All told, October is usually my most busy month. The past two years I've tried especially hard to have good Halloween lessons/parties for my students, which have included pinatas (sometimes made by me ahead of time, sometimes made by the students), eyeball relays, bobbing for mini-apples, and costume contests. I'm more able to plan more things with my students about Halloween than other holidays, in part because the teachers are accustomed to doing something Halloween-ish every year and in part because Halloween is easier to explain than, say, Easter or Christmas. (To paraphrase Eddie Izzard, "So, kids, Jesus died on the cross, so we eat chocolates because they're brown, which was the color of the cross..." Yeah, you go ahead and try to pull that off. I know all about the holiday's Pagan roots, of course, but 1st graders really don't get it. All Hallow's Eve is much easier, trust me).
Aside from lesson planning/party preparation, my overexhuberence for Halloween also meant that at least twice a week (and sometimes 3x), I would get up extra-early to make myself look like this:
Dressing up as a clown replete with make-up definetely makes the Top Ten list of Fun Things I've Done in Tsushima. (Right up there with swinging down a crazy tarzan rope at a park with O or risking my life on the grass slide in Mine). It was best my first year, in 2009; how the heads turned! And the kids would run up, not knowing who it was at first, screaming, "PIEROOOOO! PIEROOOOOOO!" (The Japanese for "clown," from the French). 2010 was still fabulous, though. My usually-subdued taxi drivers still burst into uncontrollable laughter whenever I came out of the apartment in the morning, a police officer came running after me to take a picture, and a woman I'd never met before thrust her infant into my arms and snapped her keitai-camera away. A clown in full make-up is clearly not something Tsushimians see every day.It was equally fun for me, as was torturing my students with pinatas (and forcing their students to only help by calling out directions in English-- "Left, left!" "No, right!"), elementary students....
...and junior high-school students alike.
Gosh, how I'll miss my Nanyo JHS kids.
Good sports, all.
Not only were my weeks filled with Halloween activities, but sometimes the weekends were too. Izuhara had its public Halloween Trick-0r-Treating event again this year, and with what I think was indisputably but unofficially dubbed the best ALT costume, I was stationed at the prime spot in front of Tiara. My former BOE head, a nice man who always smiled and joked with me, came out to volunteer. I tried to give him some clown-tips.
At the Nagasaki mid-year conference, I went shopping for emergency gaijin rations (including flavored oatmeal and powdered sugar) in the YuMeSaito basement grocery store and found some mini apples in packs that weren't that expensive. I'd wanted to do bobbing for apples with my Nanyo elementary kids, but with prices on-island as they were had decided it was too expensive. With the mini-apple find, though, we were in business!
I think everyone had a good time ^^
Outside of the classroom, Tsushima continued to amaze me with its beauty. I saw this moon-rise on the way south, near the Manseki bridge that connects the northern and southern islands.
And one of my favorite Tsushima flowers (rivaled by the hydragneas in June), the "multiple amaryllis," came into bloom in September-October.
I love how they bloom in clusters!
...and this was all just along the side of the road!The other thing that kept me busy in October were many taiko concerts. Seriously, between August-October this year we played in about 8 concerts, all on different weekends. One of the more memorable performances was a trip to Unijima, a one of the locations of the Self-Defence Force's bases. It also meant that I got to ride in a small (non-ferry) boat away from Tsushima for the first time.
'Bye, mountains!
...there were mini-islands between Tsushima and Unijima, too.
The base was highly-regulated, so I didn't take any pictures (just in case.. didn't want my camera confiscated!). We were met at the dock by an escort and taken to a room to wait. We were scheduled to play at a reception-party celebrating the X0th year of the base's operation, and since all of the guests had to come by boat, we had to arrive very early... which meant a lot of waiting around in that room, with guards posted outside to make sure we didn't wander where we weren't supposed to. It was a beautiful little island, though, I wish I could've walked around the coast a bit. Another taiko performance took me to Nita's Horse Festival, which I've been wanting to go to for awhile but always somehow missed. The festival features horse races between Tsushima's mini-horses; they look like ponies to me, but they are apparently horses. Just very small.
(both men in this picture are of average Japanese size.)I went early to the festival to watch some of the races--
It was pretty cool! I'd never seen live horse-races before. There wasn't any betting going on, it was just good-natured fun.One of the last events of the day was a relay race between a Tsushima horse-team and a team of local junior high school students....
....yeah, the kids really did win. Although the horses were catching up in the end and probably would've won in the course had been longer ^^There was a mama-horse and her baby, too. Way cute!
And what would fall in Tsushima be without shiitake mushrooms? I received a couple of bags of them this year from various people, including one that really was bigger than my face.
Yes, it really is a mushroom!
It was quite delicious sauteed in butter and then put into an omelette!
No comments:
Post a Comment