Disney Sea

Chie, Mrs. and Mr. Uetake at Disney Sea
Last Sunday, I went to Disney Sea with three of my favorite Japanese people - the Uetake's. They took me to Tokyo Disney Land last summer, and promised to take me to Tokyo Disney Sea this summer. It was awesome! I got to watch the Little Mermaid fly through the air and confront the evil Sea Witch, Aladdin and Genie fight of the evil Jafar, and even go through Indiana Jones's Temple of Doom on a crazy roller coaster. It was an amazingly fun and interesting time, especially since most of it was in Japanese. The place was simply beautiful, but it looked like it was Disney and Universal Studios all smashed into one.
Of course the best part was hanging out with the Uetake's. They are so nice to me and they always take care of me. As most of you know, they are my landlord's, but more than that, they are my Japanese family. I usually walk over to their house next door to our apartments and hang out with them at least once a week. Chie, the youngest daughter, is a couple of years older than me and one of my good friends. She speaks great English and loves sweets as much as I do. Mrs. Uetake has been like a mother to me, showing me how to eat fruits the Japanese way (you have to peel the skin off) and how to cook rice. She is so patient with me though I know I appear like a child to her, having to learn things that most Japanese people inherently know. And Mr. Uetake is like a father. From lecturing me because I didn't shut my curtains at night ("You are foreign girl! People can see you! Close your curtains!") to always helping me decifer my mail and bills and paperwork to always inviting me to musical and cultural art performances, he has truly helped me to become more accustumed to this culture and way of life. They have made me feel loved and accepted more than anybody else here in Japan. And don't even get me started on their grandson. They have an older daughter - Kanai - who lives in Tokyo with her husband and son. The five year old Ryuta is such a violent little tyke, but I love wrestling with him. Though he is American by birth (his father worked in Chicago for a while, when Ryuta was born), he speaks very little English (though his parents speak it marvelously). Anyways, they are a huge blessing to me here and I love them so much. They are truly kind, caring people and I pray that God will bless them as they have blessed me.

It's Festival Time!

Group picture taken with Mito Komon (the dude with the yellow scarf) - the man of whom Mito City was named after. (To learn about the awesome Mito Komon, click on his name and scroll down to "The History".)
With the beginning of August comes many festivals here in Japan. I love this time of year. This is my second time to experience the festival season in Japan, and I must say that it is not as strange....or I should say different....to me this year. Don't get me wrong, it is completely enjoyable, just very foreign compared to anything experienced in the Western Cultures.
Anyways, thanks to two good Japanese friends who actually took the time to explain to me as best as they possibly could the origins of such festivals: small tidbits as to why many people shake small shrines no their shoulders up and down the streets, why they go along in dashi (similar to parade floats) full of masked men, women, and children as wolves, funny-faced men, or round-faced women and shout "Soran!" at the top of their lungs, etc., I still have a very small understanding to most aspects of these festivals. In fact, anytime I ask a Japanese person why there is this or that going on during the festival, the typical answer I get is "I don't know."
It's not so amazing to me this year that most Japanese people don't understand why the things that go on during festivals go on, probably because I have become accustumed to living in a culture where many things are done just because "it has always been done that way." When I first came, I was told that it was best many times not to ask the question "Why?". I thought then that I could never stop asking that question, because that is one of my favorite questions, but I have noticed that I don't ask it as much anymore. I have gotten too many stumped expressions on Japanese people's faces to really want to ask anymore. Though I do find that I am still incredibly curious, just more cautious of when I ask that three letter question.
So, back from that tangent. My favorite is this festival - the Mito Komon Matsuri. It lasts for three days, with Friday night being a two hour firework show over Lake Senba, Saturday being a day of dance performances up and down the main street of Mito, and Sunday being the big shrine shaking day. It is even more fun when I get to go with my good friends (as you can see in the picture above). I am going to see how many festivals I can go to this summer. They go on at different times in different cities all throughout the summer. They are great fun and a good way to really soak in some culture, even if nobody understands why things are done the way they are done.

