Final Weeks

I co-taught an English class for adults. As we waited for the french fries to cook during this cooking class, we reviewed the previous week's lesson where I taught the Electric Slide and the Chicken Dance and my co-teachers (aka the other foreigners of the city pictured above) did arm wrestling and obstacle courses. They were pretty good at the line dancing but it was difficult to explain why we were learning the words, "I don't want to be a chicken, I just want to be a duck, waddle, waddle, waddle, waddle..."



For the 4th of July, I had a city event where a friend translated an American trivia game and we made giant hotdogs and apple pie. It went well and some of the answers to the multiple choice questions really surprised people, such as:
- 23% of Americans own guns, most people thought it was 74%
- The average American woman is 164 cm, I think I am a bad example as most thought it was 175cm
- The most common dog's name is Max
- The White House has 132 rooms





the last day of book club

final going away parties

At this party, we filled our bowls with vegetables and sauce and tried to catch the noodles -somen- as they floated down the tube that had a hose running through it. I guess this sort of party was traditionally done with bamboo. The host mixed things up by occasionally throwing in pieces of cheese, tomatoes, and even candy. This would have been excellent for parties during college.

Spring festival
In the spirit of fireworks and leaving, I finally tried chicken sashimi, which is completely raw chicken and a pretty popular dish around these parts. If you knew how particular I used to be about meat being really well cooked, you'd know that this was a huge step for me. The texture was the same as fish sashimi so I just pretended it was fish and ended up eating quite a lot of it.

final camping trip

final lessons and days at school

last class: telephone races where the students whisper a word down the line and write it on the board as fast as possible
last school lunch: eel and rice ball soup
last cleaning time
last club activities

I'm smiling in the last picture but it was taken at the end of my last and very emotional day at my mountain school. I sobbed through every class and barely got through my lunch-time speech. The students and teachers usually can't understand my Japanese very well and so they really couldn't understand my blubbering and crying Japanese. I don't think that this sort of big display of emotion happens very often in Japan and so everyone quietly dispersed without a word after the banquet. The students then treated me like some sort of time-bomb for the rest of the day and literally stepped away when they saw me coming. At least they got really good at practicing the phrase, "don't cry." Talk about embarrassing; I'm not sure what "basket-case" is in Japanese but I'm pretty sure that's how (if anything) I'll always be remembered.