My kids and Furnishing the Apartment

Exciting weekend coming up. Amazingly, its another long weekend so Asuka and I have decided to utilize it and head off to Nagasaki. There is a really cool Dutch settlement and since Nagasaki is closer to China it has a lot of Chinese influence. So they have a large Chinatown that I look forward to visiting. Starting to really miss Chinese food. They also have a huge festival this weekend that has them carrying a large dragon float, really similar to Chinese New Year. I will tell you all about it when I get back. Picture above: View of Kawajiri, taken while rollerblading.

As for the last week or so there hasn’t been too much going on here. Just school as usual. I have been going to elementary a lot and the kids there are a lot of fun. I even brought my hockey equipment this week and this one super cute/mischievous 1^st grader put it on. At Noro-higashi, a smaller elemtnary school the principal is a taiko master and he’s been training the kids since they enter the school at grade 1. So the kids play taiko super well and put on an awesome performance for me.

So both elementary and high school has been fun. The weather here is starting to change a bit more and its getting a tad colder. This week it has rained a lot and I left my umbrella at home and got absolutely soak when I got off the train and had to walk to school. Luckily the gym teacher had a spare t-shirt and I wore that for the rest of the day. Last week we also had a city wide meeting at a school in kure. The school was pretty cool as it was set on top of a hill, so it had a great view of the city. We had to park at the bottom of the hill and hike our way up. The intresting thing about the school was that part way up the mountain there was a cemetery. So the kids actually see a cemetery when they look out the window.

Had dinner in Kure yesterday as melody’s fiancé finally came from new Zealand. We went to an izakaya again and we had a good meal. Mel’s fiancé Jason is 6`3, close to 300 pounds and also a super nice guy. Though I have to watch myself and not make fun of mel too much because it might cause me to get the crap kicked out of me. My supervisor, Mr. Sakata also stopped by with 3 other teachers and it was fun chatting with them outside of work.

As for Asuka, she seems to have settled here quite nicely, we’ve been slowly buying more stuff for the apartment and it appears we have almost everything we need. Asuka signed up for two placement companies last week and luckily that got back to her with a job from Mazda. It pays pretty quite well and it will have to do with translating Japanese and English documents and conferences. She’ll visit the company next week and should start work shortly. It also funny that she will be working for Mazda as both her father and brother work for Honda and Honda was the reason why she was even able to live in Canada in the first place when her dad got sent to Ontario. Picture of me pillow shopping at the department store.

Well that’s all that been going on, as for my Japanese factoid #6 let me explain how there are no janitors in Japanese schools. Back home we always have a janitor to clean the washrooms and sweep the floors. However, in Japan, the students and teachers keep the school clean. So everyday after the last class the whole school does a huge cleanup. And I really mean clean up. Kids get on their knees and scrub the floors with towels. You see kids on ledges wiping the windows and even racking leaves and picking roots on the school grounds. I help up with the garbage disposal, but it really is quite efficient and it gives the students a responsibility to keep the school clean because they know that they will have to clean it up if they get it dirty.