Let's Do the Mambo

Two Saturdays ago, I went with many good friends of mine to Oarai Aquarium (Oarai is an oceanside town about 40 minutes from Mito). It is a really awesome aquarium and I got to see many sea thingies that I didn't even know existed. I was especially interested in seeing the mambo fish - or as it is called in English, the Oceanic Sunfish. I wanted to see it so much because of something that happened while I was co-teaching one of my Jr. High classes a couple of months ago. (Keep in mind, you will probably not find this story as humorous as I do. I have told it to many people and nobody laughs but me.) In the class, I had to critique the students on short little English presentations that they gave. My biggest critique for the whole class was that they shouldn't mumble. When I told them this, many of them looked at me and laughed. I looked at my Japanese English teacher and she was trying to suppress her laughing. She didn't quite understand what I was trying to say either. Well, I explained to her what "mumble" meant, she understood, and then relayed it to the students in Japanese. Anyways, after class, I asked her why everybody laughed when I said "Don't mumble." The other Japanese English teacher that had been in the room tried to explain to me what everybody thought I had said. He said that 'mumble' sounded like 'mambo', a type of fish that most Japanese know about. I told him I had never heard about it and he started doing gestures of what the fish does (I guess he thought I would understand him after that). He puckered up his lips really big and started doing what looked like the Hawaiian dance, except to only one side. I still didn't understand, and eventually there were several teachers trying to explain what a mambo fish was through broken English and the very entertaining gestures. Eventually, they just looked up a picture on the Interenet and showed it to me, which was a lot more efficient, but not as humorous as their gesturing around the teacher's room.
So the students thought I was telling them "Don't mambo." When they hear 'mambo', they don't think of the Latin dance, they think of this cute little (actually, it's pretty big) fish. When I saw the tank of them, I was mesmerized for quite a long time. They are really cute, big, and slow. They just moved around the tank with the huge bulging eyes and puckered lips looking at you and they would often float sideways or almost upside down. And they look like huge, flat bullets with fins. They were so cute and definitely my favorite at the aquarium.

Downtown Mito City

This is a picture of downtown Mito City taken from the Mito Art Tower. It really is a nice city. I like it a lot.

Star Festival

Here is a picture from the first festival I attended this year. The festival season in Japan has officially started, and those of us who go to Shiro-sato church decided to kick it off by going to the Star Festival in the small town where our church is. We invited many of our readers and we all had the time of our lives getting to know each other. The men dressed up in their manly yukatas while some of our female readers kindly wrapped Ally and me in our own yukatas. Us women had a good time getting all prettied up. Then we spent a fun couple of hours together watching tyko drum performances and eating yakisoba (a type of noodle eaten especially during barbeques and festivals). It was great fun. I can't wait for the rest of the festivals in August. August is the festival time in Japan, so stay tuned because I will surely blog about them after I attend them.

Another summer church camp

church camp
Well, even though I am going to another church on Sunday mornings, I still do lots of stuff with the Mito Church. Recently, we had our annual summer Church camp where we spent two days at a camp just outside of Mito having small group Bible studies and getting to know each other better. This is my second one to attend and it was awesome!
There was something very interesting that happened when we had just gotten to the camp. Japan really doesn't have thunderstorms. There are the occasional ones, and while we were all arriving at the camp and getting comfortable in our cabins, the third one that I had experienced while I have been in Japan was occuring. We were all in the cabin trying to escape the excessive heat and the lightening and talking away. Then all of a sudden, there was a blinding flash immediately followed by a loud boom. We all screamed and I tried to jump into the arms of my good friend Chisato. A bolt of lightening had struck very near the cabins. Thank God that nobody was hurt, though it gave everybody a good scare. Of course, I enjoyed it immensely.

Karaoke
Karaoke in Japan. What can I say? Well, I love it! There is nothing like spending a couple of hours singing yourself hoarse. And it is a great way to bond with people (and you don't even need alcohol). In Japan, thay have massive buildings full of Karaoke rooms - big and small - devoted to giving people moments of glamour (or embarrassment depending on how great their singing is) as they belt out their favorite tunes. They have songs in all languages, though mostly in Japanese. You should see us English speakers trying to sing along with some Japanese songs. It is just as funny as watching the Japanese trying to sing English songs. To my great surprise when I first came, "The Carpenters" songs are among the most popular English songs to sing. Of course, I had no idea who "The Carpenters" were before I came to Japan, but after doing some research on the Internet and receiving a Carpenters CD as a gift from my landlord, I am happy to say that I can now sing several songs when we go to Karaoke. They really are pretty good songs.

Stickers - the greatest gift

A couple of weeks ago, I had this last English class with my 1st graders before the summer break (this was at Watari Elementary school - the biggest school I teach at). I don't completely understand why, but the teachers decided to have me teach all three of the 1st grade classes together. Usually I don't like combining over 75 first graders together, but since the teachers are actively a part of the class and we were going to have it in the gym, I gave the thumbs up. So we spent the whole hour reviewing the English they had learned during the semester with games. Of course, we all had a complete blast (maybe I enjoyed it more than them!). I especially enjoyed watching them enjoy colors. We made up this very simple game where I would shout out a color and the students who were wearing that color would get up, run to the other side of the gym as fast as they could, and sit down. They loved it and so did I. I think that I ran with them every time even though I only had on about three different colors. I don't know why, but I especially loved it when they came to me (every single one of them) and pointed out I had said the color on their clothes.

And of course, since it was the last class, I gave them a sticker as a departing present. Tons of thanks to a great friend for sending me a whole bunch of stickers for my birthday. As you can see, the students LOVED them. The joy on their faces when they received those stickers made me so happy. It is amazing the power of a sticker. The younger they are, the more they love them. Of course, I have some six graders who full on beg me for stickers. So if anybody had any extra stickers floating around (prefferably with English on it), send it my way. It is a very inexpensive way to make some Japanese student's days.