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[This entry is a little back dated, I’ve been kinda slow at posting but want things to stay in order]

The theme for May seems rice fields, I’ve now spent two days standing in them. Geraldine, the JET in the neighboring town of Midori, invited me and a bunch of other JETs to come to her town’s rice planting festival. This is the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to do for awhile, so I was really glad to go. It was a lot of fun too, the towns people were really friendly and about a dozen of us showed up to take part. This was a really good opportunity for some of the city JETs to experience country life (and to see we aren’t lying when we tell them how long it takes to get into the city).

When we got there, they loaned us costumes to wear. Fortunately us guys were only going to play drums, because the legs of mine we a bit tight around the calfs — embarrassment would have resulted from me doing much bending. Anyways, everyone (especially the ladies ) looked really cute in their costumes. That’s me above, in case you couldn’t tell.

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Monday was a holiday, I spent it returning from Kyuushuu like I mentioned in the last blog entry.

Tuesday I had kindergarden in the morning and the last 2A class at the JHS. The kindergarden was a mix of sad and relief. Unfortunately I will only be seeing each class once every three weeks now. On the other hand, I don’t be eating lunch with them anymore (on the surface it sound like it should be fun, but in reality its a little stressful when someone gets upset they can’t sit by me and I dread the germs I’m sure they’re spreading all over my food). In the JHS class we did a couple activities and played a quiz show game. That as usual was pretty fun, the students really get into it.

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Seems like whenever anime or manga show graduation ceremonies, there are cherry blossoms (sakura) blowing in the wind everywhere. Romantic as it is, its kinda unrealistic since graduation is usually early to mid-March and most places in Japan don’t see cherry blossoms until late March-early April. Artistic license, I guess.

So, instead at today’s Mukaihara JHS graduation, we had light snow blowing gently in the wind. Didn’t look bad I guess and it wasn’t too cold.

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52% (Dixie). Barely into the Dixie category.

Actually this comes up all the time in class because of how I pronounce “a” and “the”, which I think is southern.

OK, I’m a little late for the start of the lunar new year, but I thought I’d post this picture of some of the Year of the Rooster cards the JHS students did. Again, I’m impressed at the artistic talent & creativity they have.

Having been born in early January of 1970 (which is part of the 1969 lunar year), I’m a rooster myself. So hopefully this will be a good year for me…

Sunday was my junior high school’s “culture day”, which is basically a school play & art show. Performances were pretty good, even if I couldn’t understand much of them. Most of the plays were school dramas of one sort or another. My main observation is most of the plays had far too many scene changes, which kinda broke up the flow I thought.

The one I understood most seemed to have the most acting in it. It was by done by one of my favorite classes, 2-B (2nd year is 8th grade in US). It seemed to be about some kid (rich maybe, the kind that is never allowed to see the real world) that had run away & was being pursued by men who were supposed to bring him/her home (the part was played by a girl but I got the impression it was a boy’s role). The kid meets up with some others that show him what school & life for them is like. Other thing I liked about it was that they did a good job of including most of the rest of the cast in interesting little side characters that kept popping up.