Japanese style

Last night at our Japanese club (where we go for Japanese lessons) we had a party/game night. The lady in charge of the lessons brought kimonos for the foreigners to wear! We also ate lots of yummies, including shaved ice, and played Bingo :)

Look at the cute bow on Angie's! Of course, Travis' didn't a bow :(

And here we are with our Nihongo no sensei (Japanese teacher), Keiko, eating some yummy shaved ice of course.

Soft Baseball?

We are fully enjoying our days off work during summer break. The way our contract works, we don't have to go to school at all!! Which means a lot of sleeping in, studying Japanese, and eating junk foods. We have a few trips planned and events to go to so this will be a busy time for our blog.





Last Tuesday we went to a soft baseball game--no not softball, soft baseball. Soft baseball is just like regular baseball except the ball is soft.
It is really weird to watch the ball bounce 10ft. into the air when it hits the ground.

The To-O-Gijuku team is supposedly pretty good and definitely showed their stuff when we watched them on Tuesday. We won 4-0. Now if they win the next two games, they will be champions and go on to the National tournament.





The best part of the baseball game is the cheering, which our students are quite fond of. They have a cheer for each palyer as he bats along with various other cheers.


Here are our Cheerleaders who were aided by some rambunctious boys that yell thru their megaphones.










Our school also brought along the pepband that played the favorites: The Popeye Theme, Queen's We Will Rock You, amoung others.

There's Travis banging his megaphones (because he can't cheer along with the Japanese) and sporting his school-provided-raincoat since it was sprinkling the entire game.

Earthquake!!! #2

At 12:30am last night we experienced our second earthquake in the 4 months we have been in Japan! It felt bigger than the last one, even though it was smaller on the richter scale, because it was closer to us this time! No need to worry it was still a good distance away. But, many people have told us that the last one was the biggest they have felt in many years. Looks like were getting lucky. There were many injuries this time so please pray for these people.

GijukuSai

So, last week we had shortened classes every day so we could practice cheers for a huge baseball game this Monday. However, the baseball game ended up getting moved b/c of rain so we didn't even go to the baseball game, but here's one of the cheers!

This week we had only 2 days of classes and then we had the school festival the last few days!

We saw plenty of karaoke.. . even the principal joined in!!!

Of course we ate lots of food!! All these tents are for the different classes that sold food.

And there was plenty of food indoors as well...

We also saw some different dance performances by our students

and last but not least we got to see some of our co-workers dress up as the students..

....of the opposite sex of course!!

Let Summer begin!!!! We'll be blogging a lot more since we'll have plenty to do!