The Last; The First and The Last; The First

The past two days have been monumental moments in our final year in Japan. It has been filled with many first's as well as many last's and has made our days bitter sweet.

The Last:

We had our final All-State English Speech Contest on Tuesday. The students have been vigorously working away at their speeches for at least the last month, with the last two weeks focusing on speech etiquette: intonation, gestures, facial expressions, pronunciation, etc. This has included many long evenings at school preparing and practicing, which is trying but also fun. We get a chance to spend extra time with the students and question them on their speech topics such as bullying, studying abroad, and differences in culture. They all practiced very hard and poured their hearts out at the contest on Tuesday. Although they did not win any prizes, they did really wonderful and we were quite proud of them.

The First and the Last:

Usually the speech contest lands on the same day as the field day at our school, so we have never been able to attend the field day; however, this year was a change of plans. A typhoon came to town delaying the field day to a day later which meant we were able to go to both the speech contest and the field day. The field day is an event held at all schools across Japan. Our field day consists of many running events, long jump, shot put, three legged race, funny relays, and tug-0-war. It was fun to cheer the students on as they spilled their guts for the glory of best class!

This video exemplifies the hilarity of the relays. Here the students have to duck a hurdle, grab a bag of bread with their teeth, and run with it backwards.

The First:

After the field day we took a little trip with one of our coworkers to the brand-spanking new, oh so wonderful and highly anticipated, Starbucks, which opened up about one week ago in a city about 45 minutes from us. This is HUGE news for the area as it is the first to open in our entire state. Because it was the first store to open (workers there confessed there would be more!) there were special Tsugaru (our part of the state) mugs and tumblers with Tsugaru symbols on them: apples, Neputa, The Shinkansen (another highly anticipated event of the bullet train coming in December to our neck of the woods that is hoped to enliven our not-so-thriving area). Unfortunately, they were out of tumblers already; but we were able to snag one of the mugs. Even though we love our local stores much, we are happy to see Starbucks so close to us (the closest one is 3 hours away). This brings our area a little closer to modernization.