Just before they took it down, I went to Tokyo to see the 1/1 scale gundam that was built in Odaiba.

It was AMAZING, massive, and insanely popular :O I thought it was busy when I checked it out early in the day, but that was nothing compared to night time. It's in this absolutely huge place, but it was PACKED. If you queued up you could walk under it and touch it, but the staff were saying, "don't fight the gundam, be gentle with it!"

But yeah, awesome :D Caught it's first little 'act', where it just moved a bit and Gackt's voice reeled off a long speech with some music, and also another once it was dark, where it moved and put on a little lights display, and sprayed mist :D

Haha, and there was a guy wearing a Zaku head, the eye lit up and everything!



Took a milion pics, see here

Also, I got attacked by a cicada. It flew in my hair ;__________;

vids:





What was kind of surreal was hearing a calypso-ish instrumental version of Tobe! Gundam playing as background music at some point. :p

Things that happened a little while ago but I never got around to posting:

( an awesome day at yumichu )

( elementary cuteness )

( tea ceremony lesson )

Previous reports:

RRII, standing, Hiroshima 17+18/01/09
RRII, premium seat, Yonago 22/03/09

And I recommend you read sankakukoen's report of the same live here for more details of the MCs and other awesomeness! ♥

( and suddenly, it's 10,000 people instead of 1000 )

THE END!

So last night we went to the Daisen opening ceremony (it's just an official one for the good hiking season - people can climb it any time of year) as part of the celebrations for Daniel's birthday. We caught the bus from Yonago station (which takes about 50 minutes, ahhh) which leisurely made its way up the mountain. Eventually we got the "base", which is still fairly high up, and where the entrances to the ski lifts and things are. Was strange, the last time were were there it was all under deep snow...

It was really foggy because the clouds were so low, and all the festival stalls and the stage were being set up. We bought Daisen-brewed beer (which is really tasty) and various foods like yakisoba, takoyaki and karaage (which were all actually much much nicer than normal festival food). We hung around for a while before starting to make our way up; on the way up to the temple was the stall where you could buy torches for the procession. For 500yen you got the torch, a little memorial teatowel thing, and a charm. ♥ Then we wandered up through the forest to the temple - it was kind of awkward, the torches were heavy and had kerosene spilled all over their side (they were filled up with it too, so you had to always hold them upright) and we had to wear these uncomfortable gross plastic gloves that got really sweaty. Ugh. Anyway.

It was really busy up at the temple, loads of people came! There were people ladling out free sake just outside the entrance, and there was a local TV crew interviewing people. Yes, being the token foreigners they came to film us too. Luckily one of our party spoke fluent Japanese, so we left the talking to her :p Er, hopefully none of my students will see that...

At about 7.30 they lit the big torches near the temple entrance; these were the ones everybody lit their own small torches from. And then as dusk fell it began! It was so much fun and there was a really nice atmosphere. Obviously we stood out a lot, so lots of people wanted to take our picture or talk to us. Walking down was quite tricky though, as it was dark, the rocky ground was very uneven and also slippery, so I almost fell over several times! I was seriously impressed there were no accidents :p

When we finally got to the bottom (it's about a 25 minute walk between base and the temple) there were big bonfires to throw your torches onto. Though mine kept sputtering out as we got towards the end :( By that time there was a band playing on the stage, and it was quite busy.

It was so much fun! Photos are here.

( And now some videos! )

Areas of Japan Nobody Cares About

...and we're number 8! I especially love the '(Sorry, I don’t care about the location of these prefectures, so I didn’t label this map.)'

Also inordinately amused that Shimane, our next door neighbour, is number 1.

Clearly, no-one cares about this corner of the country!

just discovered this guy hanging out in my wardrobe.

I had a go at these because they're such lovely songs, and no translations yet exist :) My Japanese is not very good so I'm sure there's errors, but this was done for fun and practice.

( Vesperbell - Japanese )

( Vesperbell - Translation )

Also, if anyone has any clue what he really means by "月の2番地", I'm intrigued.

( Listen to the song~ )

( The Primary - Japanese )

( The Primary - Translation )

( Listen to the song~ )

Actual Japan-life related entry soon! We're going to a festival in Matsue today that only happens once every 12 years...

Firstly: I had to listen to full-length 'Puff the Magic Dragon' eight times today, I'm now quite fed up of it.

Anyway, this is mostly about the cuteness of Japanese schoolboys: today, a group of my third year boys were chatting (so, around 15 years old) - one of them put his arms around the boy in front of him, with his hands on the other boy's waist, while resting his chin on the boy's shoulder. And they stayed like that for about ten minutes, all while talking casually in a group.

Just something you'd never see in English schools! They do that quite a lot... hold hands, or sit in each others laps.

And these were compositions by two third year boys at my country school (which is fairly rough) for context, they had to write about something precious to them:

Ryosuke wrote, "This is a keychain of a pig. Hayato gave it to me as a symbol of friendship. It's very cute and soft."

