Two weeks ago, I had a Christmas party for the students in my jr. high school eikaiwa (English conversation class). It was my Christmas present to them for all the hard work they had put in during the year. It was a bit stressful and expensive for me, but I think that it was a success. Everyone had fun and they may have even learned something.
This year I spent my second Christmas in Nakatsu. I suppose I could talk about all the negatives of celebrating Christmas in Japan. I could moan about being far away from my family, how most Japanese people still work on Christmas, how I will be back at work on the 26th, or the fact that most Japanese have never tasted turkey, etc. But instead I am going to talk about the good things I have found this year. Christmas is certainly different here, but if you look hard enough you can find the Christmas spirit anywhere.
Last week Nakatsu Japan was transformed into a winter wonderland, for a few hours at least. I managed to snap these pictures in the morning after it had been snowing during the night. Last year in Nakatsu it snowed only once and did not accumulate much at all. This year however it looked beautiful. I am from Wisconsin originally and there is nothing quite as beautiful as new fallen snow.
Last weekend I heard that there was a new Apple store opening in the Tenjin shopping area of Fukuoka. Now I am a pretty big Apple fan, but it seemed like a lot of effort to go all the way to Fukuoka for a store opening. But I hadn’t taken a day trip in a long time, so it was a good excuse. At about 11:00am Saturday morning I boarded a train for Hakata Station.
A few weeks ago I had a lesson about writing stories based on pictures. For the activity a group of five students chose a picture and wrote a story about it. Then they presented their stories to the class. The hardest part of planning this lesson was finding suitable pictures. There are pictures everywhere in the Internet but more of them would not work for the activity. If I used pictures of famous celebrities or places the students would be tempted to write down what they already know about these people or places rather than making an original story. Thus the pictures had to be interesting but obscure. I just couldn’t find enough of this type of picture, so I decided to use some old pictures I found on my hard drive. These are pictures I had taken of my friends in America. And they generated some very interesting responses. What follows are two of the pictures and the stories my class wrote about them:
Yesterday I posted an article on the gaming site 4 color rebellion. If you are not into video games, you might want to skip this one. But it does include a humorous video of Alex playing an arcade game with a virtual sword.
Alex wants to teach in Japan next year so I asked for permission for him to visit my classes. The school was enthusiastic about this and in the 2 days he visited my school we were scheduled for classes every single period. We wound up visiting all of the first and third year classes. In the third year classes, we decided to use Alex’s skill at playing the guitar to do a live music lesson. Since I don’t play any instrument, the only music lessons I had done previously were with recordings. This was a very nice opportunity for the students.
I have always been a fan of the arcade game Pac-Man. I used to play it every time I went to Shakey’s Pizza. Now some people have gone to the trouble of building the game in real life. It looks a lot harder to play than the original, but I’m still dying to give it a try. The full story was reported on Akihabara News, so check out their pictures and a video if it in action.
Thanks to 4 color rebellion for the tip.