo...

If only the real Himeji castle wasn't in a box... Himeji's Yukata Masturi is an annual festival taking place in Japan's most famous castle town of Himeji. Unfortunately, construction has prevented me from ever seeing the actual castle structure, and so this model in the tourism office will probably be as close as I will ever get (reopens in 2015!).  The festival took place the weekend of June 22-24, with over 800 food vendors and amusement stalls open the whole day--and stage fashion shows, singing, and dancing picking up in the evening.  One of my girl friends who lives in my neighborhood and I, we went to the festival early in the afternoon, when the crowds were thin and we were free to slowly wander back and forth through the stalls. We had a delightful day of eating festival food, fried chicken, soft serve ice cream, tai-yaki, yakisoba, and I can't even remember what else now. There were hundreds of girls in yukata of all different colors, and quite a ...

Ikakita's 3rd year Elective OC Class  Monday, June 25 What to do??????? So I'm still not sure if I'll be able to get those last classes with my first year students, but I did end up telling the first year department chief that, "it would break my heart if I didn't have a real final lesson" with my first year classes. He laughed but seemed to understand why I said that, so all I can do is wait for the schedule. Things are rolling pretty fast, it's exactly 4 weeks until the end of my contract, but I'll stop teaching classes before that. Some of my last classes are tomorrow and Friday actually, so I probably should get to planning and figuring out what to do. --Edit-- Saturday, June 30 So I ended up doing a bunch of cool things actually. First I had the kids do a fill-in-the-blank dash of questions and answers about me, hehehe. Then we did a mad libs activity in pairs (mad libs can either go pretty well or flop depending on the class atmosph...

It's so easy to get burned out. But if it really is that easy, does that mean that I wasn't resilient enough in the first place? It's the final countdown here Japan-side, and my work as an ALT will soon be over. Day-to-day, I have lapses of "gosh, I'm just starting to get the hang of this" and "man, wouldn't it be great if the kids had one ALT for the whole school year for once"...stuff like that. A part of me still wishes that I could have made a read difference. And sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that I actually did. I'm gloomy today, I think that's pretty easy to tell. I just had one of those classes where it was like there was an invisible wall between me and the students, filtering out only what I was saying. Nothing seemed fun, everything seemed like I was torturing them. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that they were getting someone new next term, at least the excitement of getting a new person can ...

Of course it was an incident at work today involving cultural diversity that is getting me fired up enough to write a post about this. Just as I am forgetting about the little things here in Japan that make me tilt my head and go, "Huh?", something else comes up and it's like I can feel the invisible atmosphere of suppressiveness closing in. It doesn't make much sense, no one really cares here what I think about these sort of things. Okay that's over-exaggeration, I think it might be a generational sort of thing. I'll explain more in a moment. This particular eye-opening spit-choking moment had to do with a translation contest. One of the English teachers at my school told me that over the summer, our school's English Speaking Society (ESS) will be translating a picture book, Olanna's Big Day , into Japanese. She asked me to take a look and return it to her after.   So the book is about a young student (probably elementary, since the book sa...

So some of my advanced students said that they wanted to learn more about American culture/life in America. And it's just been long enough that I am bit at a loss... Where should I start? O_O ideas welcome and necessary

This weekend I kicked off June in style with my boy here in Kobe. In style consisted of exploring scary mountains at night, climbing structures, wandering crowded Osaka streets and spacious castles grounds, pretending to belong in fancy buildings, watching great movies and tv, and just all-around chilling. So needed and really really wonderful :)

There were a few things I wanted to end with for this story, but with the passing of time and the feeling that my original intentions for writing are not so relevant anymore (I kind of meant this to be a "Don't worry seniors, things get crazy during spring semester and you never know where you'll end up!" encouragement type of reflection), I think it's better just to wrap up with the other reason why I felt like writing. Basically, it was mostly for me, that these thoughts swirling in my head seemed to be visited and revisited time and time again since I've been here, and finally I was patient and brave enough to write something down. "Did I make the right decision?" "How did I get to this point?" "Am I doing what I intended to do by coming to Japan instead of teaching in America?" etc etc. But the answers in my head only had a few tangible words, and so writing them down forced me to think about how to phrase them. Talking w...