Hayato wrote, "This is a keychain of Tigger. Ryosuke gave it to me this year as a symbol of friendship. It's very cute and フワフワで気持ちがよい。" (roughly meaning, it's fluffy and feels nice. But the Japanese phrasing is so cute!)

They do rather like their cute Disney mascots, even the boys.

So! First week is over. :) it was actually really lovely! Only met the new first years from one school, but they're all really sweet (if a bit shy) so a vaaaaast improvement over last years at that school. Of course the now-third years are still my favourites at yumichu ♥ They're so much fun - even if they're just doing writing composition, most of them really like to call me over or ask me questions, and lots of them write really interesting, imaginative stuff.

Today as I came up the stairs to class 3-1, there was a group of girls who as soon as they saw me started shrieking 'Jessicaaaaaa~!' and beckoned me over to ask me about Hetalia! (I'd completely forgotten - last term, one girl had mentioned in one piece of work how she liked it, and while marking it I'd commented that I do too) and she'd obviously remembered and told her friends. So then they wanted to know about favourite characters and things - told them I like Russia, but their favourites were Austria, Canada and Italy. :D (but no love for England! boo.)

Anyway! So in that class they doodled some really cute stuff on their work:

( Read more... )

Also a boy invited me on a midnight walk. But then he started talking about masks and hats and policemen, so I'm not sure what he was on about...

Okay! Off to catch the overnight bus to Fukuoka, and then getting a plane to Okinawa tomorrow lunchtime~ ♥

Back on the 4th! :)

Me and my toucan friend!

Becky visited, so we went to Matsue bird park, before hanging around for Gackt in the evening :D

The last Gackt concert for me... so sad :( Of course it was amazing though. I ♥ him so much! And I really, really can't wait for the new album to be released... it's going to be so much better than Diabolos :)

Weather has been appalling though, soooo rainy and windy for the past couple of days.

First, photos!

( Silver streamers, and things I bought... this time. )

Meant to get some more stickers, but I forgot.

Now!( I talk at great length about the concert! Again! )

Just... so unbelievably happy! My dream came true, after many years :)

To end on a slightly surreal note: I was sitting at the train station near my school earlier - out in the middle of nowhere, amidst leek fields, and there was just this one older lady (maybe in her 60s) sitting next to me. But when I got out my keitai to mail someone (and thus my Gackt keitai case) she immediately seemed interested. As it turns out, she too went to the live last night! And whipped out her own keitai, with many Gackt keyrings, and showed me her auto-changing Gackt wallpaper, haha. It was weird, but we had quite a long chat about Gackt.

THE END. ♥

GACKT SANG AT ME DURING KOAKUMA HEVEN

CHACHA GRABBED MY HAND. TWICE. AND KEPT SMILING AT ME :D

and then I cried on the way home like a big girl because my dream came true.

raided the merchandise stall again and also got my special premium seat present :D

can't really be more coherent, proper report tomorrow~~~~

So exciting!

But in the meantime, school. Today was the rehearsal for the graduation ceremony. So... dull...

TWENTY MINUTES OF IT was basically just practicing standing up, bowing, and sitting down in unison. But at least I got to go home a bit early. (Aside from the rehearsal, I sat at my desk all day doing nothing.)

Tomorrow, the actual ceremony! I'll be sad to see my 3rd years go~

Yesterday was such a lovely day! It was my last time at fukuhigashi elementary this school year, so we did games and activities reviewing all the things they'd learnt.

Last lesson of the day was with 5-2, my absolute favourites. They're always SO genki, happy, and excited to do English :D Their homeroom teacher is lots of fun too ♥ Well, when we went in, they'd decorated the whole classroom with paperchains and handmade tissue-paper flowers! And put a big poster over the back wall's blackboard saying thank you, with cute little drawings of me and Kano-san on. Then they gave us a big paper flower each to wear during the lesson~

Then afterwards, they presented me with these:



So cute! They're very solid so I'm going to put them on my wall :D and then they sang us a song~

AND THEN. The kocho and kyoto sensei gave me an amazing flowery patisserie basket full of cakes and things :') Glad I brought in cake for the teachers that morning, they're all so lovely. ♥

Right now I'm baking a matcha cake, which will have a whipped azuki bean cream filling~

Yesterday I went to one of my elementaries in the country, it was so much fun! They picked me up around 9 (which I feel bad about, but there's no buses or trains and it's too far to walk or bike) and then since the activity wasn't starting until 10.45, I just got to watch lessons until then :D So I learnt how to use a Japanese abacus (sort of, it's pretty confusing), and then went and watched the cute ichinenseis doing PE~

After that we went to the cooking room, to make okonomiyaki with the 5th years! First they explained to me how to do it, and had drawn cute pictures to help, and then they were split into six groups to make their okonomiyaki. So I spent some time with each of the groups and helped a little bit. They were also making bizarre fruit okonomiyaki...

Anyway, I'd been told beforehand that the groups would all give me some, and I'd then try them and give comments. But... each of the six groups gave me about half an okonomiyaki x_x I tried my best, but I just couldn't eat everything. Especially since they gave me bits of their 'fruit' okonomiyakis as well (which varied in how edible they were).

