English Camp :)
Okay, lots of random stuff has been going on the last several days. Last week the ALTs held a beach party in Karatsu, which is about an hour and ten minute train ride from Saga City. I got a car ride there and took the train back with a group of other newbies...when you can't read a darn thing on the train schedule it's better to travel in packs ;) Anyways, I got to the party late so I couldn't stay long, but I was there for the lovely sunset. Karatsu's a really beautiful little city, unfortunately there had been a typhoon only a few days before so the beach was covered in trash, but the landscape around it was nice: 1, 2, 3. Here's a random photo of some other ALTs, Joanne, Jen and Steven ^_^
The big highlight of this week was the Karatsu English Camp; I went with several other ALTs. The center is in this pretty little seaside town about a forty minute drive from Karatsu. Basically these English camps are held for first-year high school students who like English class. They sign up, pay a flat fee for food and lodging, and stay three days to play games with the ALTs and practice English. It was so much fun; I had a group of four boys, though one of them had to leave the second day. Here's the other three, Motohiko, Taihei and Yuudai. They were really cool...all these kids were, actually. Taihei was the best English speaker of the group, and he was basically the spokesperson for the other three. I had a hard time getting the others to talk to me, though I could tell they wanted to. The Japanese in general have a real embarrassment/shyness complex going on. They are terrified of making mistakes in English, so instead they never talk at all.
Still, they were nice kids. Children in Japan are raised very differently from those in the West, and at 15 they are a lot less mature than Western kids in many respects. They still love to play simple games (even the boys, who we witnessed playing the sort of clapping hand games only third grade girls in the West play) and they don't think they're too cool for the adults. When it comes to responsibility though (especially cleaning up after themselves) they are much more mature than Western kids. In their free time they were allowed to just wander around and do whatever they wanted...and there wasn't a single incident. I remember a trip in middle school where we stayed at a hotel and the chaperons put colored stickers on our doors so that if anyone snuck out during the night, they'd know. Such prison-like methods are completely unnecessary with these Japanese kids. They really amazed us.
The facilities were really nice, here's photo of the inside of the dormitory building. All the female ALTs were stuck in the same room where the only bedding was minimal futons (read: rock hard. My back was not happy with me), but it was nice enough. The best thing about the place really was the Onsen upstairs. The whole naked thing really didn't bother me...I surprised myself with that one. I'm determined now to go to a real Onsen, the natural hot spring type ^_^
We played a lot of the games with the kids, which was good practice for our actual job of working in the schools, and on the second day we did a lot of sports activities and races outside. My group won most of them ^_^ Believe it or not, two required gym subjects in Japan are unicycles and stilts. Evil...
Random Otaku question: So Jess, do Japanese kids really use all those expressions you hear in anime?
Yeah, actually they do. I found it infinitely easier to understand the kids' casual chatter than the adults in stores or at the Kencho, who use much more formal speech. I got a lot of good Japanese practice at this camp :) One of the activities we had to do with the kids was a short English drama. All the groups had names, ours was the Puffers (no, I did not pick it. I didn't, honest!). We had to write the drama using a specific song lyric in the script; other than that the plot could be whatever we wanted. My boys weren't the creative types and they had a terrible time writing the thing, so in the end we made the story have something to do with our group name. I went rather well in the end I thought; we had lots of martial-arts type fighting, and everyone seemed to enjoy it ^_^
The evening of the second day was a barbecue, and referring back to my earlier comment about organization and responsibility, we could hardly believe our eyes when the kids did all the work. They had never done a BBQ like this in their lives, but with only five minutes of directions from the supervisor they knew exactly what to do. They cleaned the dishes, chopped the wood, tended the fires, cooked the food, and cleaned the whole mess back up again, all without being told twice. Simply amazing. And the food was great ^_^
Here are some more pictures of the camp. The place was crawling with little red crabs. Every morning they had this sort of flag ceremony. And because I just couldn't resist, I doodled a dragon on their chalkboard. When I went back later in the day, some of the kids had drawn their own dragons beside it ^_^ Here's the whole group making a handprint poster to commemorate the camp. We also walked quite a bit around the hills and beaches around the center, it was beautiful scenery. What am I saying, this whole island is gorgeous! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Let's see, what else...oh yeah, I visited the main Saga Shinto shrine yesterday. There weren't any events going on, the only people besides me were some traditionaly dressed miko. I didn't take photos of them because I thought it would be rude, so I just took pictures of the complex instead. Here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I had an amazing experience yesterday. I was walking around looking for the art store and I couldn't find it, so I wandered into the big downtown department store Tamaya instead. I explored the place until I found their kimono shop. I had been having trouble finding geta my size and luck seemed to be on my side yesterday, because one of the women working there has been taking English conversation classes and could actually talk to me. She not only sold me geta the right size (and on sale for only 2000 yen!), when I told her I'd made a yukata she got all excited and invited me to come back today and show it to her. When I walked in this morning the staff made a huge fuss over me, and to my surprise insisted on dressing me up! Here's me in front of their beautiful (and horrifically expensive) kimono, and in front of their store manneqins. Fun!
