Olympic Disgrace!

Olympic season has begun, which means we are tentatively following the events. The other day women's curling had captured our attention, as it was US vs. Japan, our 2 "home" countries. It turned out that Japan defeated the US in a very close match, that ended with a measuring tape. Throughout the event, American TV was calling the Japanese team, Team "Amora." Which we thought sounded similar to "Aomori," where we live. But, we figured it must be somewhere else because of the different name, and we had never heard of Aomori being famous for curling. Furthermore, the members of the Japanese curling team were speaking English to each other, which is a rarity in the Aomori area.

However, the next day, while passing by the newspaper at work, we noticed a picture of the Japanese curling team we had watched the day before. A closer look revealed this was truely Team Aomori (pronounced A-o-more-y) which the American broadcastors had been mispronunciating! What a disgrace!

Valentines Party

Today we celebrated Valentine's Day with English Club. Our English Club has unfortunately dwindled in numbers, but the students we have are dedicated, ambitious, and fun which makes for exciting parties full of colorful surprises!

Of course we had plenty of food for all the hungry mouths to eat and hands to take home: rice crispies, jell-o, cupcakes, cherry pie, ice cream cake, as well as others.

The most colorful surprise of the day was some poetry we wrote. Since V-day is all about love we wrote the classic poem, "Roses are red, Violets are blue..." Our favortie is the purple one at the top center about the hamburger.

We also wrote a couple of love stories together. One involved a girl falling out of a window twice into the arms of her lover who was too poor to marry such a rich girl so they had to run away together. We really don't know why she had to fall out of a window but it made for an interesting story. The other story was a Twilight off shoot. This story had Jacob leaving his ex-girlfriend, Cassy, and escaping with Bella from the rage of Edward. Not exactly how it goes but one of our students thinks Jacob is much more attractive than Edward so....

It was a short party but quite fulfilling. It ended up going longer because we were having so much fun!

Rockin' Robin

Last Saturday we rocked out to some karaoke with our friends, and as always, we were amazed and perplexed by the music videos they choose for foreign songs. Usually the music videos to foreign songs do not relate at all to the song itself which can be pretty distracting as you are trying to give it your all to one of your favorite songs.. such as this video, that we were lucky enough to witness TWICE on Saturday night to two different songs.

On Sunday night we got to go see one of our English Club students sing, but not karaoke! He's in a band called "Jash heart" and they performed at a local venue in Hirosaki. As you can guess, our student, Haruki, is the guitarist, and he definitely rocked it!!

There were a total of 5 bands that performed, but we only stayed for the first 3. This band, which performed after "Jash Heart" was quite interesting, quite out of the Japanese persona, which we can't decide if we appreciate the self-expression of the band (which is basically against the law here!) or too creeped out by them! You can decide for yourselves!