Peachy Keen

Thursday was my first Thanksgiving back in the US. For my family, Thanksgiving is just another family gathering for us to pig out, but with a few differences. We dress up a bit and add a turkey and other classic Thanksgiving must-haves. It's also tradition to share at least one thing we are grateful for this year. Mine was pretty simple: I was grateful that I can spend Thanksgiving with my family again and able to eat an *actual* turkey.

Looking at the turkey was like this:

Thanksgiving in Japan pretty much marked the beginning of the holiday blues for me. I loved living in Japan, love it and miss it, but November onward was when the homesickness hit. Maybe its because the winter holidays are celebrated so differently in Japan (or don't exist at all, turkeys rejoice) that it really emphasizes the foreignness. At least Japan has a word for turkey(七面鳥、しちめんちょう、or seven-faced bird. lolz). A plus side was that it gave me plenty of lesson ideas/culture sharing time.


My first year in Okayama I had 2 Thanksgivings. The first was a potluck in Yakage, the next town over from Ibara. Awesome food, awesome people, lovely times. The second one was with closer friends. We decided that we wanted to celebrate on the actual day, despite the fact we all had work the next day and some of us had to travel over an hour to commute to and from the city (*ahem* me). Ordering turkey from The Meat Guy and/or the Flying Pig was pretty pricey, so we had KFC instead. I know. Looking back now I'm wondering what the hell were we thinking, but I think it was along the lines of hey, KFC is as American as you can get and its a kind of play on Japan's odd custom of eating KFC/friend chicken on Christmas. We did make homemade mashed potatoes and dessert though! And despite the near brawl of the Americans and British on what a biscuit REALLY is, fun was had by all. Not so much for me when I woke up 5 in the morning to take the first train back to my town and head straight to work. Never. Again.





The second time around we took the holiday more seriously. Sort of. Lots more homemade stuff including an awesome chicken bake (our turkey substitute) and homemade apple cider. Oh, and pazookie, can't forget that.  The day can be summed up into 2 words: food and Zelda.



So yes, I was very, *very* happy to celebrate Thanksgiving stateside. But, I am grateful that I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving in Japan with an amazing second family.

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Labels: 2012, day in ibara, food, friends, Japan, okayama

I never considered myself a hiking kind of girl. Sure, when I was a kid my family went camping over the summer, but I never did anything more than that especially when I got older and discovered the internet. Then, I climbed Mt. Fuji and I thought it was *awesome*. I guess it also helped that Japan is just a beautiful country and would inspire anyone to go for walks and take in the scenery. So, I was happy when I was invited to go with some of the Ibara English conversation students and hike a small mountain in Yakage, the next big town over. 

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Labels: 2011, day in ibara, friends, okayama

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Labels: 2012, day in ibara, Japan

So...back in December I talked about a crazy video the Ibara JETs did in the fall called Genki Taiso. Well, about a month ago we received a copy and it's been broadcasting on the local channels.

Genki Taiso is a play on Japan's radio taiso which is a morning warm-up exercise companies can do together to build up team spirit and promote health and all that jazz. Do you remember the first episode of Heroes? You know, when Heroes was actually *awesome*? And Hiro and his co-workers were doing those weird exercise moves? Yup, that's radio taiso. Apparently Japan got it from the US back in the 1920s (yay wikipedia) and was used for the soldiers in the 1930s-40s. Then Japan got owned and now well, we get things like this:

 I don't really see it too much at my schools; I think I've only seen it during the sports festival. My BOE does it every morning. The men do it while the women kind of sneak into the refresh room and wait it out. Even now I have people in town come up to me and tell me they saw me on TV. And my kids ask me to do it. Sigh. The things I do for internationalization...

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Labels: 2012, day in ibara, friends, JET

The title more or less translates to happy/energetic exercise....GO!

Today was...interesting.

...guess I better back up a bit. The story starts in October during the Ibara Sports Festival. After parading around the track all the participants gathered in the center of the field and lined up to do a warm-up. What us unsuspecting ALTs didn't know was this wasn't the usual, every-morning-radio-taisou the salarymen do. It was a mix of some warm up karate punches, marching, line dancing and jazz hands (okay the jazz hands were our addition). Of course, we thought the weirdness was AMAZING so we kind of...well, we were *genki*. We started to aim the punches at each other, do jazz hands, make weird faces, etc. Then it was finished; we had a laugh and the sports festival continued. We really didn't think anyone paid attention to our shenanigans.

Man, were we wrong. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago where one of my supervisors comes to me and lets me know that the city saw us do the Genki Taisou so *well* that the local broadcast wants to record us and air it. 5 of 6 pretty much screamed at him to let us do it. And so today, we did just that.

I have to say there was just a teeny, tiny moment where I felt...irked over what the instructor said. While we were practicing and asking questions of 'where does our arm go, which direction,' etc. she tells us that mistakes are okay (funny coming from a Japanese person) and the main point is for people to laugh. At first I thought well, to laugh *at* us? Sure, let's look at the silly foreigners do a taisou, dance, monkey dance! Because there are quite a few moments, both inside and outside the classroom where I do feel like the 'monkey' and perform for the kids/community. And well, let's face it, most of the time, I have no idea what's going most of the time anyway so I just go with the flow and do it. Besides, dancing is fun.

Regardless, the irked feeling went away because well, it was our fault for acting silly at the sports festival in the first place and come ON! We're being taped doing a warm-up exercise that the whole town will see!! How awesome is that?! Of course we all requested copies when it's finished. We ended the day with dinner (and DRINKING) at Champloo aka Champs. Even our supervisors came by for a drink to pat us on the back.

The taisou will air in January for who knows how long. Once I get my copy I'm immediately sending it stateside because otherwise I might end up setting fire to it.

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Labels: 2011, day in ibara, JET