I know that this is the kind of thing that kids do in elementary school, but I absolutely love making these with my students here. I just hope that they remember something and will be able to describe themselves with some nice words.

So continuing on somewhere after I left off from  last time ... I returned from Indiana, and to tell you the truth most of it is a blur. My thesis was due before the end of the month and I still hadn't finished collecting data. I was stressed out about the different offers but didn't really have the time or willpower to really think about what I actually wanted. I knew I didn't want to let anybody down. It all sounds so easy from the outside. "You wouldn't be letting anyone down, Elaine!" "Wouldn't you always regret not going to Japan?" "You can always go back to America and become a teacher later," etc. etc. But no, the thoughts in my head were the exploding masses of whether I was a good or bad person. Whether I could abandon my third grade classroom in Sacramento waiting for me. Whether I could let down my future housemate Joe, who was so sweet and ready to be newcomers to the community we were joining. To this day I still rememb...

1. Shaq getting his doctorate in Education. I seriously think that is super super cool, and super sweet that he said that he did it for his mom. Charles Barkley: I can't believe this guy has a degree. Shaq: 3 of them! You show 'em Big Guy. 2. Today I realized that both Pikachu and Mickey Mouse are mouses. And even more smile-worthy was how I realized this after I made a worksheet where Mickey is asking Pikachu how to say words in Japanese, which makes sense if you think about where they are from. Cultural exchange ftw. 3. Watching The Amazing Race finale go to Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Osaka--places where I myself have traveled and lived. Seriously, it was so cool. I loved how they had trouble buying train tickets, and I loved how they spent the night on Miyajima island and there was a stop motion/fast forward video of the tide rushing out from the shrine. I loved how they ate at a rotating sushi place, and I loved how they had to explore Osaka castle. And ...

Today I am in Tokyo, yesterday I was in Kyoto. It's not a far distance but I get overwhelmed with the "whoa really?" feelings every once in a while--life sure is interesting.

It would take a few minutes for me to place the exact date, but basically I wanted to take the time and think about these events during a time that impacted my life so much. It must be the combination of Brown's Spring Weekend events and watching kids receive First Communion at the church I go to in Kobe, but it sparked a lot of thinking back and wanting to express it. Brown's Spring Weekend in 2011 was a week earlier I remember, because I actually skipped out on Spring Weekend to go to Indiana on a weekend retreat from April 15-17 to visit Notre Dame University. I had been accepted to a 2-year teaching program there that placed recent college grads in Catholic schools. The acceptance came soon after the Tohoku earthquake in Japan, and feeling unsettled over waiting for JET and the desire to keep my options open, I took the program's offer and was invited to visit campus with other members of the program. A free trip to a college campus, and the people I had been in conta...

Sometime soon I'll post about my cherry blossom adventures!  But first...  The new school year is finally finally here :)  In Japan, the school year ends in March and starts again in April. It's a really weird state of mind for those of us leaving in August. Since signing re-contracting/not re-contracting papers in February coincide with the slowing down of classes, exam periods, etc, I felt like I was inundated with the messages of LEAVING, FINISHING, GOING BACK, from my friends here, from my friends back home, teachers, and so on. But to tell you the truth, I'm really not into that right now, because there's still a whole lot of teaching to get done and a whole lot of adventures to be had, and well...it really isn't all that close you know, and until I can really see leaving on the horizon (plane tickets bought, packing boxes, contacting my successor and working out that stuff), I can't really look forward to that yet. It's like thinking about ...

View Larger Map 19. It's been a terribly terribly long winter, but the cherry blossom season has finally arrived! This Saturday I found myself exploring Lake Biwa in Otsu-shi, the capital city of Shiga prefecture. A couple of my fellow JETs and I thought that the largest lake in Japan would be oober picturesque and filled with lots of cherry blossoms. Unfortunately, the lake looked more like this. Beautiful, no doubt, but also very very desolate. And very very devoid of sakura trees. We were hungry, however, so we set up our picnic and started to eat. The weather was highly uncooperative, and less than halfway into my sandwich, it started to rain. Like the wicked witch that would melt with water, we fled to a nearby mall. Completing our lunch indoors, we decided to try our luck at Miidera temple, about a 20 minute walk north. But alas, our luck continued to sour, and though I thought it was a beautiful area and would have been satisfied simply wandering for the rest of ...