Student Stories: that CRAZY baby...

I teach a wide range of age starting with 6 month olds (I only have one). This is a story of one of my babies. He's about a year and a half old and he is CRAZY. He climbs all over his mother, runs around screeching and babbling, touches everything. His poor mother always looks so tired. One of the funniest thing that he does in his fits of temporary insanity is runs into walls. We will be in the middle of a lesson and he will jump out of his mother's lap and runs straight into the wall while screaming. The kicker is that EVERY time he does this, he looks surprised that it hurts. I'm pretty sure most people already learned by a year and a half that slamming yourself into walls hurts. Not this kid. It's a shock every time. His mom and I are hoping that he learns some basic physics one day soon...

Food Spotlight: Okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a savory dinner pancake. What makes it so fun is you cook it at your table. You also get to pick what ingredients you want in it and, get this, you have to pick the consistency. There's a solid one and a kind of runny pancake. After you pick that out, the batter comes out and you cook it! You get little cooking utensils to flip it and everything.

Cooking it up!

Flip!

Once it's all done cooking, you cut it up into fourths and then add some sauces. There's mayonnaise, fish flakes, and seaweed. At least you can pick what you want. I totally skipped out on the fish flakes...

Yummy!! (Oishii!!)

Student Stories: He has a catchphrase

Let me introduce another new segment! I've been meaning to put up some funny lost in translation/student moments from my experience teaching in Japan. Please enjoy the first installment of Student Stories featuring one of my favorite kids!

I have a student who on a weekly basis makes me nearly die laughing. He is a super fun and energetic kid in a small class (just him and a little girl). I think he wants to be an entertainer when he grows up because he is always trying to make people laugh and he has something every good Japanese comedian needs: a catchphrase. I kid you not. It's hilarious. He adds "baby" to the end of the most random sentences. Did I mention he's like 6 yrs old? Precious.
It started out as "Oh no, baby!" when he was first in class with me. Recently it has evolved. Here are my favorite new catchphrases from him:
~We sing a transitional song that basically just repeats the question "What's next?" four times. This was his response last week. "I don't know, baby. What's next?" I nearly died.
~ I asked him, "How are you?" He paused, smiled and replied "I'm happy, baby."
~We recently learned some phrases and vocabulary about body parts and injuries. He changed every phrase to "Oh baby! I hurt my fingers."
~He recently picked up from me the phrase "Winner!" which I will sometimes proclaim after a game. When he wins, he now yells "Winner, baby!", takes a victory lap, and then asks for a high five. The other girl in the class thinks it is hilarious and has now let him start winning games.
This is my life. Love this kid.

Food spotlight: Bento box lunches!

One of the many highlights of living in Japan is the FANTASTIC food! I've been meaning to start a segment on some of the more traditional and unique foods that I am in love with so let the fun begin!
My favorite thing to do for lunch here is to go across the street to the new 7-11 and buy myself a bento box lunch.

SO CONVENIENT! I adore 7-11s here. I'll gush about convenience stores in a new post soon, I promise!

Bento boxes are traditional style Japanese lunch boxes. They generally have some rice and assorted meats and pickles such as fried pork or a cute little hamburger patty. I also love the little sushi boxes!

Some sushi and unagi (eel)-It's delicious!!

They warm it up for you as soon as you buy it which is amazingly nice to have a warm lunch despite not having a microwave in the office.
I also recently bought my own little bento box and have been trying to make my own lunches. They taste delicious but are not pretty at all.

Lookie what I made!

Part of the culture is to make the bento's cute or at least appealing. Mine are never such lol. Normally people at least have plastic containers to separate all of the aspects of the lunch. I bought my bento box at the Daiso (100 yen store) so basically it is not big enough to fit the containers. Oh well, I wish my bentos looked like this...

What a good and creative bento box looks like lol

 

Photo credit: http://blog.modes4u.com/products/cute-kawaii-bento-boxes.html

 I'll keep working at it. Who knows, maybe one day I'll make some super cute bento box lunches!

Japanese Style BBQ

I had a fun weekend this weekend! A part of that weekend was going to a Japanese style BBQ on Monday. There were some fun differences that I really enjoyed experiencing. We had the BBQ next to the river in a town about 35 mins from my apartment. I didn't realize how popular of an activity this was! There were at least 15 other groups around the area that we were in!
Of course, the major difference here was the food that we ate. At a traditional American BBQ, we have hamburgers, hot dogs, and maybe some chicken sandwiches or bratwurst. Here, the main dish was fish, as I expected. Everyone shared the same big fish.

Cleaning and gutting the fish

Grilling that bad boy up

We also had yakisoba (fried noodles) as well as various meats and veggies. It was great. We ate all day, literally. I arrived at 12:30 and left at 6:30 and the grill was never cold. It was really cool. We cooked a lot of different foods and everyone had a little bit of everything. Not many people there spoke English so it was an adventure in and of itself just to try communicating with some new people. Still, I did it! It was a great time with some amazing people and food!

Shizuoka and Hakone weekend!

This weekend, I took a trip with the adventure club Tokyo Gaijins. Our tour schedule got changed many a times due to unforeseen circumstances but we powered through it and had a good time.
We started our trip by taking a hike to go these seven famous waterfalls. Here is where some of the trouble started. There was a huge typhoon that just passed through here a couple of weeks ago. There was still damage that the grounds staff had to clear up, so two of the waterfalls were still off limits. We still saw five of the waterfalls and had a picnic lunch while sitting and enjoying the view.

The legend is if you can throw a stone and it stays on this sacred rock, you will have good luck for the rest of your life. I failed...

It was so beautiful

After the hike, we were supposed to go to a traditional Japanese onsen (hot spring). However, we ran into two problems. First, the original onsen was closed due to typhoon damage. At the second onsen that we were supposed to go to a maintenance man dropped a light bulb into the spring and there was glass everywhere. Needless to say, that onsen was out.
We decided to head up to Hakone and find an onsen there to relax at. I was determined to visit one as this was one of the main reasons I signed up for the trip.
We started the Hakone trip by traveling up to the mountains on a literally spiraled road.

Once there, we did a little sight seeing. My group visited a shinto shrine in the area which was beautiful! It was dedicated to the lake.

Sacred tree

My favorite part of this photo is the Japanese couple admiring the lake.

After that, we went farther up into the mountains to see some sulfur pots and natural springs. As expected, it was pretty smelly but still cool. My favorite part was the view of the town and Mt. Fuji.

Wow, just stunning.

That's Mt. Fuji in the distance.

Then came the part of the trip that I had been both dreading and looking forward to, it was time to go to the onsen. Now, something to understand about traditional Japanese hot springs is that there are two different hot springs for ladies and gentleman because you go into the hot springs totally naked...quite a daunting
idea to me...I was determined to do it at least once while I was here though. At first, I was a bit embarrass ed because I had never done anything like this before. But the others were really supportive and coaxed me out of the dressing room. Soon, I was in the natural hot spring and relaxing. We knew it was a natural hot spring because there are trace amounts of sulfur which started turning my skin yellow! I ended up loving it so I'm beyond happy I gave it a try!
After the relaxing onsen, we drove home. I was so relaxed that I slept the whole way home. All in all it was a fun trip. I got to meet some new people and saw some great sights.

The group. The photographer told us to do a muscle man pose but apparently I was the only one who got the memo lol