Simple Home in Paradise: April 2016

Our Winter semester ended on Friday and what a semester it has been! We have been so busy that I haven't had time to blog like I had planned so I hope to squeeze in the time to add blog posts when I can.

This is backing up to February again...

We celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary on February 16th. When some of our students found out it was going to be our anniversary soon they offered to babysit the girls for us while we went on a date! It was so fun to go out and spend time with just the 2 of us. Our first night off since we've been here. We went to a yaki niku restaurant that is close to our apartment and it was delicious! Yaki niku means "grilled meat" and is really fun because you have a little grill at your table and cook the thinly sliced meat and vegetables that you ordered and then dip them in a delicious sauce. Unfortunately the pictures I have are terrible because my phone only takes good pictures outside in full sunlight but here is what I have.

Here is our meal of rice (which is so delicious in this reason)

Wow, our time here in Japan is just flying by! We have never been so busy but we are really enjoying this adventure. I decided I had to make time to finally update this blog!

First I'm going to back up a few months and tell you about some of the fun events we had at our Mikuni school in February.

I get to teach the Modern American Culture class and I love it! I decided that we needed to start this class so I could help prepare the Japanese students for some of the cultural differences that can be hard for Japanese students when they first come to school in America. Since Geoff and I have had about 18 foreign students (most of them Japanese) come and live with us since we’ve been married we’ve seen a lot of these challenges first hand. Some of the things I teach in my class are: participating and contributing to class discussions (in Japan the students are expected to just sit and listen to their teacher with out asking questions, giving comments etc.) the differences between dating in Japan and in America (and wow, are there a lot!) food, cooking, facebook, gmail/googledocs, greeting people/being more out going, eating and cooking in America (where we don't use the metric system!) etc. I have really loved this class and I think the students do too, even though I make them do things that are completely out of their comfort zone! One of them was teaching them how a dance works and having one for Valentine’s Day. All of the students were so nervous and did NOT want to dance but after teaching them the basics and putting everyone on committees to get everything ready (music play list, refreshments, decorations, sound system etc.) when the dance actually came everyone did awesome and really enjoyed it! I’m really proud of my students because dancing is NOT something most Japanese people do! (Unless of course it’s Obon and they are doing the traditional line dances all together.)

Everyone getting read for the dance to start

Eventually I did get the boys and girls to dance together ;)

Some of our Mikuni ladies

Aya enjoying the awesome refreshments we had

I told the students what the term "wall flower" means and here 2 of them are demonstrating it for me :)

As if I didn’t put them out of their comfort zone enough, the next week we had a talent show and I told everyone well in advance that participation was mandatory. And wow, Mikuni’s got talent! We were blown away by everything from guitar playing to baking to speaking Pigeon (that was Aya) to video game tutoring to my very favorite, a boys band! Let me explain a little about this. Several of our boy students live in a lodge(cabin) instead of the apartment building like everyone else. We naturally started calling them “The Lodge Boys” and so I told them with a name like that they really should start a boys band. I would often remind them, jokingly, to practice singing and dancing and they did it! For the talent show they did not one but several song and dance numbers in boys band style. It was awesome and hilarious! When they get famous I’m totally telling everyone it was my idea :)