Every year in Kasama City, Jr. High students from all over Ibaraki come together with their teachers and their ALT’s to present their own unique 5-minute speech. This year 78 students participated, split into 2 groups. Continue reading
Summer break is over, the homework is turned in and 2nd term has started. You know what this means?
You got it! Sports Day!
The late summer air filled with students cheering and laughing, teachers screaming encouragement (because no one here is competitive at all, no, absolutely not!) and parents scrambling to get the best photo spot to practice their action shots (it’s a nation of photographers after all). Continue reading
Here we go! The year is moving fast and it’s time for a new survival guide! Hope it helps and let me know if you have any more questions!
Fall
Ah, the fall. My #1 most favorite season, especially in Japan! Summers humidity is gone, it’s not too cold yet and the colours! My gosh the colours! I’ve never seen trees so vibrant and reds, golds and oranges so breathtakingly vivid. I love summer but the fall totally wins as my favorite season. Continue reading
It’s happened. You’re in Japan. You finished all the training. You have all your materials and your Survival Kit is ready for anything. You’re ready to teach up a storm!
Ready, Set….
Sit in the Teachers Room.
It’s that time of year again! Typhoon season! We’ve already had one come through the area and I recently found this post I had written back in October 2014 and forgotten about! Woops! So without further ado, the new and improved Typhoons in Japan!
We’re nearing the end of the official typhoon season here in Japan and I’m here to relate my experiences with them, as well as offer some advice from a sunny southern Californian on how to safely weather them if you’ve never seen anything more than an inch of rain falling throughout a whole day (or as a refresher for those who’ve seen them before and just want some reminding). Continue reading
Few things scare me as much as needles. The very idea of a shot makes me woozy! My mom literally had to pull me out of the car screaming and tear away the seat belt I had in a death grip to get me into a doctors office when I was younger. Nurses pinned me down as they poked me with that horrible thing of my nightmares until they could find a vein. No joke.
The only thing that may compare is the idea of falling from a high, well… height! I’m all fine and dandy when my feet are on solid ground but put me on a rope or swaying bridge and I’m down for the count! How then, did I find myself in a metal cage underneath the longest suspension bridge in Japan, hobbled with a long rubber rope and about to jump off into oblivion? Continue reading
*NOTE: I found this blog post and a few others I’d written awhile ago and never published. So I’ve gone through and updated them a bit and they’ll be coming in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
Living in Japan has many perks, and hopping on a shinkansen to travel for a holiday weekend is one of them. So for a 3-day weekend in the fall, I planned a trip to Hiroshima and Miyajima (planned being a strong word, I booked a hostel and left it at that). This is what I learned: Continue reading