Some of them were quite good. Some... were not. I ate FAR too much undercooked batter that day, urgh. One of the teachers also made takoyaki, which was pretty nice.

But they were all so adorable and proud of their cooking <3

Food hygiene was NOT good though... the number of children I saw cutting bananas and raw pork next to each other (touching!) on the same chopping board...

But one of the groups was really sweet, they made me a fruit okonomiyaki with silver sprinkles, and wrote my name on it in icing! ♥

One boy was hilarious and kept bring me random bits of english/engrish, just because he found it so amazing that it was real words, and that I could read it.

After all that I was ridiculously full...BUT it was lunchtime. At elementary I always eat school lunch with the children, and you get sooooo much food for it, I really couldn't eat much at all. :( Which I feel bad about, because you're supposed to eat everything. But - with yesterday's kyuushoku we got NATTO~

I'd never actually tried natto before, so the girl next to me showed me how to peel off the film and mix in the... whatever it was. I have to say - it's not that bad. Considering how often I've heard it's repulsive, it was a bit underwhelming. Doesn't win any deliciousness awards though. The smell and taste are okay - the only horrible thing about it is the TEXTURE. It's got this slimy-stringy-stickiness that just doesn't go away :( Some of the kids looooooved it though, and ate like two pots.

Today I was also at elementary, but a different school. I managed to get a picture of the kyuushoku so you can see the kind of thin they eat...


Milk from Mt Daisen, huge bit of bread, weird salad, noodle soup, sugar-sesame sweet potato. Doesn't look that great but was actually one of the nicer ones I've had.

Finally got round to getting some cough medicine and medicated throat sweets... I'm constantly losing my voice at the moment, almost every day, which is obviously not a good thing to happen considering my job. :(

But on the whole the past few days have been pretty fun, mostly because of little random things.

- The other morning a group of my girl students screamed out to me all the way across the carpark, "Good morning! You're beautiful!" Haha.

- Doing various interview-type questions with the second years, one of which is, "what's your favourite movie?" and one boy said... MOON CHILD. :D Which I found kind of surprising, unless there's some other Japanese movie called Moon Child. But still. That boy is awesome.

- Another of the questions was, "what would you with if you had 10,000yen?", and one girl said, "CDs". So I asked her what kind of music she liked. She thought for a moment and then said, "visual kei" - so uncommon among JHS. But obviously that made me happy, so I asked her who her favourite VK artist was - and she said Miyavi! ♥ I told her I loved Miyavi too and she got really excited (well, so did I.) :D

- Also, the 3rd years were obviously doing loads of cooking the other day, because they came to the staffroom and brought us each little plates of food, I got some takoyaki :D Along with a little note that said, "we like your lessons, please eat it"! Soo cute.

- The italian dinner I went to with the female yumichu teachers on Friday night was a lot of fun, and the food was really good! The restaurant was quite far, but worth it. It was a delicious 5 course meal (parma ham dish, squid pasta, salmon, chicken, ice cream) and lots of wine ♥

....ugh, this cough medicine is vile. No flavour or sugar to even attempt to mask the bitterness :(

I thought Monday was going to be a HORRIBLE day. Just as I got to school, the JTE I was supposed to be teaching with phoned in sick - and as a result, they asked me to do all four classes by myself, without even another teacher in the room. (I'm not actually sure this is legal, but I could hardly say no as it would have been such a bother to everyone else). Also, these were all classes with my country-school first years. The very badly behaved ones :(

...but shockingly, it actually turned out fine. They all behaved! We didn't have any great communication problems! It was quite fun! Of course, the "bad" kids as usual still didn't do any work, but at least they didn't disrupt the others like they usually do.

Also, at the end of the day there were some first year girls waiting in the genkan, and two of them gave me valentines chocolates ♥ So cute! Little handmade truffles~



:D

A little unusual in the sense that, in Japan, Valentines Day is for girls to give chocolates to boys, but nevermind. It was so nice of them! And they were delicious, too.

Since I had to mark the rest of the "letters to your 20-year old self" today, there were a few other great ones.

Sadly my keitai ran out of battery so no photo, but one oddly depressing one went,

"Don't become a neet. Have you play the game a lot? I want to play the latest game. I hope that you aren't die. Good luck."

If you're not familiar with the term: NEET.

One girl wrote,

"Now I want to be a Arab Oill King but it is difficult for me because I am woman."

Lastly, another girl began her letter to herself... "Dear Okada fuckin' Lisa (twenty years in the future)"

She even had the apostrophe and everything.

Okay. So these third years had to write a letter to themselves in the future, age 20. Here are a few of my favourites!

( This student is just not very optimistic. )

( ...either a deep nonsensical poem, or the result of babelfish )

( One of the few genuinely great ones! WITH HELPFUL PROVERBS. )

( MY ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE )

Yes, that Japanese does say, "Barack Obama". :p