But that's not the end of the story! After selling me the geta yesterday the woman bustled me over to meet one of the store managers, who in turn took me to a little traditional Japanese restaurant nearby to introduce me to the owner Itsuko Eguchi (affectionately nicknamed "Mama-san" by her customers) who loves foreigners and who has been to America several times. She's a really cool woman, I'm planning to go to her place for dinner Monday night, hopefully I can get some other ALTs to come with me. Her business has been down because of the slow economy :( In the space of an hour I made three new Japanese acquaintances...and all by accident! Funny how the world works sometimes...
The big highlight of this week was the Karatsu English Camp; I went with several other ALTs. The center is in this pretty little seaside town about a forty minute drive from Karatsu. Basically these English camps are held for first-year high school students who like English class. They sign up, pay a flat fee for food and lodging, and stay three days to play games with the ALTs and practice English. It was so much fun; I had a group of four boys, though one of them had to leave the second day. Here's the other three, Motohiko, Taihei and Yuudai. They were really cool...all these kids were, actually. Taihei was the best English speaker of the group, and he was basically the spokesperson for the other three. I had a hard time getting the others to talk to me, though I could tell they wanted to. The Japanese in general have a real embarrassment/shyness complex going on. They are terrified of making mistakes in English, so instead they never talk at all.
Still, they were nice kids. Children in Japan are raised very differently from those in the West, and at 15 they are a lot less mature than Western kids in many respects. They still love to play simple games (even the boys, who we witnessed playing the sort of clapping hand games only third grade girls in the West play) and they don't think they're too cool for the adults. When it comes to responsibility though (especially cleaning up after themselves) they are much more mature than Western kids. In their free time they were allowed to just wander around and do whatever they wanted...and there wasn't a single incident. I remember a trip in middle school where we stayed at a hotel and the chaperons put colored stickers on our doors so that if anyone snuck out during the night, they'd know. Such prison-like methods are completely unnecessary with these Japanese kids. They really amazed us.
The facilities were really nice, here's photo of the inside of the dormitory building. All the female ALTs were stuck in the same room where the only bedding was minimal futons (read: rock hard. My back was not happy with me), but it was nice enough. The best thing about the place really was the Onsen upstairs. The whole naked thing really didn't bother me...I surprised myself with that one. I'm determined now to go to a real Onsen, the natural hot spring type ^_^
We played a lot of the games with the kids, which was good practice for our actual job of working in the schools, and on the second day we did a lot of sports activities and races outside. My group won most of them ^_^ Believe it or not, two required gym subjects in Japan are unicycles and stilts. Evil...
Random Otaku question: So Jess, do Japanese kids really use all those expressions you hear in anime?
Yeah, actually they do. I found it infinitely easier to understand the kids' casual chatter than the adults in stores or at the Kencho, who use much more formal speech. I got a lot of good Japanese practice at this camp :) One of the activities we had to do with the kids was a short English drama. All the groups had names, ours was the Puffers (no, I did not pick it. I didn't, honest!). We had to write the drama using a specific song lyric in the script; other than that the plot could be whatever we wanted. My boys weren't the creative types and they had a terrible time writing the thing, so in the end we made the story have something to do with our group name. I went rather well in the end I thought; we had lots of martial-arts type fighting, and everyone seemed to enjoy it ^_^
The evening of the second day was a barbecue, and referring back to my earlier comment about organization and responsibility, we could hardly believe our eyes when the kids did all the work. They had never done a BBQ like this in their lives, but with only five minutes of directions from the supervisor they knew exactly what to do. They cleaned the dishes, chopped the wood, tended the fires, cooked the food, and cleaned the whole mess back up again, all without being told twice. Simply amazing. And the food was great ^_^
Here are some more pictures of the camp. The place was crawling with little red crabs. Every morning they had this sort of flag ceremony. And because I just couldn't resist, I doodled a dragon on their chalkboard. When I went back later in the day, some of the kids had drawn their own dragons beside it ^_^ Here's the whole group making a handprint poster to commemorate the camp. We also walked quite a bit around the hills and beaches around the center, it was beautiful scenery. What am I saying, this whole island is gorgeous! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Let's see, what else...oh yeah, I visited the main Saga Shinto shrine yesterday. There weren't any events going on, the only people besides me were some traditionaly dressed miko. I didn't take photos of them because I thought it would be rude, so I just took pictures of the complex instead. Here they are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I had an amazing experience yesterday. I was walking around looking for the art store and I couldn't find it, so I wandered into the big downtown department store Tamaya instead. I explored the place until I found their kimono shop. I had been having trouble finding geta my size and luck seemed to be on my side yesterday, because one of the women working there has been taking English conversation classes and could actually talk to me. She not only sold me geta the right size (and on sale for only 2000 yen!), when I told her I'd made a yukata she got all excited and invited me to come back today and show it to her. When I walked in this morning the staff made a huge fuss over me, and to my surprise insisted on dressing me up! Here's me in front of their beautiful (and horrifically expensive) kimono, and in front of their store manneqins. Fun!
But that's not the end of the story! After selling me the geta yesterday the woman bustled me over to meet one of the store managers, who in turn took me to a little traditional Japanese restaurant nearby to introduce me to the owner Itsuko Eguchi (affectionately nicknamed "Mama-san" by her customers) who loves foreigners and who has been to America several times. She's a really cool woman, I'm planning to go to her place for dinner Monday night, hopefully I can get some other ALTs to come with me. Her business has been down because of the slow economy :( In the space of an hour I made three new Japanese acquaintances...and all by accident! Funny how the world works sometimes...