Monday, June 7

IN A NUTSHELL: Visitors From Afar

The Weather Card Game! At the elementary school today, it was Icky and Hot. Just miserable. Is it going to be hot this whole week right as my parents are coming? Despite the hot weather, however, my weather card game was a success! I don't know how I thought this up, but it worked really well. I made mini playing cards by printing little pictures, each saying "sunny" "snowy" "windy" "cloudy" or "rainy" in color, gluing them to construction paper, then cutting them out. I made about 150 cards. About one out of every eight, I made a special card that said "tornado" or "lightening." The rules were simple, put down a card and say the right word. If you made a mistake, you had to take the pile. If you played the lightening card, you had to take the pile. If you played the tornado card, then everyone gave their cards to the person on their right (like a tornado of cards.) I demonstrated with one team of 4, then let them go. Woo hoo! I also had fun with my fifth and sixth graders today as we learned adjectives. Cute and Scary was especially funny - I brought in my cute princess doll and a scary skull. I also brought my funky doll of The Count from Sesame Street, which is neither cute nor scary. We passed them around, pretending the doll was scary and the skull was cute for a little while. Lots of fun.

Parking at Hiroshima Station I followed the first sign I saw to Hiroshima station, which wasn't a good idea because it took me on a really roundabout way instead of the way I was familiar with. I had to drive around the station once, but I made it to the parking garage. I found a spot fine. The one problem I had was that THE STATION WAS CLOSING. I should have remembered this from when Denise and Ann couldn't get in. Still, trains were coming in even if it was nearing 10pm. All the stores were closing, though, and I just had to hope the parking garage did not close. After walking all the way around the station, I went up and waited at the Shinkansen exit. My directions were overkill since there were so few people there. I had not received any calls on my cell phone, so that was a good sign. After a bit of waiting (and reading The DaVinci Code) they came! Woo hoo!

Long Drive I found out later that they had not even packed my cell phone number. Good thing they found all the trains from Osaka. Good thing the parking garage had an automatic payment system and so was open 24 hours. I put on my air conditioner for the first time because it was so humid out. Then I turned it off and my window fogged up intensely. I had to turn it back on again. The drive back was long for them, and we did not make it back to Sakugi until after midnight. My parents and brother were still awake, the troopers.

IN A NUTSHELL: The Wooden Egg Roll

Work I got up early and went to work like I agreed to, bleah. My morning classes were pretty fun. I did a simple review game where I basically had my 8th and 9th graders write down as many English words as they could in 7 minutes (without their textbook). It was amazing how many 7th grade words they relied on. They read out their words one by one and if another student had the same word, I gave them double points. Looking back, the opposite would have been better. I should have given them more points for original words. I had been hoping they would try to use vocab words if I did it this way, but that didn't happen.

Self Introduction With Actual Foreigners! I left at 12 and went back home. My parents and brother had fun their first morning in Sakugi. I took them to Sakugi's only restaurant where we had noodles, then I took them back up to the school at around 1. The staff was very welcoming and the principal talked with us in his office for awhile (while we ate tea and cake.) Fifth period started really quickly and we didn't finish our cake. Tomomi met my parents and brother then suddenly asked me if I had any ideas for the next lesson. (He wanted to do a review and sing the ABC song again) I guess he did not expect me to leave at 12. Anyway, we went up to the second floor and the lesson was mostly them asking questions then we practiced introductions. My parents (and brother especially) were good sports, enduring unusual questions, like asking if Jack liked any of the girls in class, then they shook a lot of hands and said "Nice to meet you". We walked back down and it was a giggle-fest for the 8th grade girls when I suggested they introduce themselves to my brother. The word of the day was "kakkoi!" (cool!) My brother is so kakkoi! We hung out in the principal's office a little longer. They gave us some cold "Dakara" a sports drink even though it was not nearly as hot as yesterday. Then they said we could leave whenever, so we headed out.

Waterfall Before dusk, I took my parents up to one of Sakugi's two tourist attractions: Josei Falls. On the way up, we looked at the nifty giant map on the signboard. No one else was up there and we had the honor of signing the guestbook from a REALLY far off place. At the waterfall is where the running joke started: I was trying to read the sign but I only understood as far as "This waterfall..." so from then on, every time we saw a sign with lots of kanji, someone would say "This temple..." or "This building..." trailing off. In the parking lot, I proceeded to run over my brother's foot with my car. Oops. but he seemed to be okay.

Get Wood Free With Dinner I tried out a random Japanese restaurant in Miyoshi and it turned out good, except when I had my mom put dressing instead of tonkatsu sauce on the tonkatsu and when the egg roll on the picture was not an egg roll at all. It was an egg-roll-shaped piece of wood. We found out later that it was meant to be something to crush the sesame seeds with before putting it in the tonkatsu sauce. Oops. After that, we got to see the mid-parking-lot rice paddy, a true example of historic vs modern. Then we went to karaoke! I'm impressed how many songs my parents and brother know that I don't. It's true. Karaoke is in the genes!

IN A NUTSHELL: Survey Madness

Highlights of The Peace Park Fairly early in the morning, we drove down to Hiroshima and parked in a tower near the YMCA, then we walked up to the peace park.

• Getting stopped and questioned by massive amounts of wandering elementary students
• Stunning one of the little girls when I started spouting Japanese
• Seeing a random yosokoi souran done by kids that was nearly identical to the one at the Jr. High
• Getting prayed over separately by a wandering old woman who did not ask us for money or anything else
• The echoing of the peace gong, rung by dad
We ate lunch at a random hole-in-the-wall okonomiaki restaurant ("It's like going upstairs to eat") then walked back toward the Atomic Bomb museum after that. The whole time in the museum, it was relative silence followed by the chaos of a school group coming through, then relative silence, then another school group coming through. It was a little easier this time, but I didn't spend as much time with the exhibits as before. On the way back, we hit an underground Starbucks and had some serious mocha shakes, then we headed toward Hiroshima Castle. We just made it in before it closed. The interior of the castle was very different then I have come to expect from Japanese castles, the whopping two that I have been in. It was a full museum, very spacious, and had a real concrete stairwell in the middle instead of steep wooden stairs. At the top was... a vending machine. Nice view, though.

Miyajima Closes at 8 Apparently Finding parking at Miyajima station, something I had worried about for months, turned out to be no problem at all, especially since it was before the weekend. Finding somewhere to eat on Miyajima island, however, was a bit harder. Miyajima is touristy, but lacking in modern features like supermarkets, convenience stores, and restaurants open late. We finally found one place, after walking up and down the main strip twice (seeing dozens and dozens of unaccompanied kids, giving the impression that Miyajima is a children's island where kids and deer run free.) We were not sure what exactly we ate, so we called it Kentucky Fried Sea Creature. Then we went to our ryokan with our sea-facing room on the fourth floor.