(no subject)
I'm finally going to write the entry about my high school's culture festival (or bunkasai in Japanese).
The festival was held on the 3rd and 4th of this month. The school was opened to the public for the weekend. The culture festival is an event for the students to show the local community what they've been doing in their extracurricular activities and it's also an opportunity for the students to just have fun. The students spend a lot of time preparing for the festival. I'd seen them working on festival preparations since shortly after I first arrived at the school in July. The whole school was decorated by the students. The homeroom classes in each grade all decorate their classrooms, each room with a different theme. This year's festival theme at our school was movies, so each class chose a popular movie (like Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, or Alice in Wonderland) for their classroom's theme. They then went all out with decorating. Each room either sold food or had some sort of games for people to play. There were also a few different rooms that the students made into haunted houses (of course, these rooms were very popular). The festival was also an opportunity for the cultural clubs to show what they've been doing in their meetings. Groups such as the band, dance team, baton club, and tea ceremony club all put on performances during the festival. The photography, art, calligraphy, and astronomy clubs also all had rooms to display their work.
That weekend was basically the best days of work I've had so far because it wasn't actually work. I got paid to attend the school festival, eat food, play games, watch performances, and talk with the students. One of my favorite rooms was the Harry Potter themed room. The students decorated the outside of the room like Platform 9 3/4 and the inside like the Great Hall. Inside the room the students sold yakisoba. There were four tables set up, one for each Hogwarts house. Before giving each customer their food, the students would put the Sorting Hat on their head and sort them into a house. I was amused when the students decided to sort me into Hufflepuff (even though it's not my house of choice, I think them sorting me into Hufflepuf shows that they think I'm nice). One of my other favorite parts of the weekend was going to the tea ceremony club's tea ceremony/koto performance. There's something about koto playing that I really like. Here's a link to a few pictures from the festival (cause I'm being too lazy to upload them into this entry right now). I have more, but I'm not posting them because they have my students in them. (I don't think it's kosher to post photos of my students online without their permission.) I feel like the few pictures that I can post don't quite do the festival (or the amount of work that the kids put into it) justice.
That same weekend was the weekend that Leslie and Kate arrived in Japan. We tried to meet up in Ikebukuro that Saturday night, but they were really tired and I was a bit late getting to the station. That, combined with the fact that they didn't have cellphones yet, meant that we were unable to meet up. I was pretty disappointed about this because I'd really wanted to see Leslie before she had to go to Osaka. The night wasn't a complete loss though. After I'd been waiting at the station for a while I noticed another blonde foreign girl waiting by herself, too. We passed each other by a few times, then we started talking because we were both waiting. She told me to call her Ed. It turned out that she was also a JET and that she was also having trouble meeting up with her friends because she had forgotten her cell phone. Since we both couldn't find our friends, we decided to go grab dinner together. On our way to find food, Ed ran into the friends she had been looking for. They were four college-aged Japanese guys. They all invited me to come eat with them, so we got a bunch of pizza and pasta at Shakey's. They were a fun group to hang out with and Ed had a lot of amusing teacher stories because she's been here a year longer than I have. After dinner, we managed to squeeze all six of us into a purikura machine and took some ridiculous purikura pics. Even though my original plans (sadly) didn't work out, I still ended up having a good time. Ed and I exchanged info, so maybe we'll meet up again sometime.
The festival was held on the 3rd and 4th of this month. The school was opened to the public for the weekend. The culture festival is an event for the students to show the local community what they've been doing in their extracurricular activities and it's also an opportunity for the students to just have fun. The students spend a lot of time preparing for the festival. I'd seen them working on festival preparations since shortly after I first arrived at the school in July. The whole school was decorated by the students. The homeroom classes in each grade all decorate their classrooms, each room with a different theme. This year's festival theme at our school was movies, so each class chose a popular movie (like Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, or Alice in Wonderland) for their classroom's theme. They then went all out with decorating. Each room either sold food or had some sort of games for people to play. There were also a few different rooms that the students made into haunted houses (of course, these rooms were very popular). The festival was also an opportunity for the cultural clubs to show what they've been doing in their meetings. Groups such as the band, dance team, baton club, and tea ceremony club all put on performances during the festival. The photography, art, calligraphy, and astronomy clubs also all had rooms to display their work.
That weekend was basically the best days of work I've had so far because it wasn't actually work. I got paid to attend the school festival, eat food, play games, watch performances, and talk with the students. One of my favorite rooms was the Harry Potter themed room. The students decorated the outside of the room like Platform 9 3/4 and the inside like the Great Hall. Inside the room the students sold yakisoba. There were four tables set up, one for each Hogwarts house. Before giving each customer their food, the students would put the Sorting Hat on their head and sort them into a house. I was amused when the students decided to sort me into Hufflepuff (even though it's not my house of choice, I think them sorting me into Hufflepuf shows that they think I'm nice). One of my other favorite parts of the weekend was going to the tea ceremony club's tea ceremony/koto performance. There's something about koto playing that I really like. Here's a link to a few pictures from the festival (cause I'm being too lazy to upload them into this entry right now). I have more, but I'm not posting them because they have my students in them. (I don't think it's kosher to post photos of my students online without their permission.) I feel like the few pictures that I can post don't quite do the festival (or the amount of work that the kids put into it) justice.
That same weekend was the weekend that Leslie and Kate arrived in Japan. We tried to meet up in Ikebukuro that Saturday night, but they were really tired and I was a bit late getting to the station. That, combined with the fact that they didn't have cellphones yet, meant that we were unable to meet up. I was pretty disappointed about this because I'd really wanted to see Leslie before she had to go to Osaka. The night wasn't a complete loss though. After I'd been waiting at the station for a while I noticed another blonde foreign girl waiting by herself, too. We passed each other by a few times, then we started talking because we were both waiting. She told me to call her Ed. It turned out that she was also a JET and that she was also having trouble meeting up with her friends because she had forgotten her cell phone. Since we both couldn't find our friends, we decided to go grab dinner together. On our way to find food, Ed ran into the friends she had been looking for. They were four college-aged Japanese guys. They all invited me to come eat with them, so we got a bunch of pizza and pasta at Shakey's. They were a fun group to hang out with and Ed had a lot of amusing teacher stories because she's been here a year longer than I have. After dinner, we managed to squeeze all six of us into a purikura machine and took some ridiculous purikura pics. Even though my original plans (sadly) didn't work out, I still ended up having a good time. Ed and I exchanged info, so maybe we'll meet up again sometime.