I’m nearing the 3 month mark of living in Japan and I find that my weekends are going by faster. It’s not that I dread going to work the next week (I rather enjoy coming in on Monday to see the students doing my homework), but it seems that I find myself doing a lot of activities. Every weekend is different, but I’m always busy.
Friday afternoon I took the time to go grocery shopping to stock up for the next few days. Usually I’d run into someone I know/work with (which is starting to be a common occurrence everywhere I go now). Today it was the 3rd grade teacher from my Uonome Elementary School. She was there with her husband (the principal of my Tsuwazaki Elementary School). We talked about how my Halloween lesson went (another entry soon) and how some of the teachers actually used it in their lessons. Laura, the Narao ALT, told me that her teacher heard of the lesson. I was pretty surprised at how fast news spreads around this island. I spent most of the evening unpacking the box my parents sent me. I’ve forgotten how common things in the states are fairly rare here on the island (for example, Hershey bars). I did this until about 8:30pm when the other ALTs stopped by to take me to dinner and relax in the bar.
The bar we went to was called Arcadia. It’s run by a Japanese man who likes to be referred to as Ken-chan (don’t ask me why). While at the bar, we met some of Nathanial’s teachers and we all sat and drank some beers. The teachers were already pretty drunk when we saw them walking down the street. One of them staggered all the way into the bar and was swaying back and forth when we were sitting. I thought at one point he would start sleeping on my shoulder. I soon learned that guy lives right next to me. We talked about how Aokata has different neighborhoods and clubs are formed depending on which neighborhood you live in. Aokata’s pretty small to begin with, so it puzzled me that they even had “neighborhoods”. One of the teachers said that even though Nathaniel and I were from a different neighborhood, we could join his volleyball club.
After the bar, I went back home and watched crazy Japanese TV. I also was looking through some information on the pool they had at the community center. I think I’m going to take up swimming again to supplement my weekend exercise. I went to bed around 2 am that night.
Saturday started bright and early for me because it was the annual basketball tournament for the elementary schools. The boys were playing at the elementary school across from my apartment, and the girls were at the community center down the street. I spent the entire morning travelling between halves to see all my kids. In Japan, you take off your outdoor shoes when you enter the gym. You either have gym shoes or no shoes at all. It was a tournament between all the elementary schools on the island. You can imagine how many shoes were at the door. There were some shoes outside because of the sheer number of them. My Kita-sho girls were really great! However, they had no coach there at the time to warm them up. It just consisted of mothers supporting their kids. So I ended up running warm-ups for that school. At one point, both my schools faced each other and I found myself pacing both ends of the court like a NBA coach. The whole thing took the entire morning and most of the afternoon. After the tournament, Maeda came over with some stuff I forgot and we spent the next few hours doing Japanese crafts. She makes little charm things with the fancy tassels by hand. She brought some colored strings and a template in which I was to weave the string around. After an hour of crafting, she made this cool double string decoration, while I made a small, blue, fancy knot. It was supposed to be a flower, but whatever. She helped me on the next one and now I have a bigger knot flower. She told me about a volleyball thing she was in and wanted me to watch on the following Monday. It consisted of the women from my Kita-Uonome JHS teachers. I went to sleep well that night because I was so tired from the day’s activities.
Sunday was really early for me. I woke up at 6am and the school nurse from Uonome JHS picked me up at 6:15 to do some commercial fishing with the kids. When we got to port, most of the kids were already sitting in a line on the road. Again, surprised looks on their faces when they saw me.
"Boys go fishing, girls can watch"
Going to the nets
Preparing to haul the nets
The boss of the fishermen came up and did a speech about how this is has been going on for a long time and is the pride of the island. He also laid some ground rules, but I couldn’t understand most of it, just something about not running around on the boat and listen to the boat people at all times. I also see the drastic difference between how they treat boys and girls in the states and how boys and girls are treated here. When they were deciding who would go fishing, the fishing guy said that they would only be taking boys fishing. They only took some of the third year boys and me. The girls were to go on another boat and watch us fish. He also said that when they were finished, the girls were to take the unloaded fish to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. If this was in the states, there would be so many complaints. Over here, it was the mothers of the kids themselves shoving the girls away to the watch boats and some preparing the kitchen for the return.
The fishing itself only took 2 hours, but it was very hard. What happens is that they take the boats to the fishing nets and pull it until the boats come together. These nets go all the way to the bottom of the ocean, so needless to say it was one huge net. This is the first time I’ve went fishing, so when I see a 4 ft long fish thrashing about, I got scared. One was thrashing about so much that we had to wrestle it down crocodile hunter style while one of the fishermen stabbed it in the head before throwing it down below with all the other iced fish. We also caught a huge sea turtle. At first I thought they were going to kill it because they laid it on its back, but they just wanted to show everyone else when they got back to port. I got soaked, not only did I have to pull that massive net, but the waves were pretty strong that day and splashing the boat everywhere. I felt like a toned down version of Deadliest Catch and was waiting for Discovery channel to send me a contract for a season of commercial fishing. One of the kids fell off the boat due to the waves. After fishing him out, the fishermen and teachers on that boat got mad at him. He looked at me waiting for some sort of verbal punishment and all I could say was “Was it cold?” Haha, some disciplinarian I am.
After getting back to port, the girls were waiting to cart some of the days catch to the kitchen. I was able to observe some of the filleting and peeling. It was very interesting to see those 4 ft fish things being skinned and filet. Some of them were almost as big as the girls. Of course there was horsing around, like throwing ice at each other and poking the turtle. What can you do, kids will be kids. As I was walking around, the kids would come up to me and display their knowledge of fish by pointing at one and saying “FISH!”. After about an hour, we all sat in the cafeteria and ate some grilled fish with misou soup.
I came home around 11am and browsed the internet until noon. Around that time the other ALTs stopped by to see if I watned to go to lunch. I turned them down because I wanted to clean my apartment. So I spent the next few hours cleaning, doing laundry, taking the trash out, etc. etc. I was going to spend the day just relaxing after cleaning, but around 2pm, Andrea came back and said we were going to teach some kids in some town that day. The place was actually in Kogushi, which is a small town in my territory. Most of the kids were from kita –sho elementary school. We had to do a impromptu English lesson involving Halloween; So in essence, a Halloween party.
The party consisted of 10 kids, 5 adults and a small room no bigger than the bathroom in my house. We did some flashcards, stories, trick or treating practice, etc. The kids really enjoyed themselves. Afterwards, we played with them on the waterfront. Their playgrounds consist of big rocks, high places, and big rocks in high places. They were a bunch of monkeys flying from rock to rock while I scream be careful (so adult-like). We spent a few hours there before all the ALTs went sightseeing and had dinner. I got home about 9:30pm. I was dead tired by then and just passed out until Monday morning.
That was my weekend. It varies from week to week, but the schedule is somewhat the same. You can see why my weekends go by very quickly. I still have to plan for a Halloween lesson and prepare for Nagasaki mid-year conference for JET.
