Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Twilight Re-Dubbed!

On Tuesday we had an outing with two of our students. Twilight Eclipse FINALLY came to Japan after releasing in the rest of the world 6 months ago!! So the big fans from our English Club were dying to see it. The picture below represents the love each as for the opposing boys.



Because the enthusiasum was high, we bought our tickets early at a discount. So we bought the tickets without realizing that the only theater showing the movie in the area was dubbing it in Japanese! We were in quite a pickle, should we watch a movie we will hardly understand??? Or, just let those two go alone to enjoy it?? We finally decided that we would go. Even if we couldn't understand it at least we could hang out with our students...

...but then...an idea...what if we download the audio for the movie and put it on our mp3 player...yes that would work, we thought. But instead of just the audio we ended up with the entire movie (oops! we will buy the real one--promise!). So yes indeed, while at the theater, we watched the screen and listened to the mp3 player, which was playing the movie at the same time--in English!! A double dub!!! and it mostly worked! At times it felt we could really hear the words come from the screen but other times we would know what would be said before they actually said it...or catch it a little late...all in all, it worked and we were satisfied!



A Good day!

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Thanksgiving and more...

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!! Hope everyone is enjoying the festivities at home cause we sure are here!

This year at Thanksgiving we had a few special guests with us. Some of our friends came to the feast just like the Native Americans did so many years ago to help people they knew very little of. And a challenge it was for the students who had to participate in activities to test if all their years of English training is paying off, which, to our joy, it has!


After feasting and playing a few games our special guests left, but we continued the festivities with watching "This is America: Charlie Brown, The Mayflower Voyage" and quiz, a Pilgrim simulation, skits, and picitonary.
In the Pilgrim simulation, the students had to hunt (shoot a plastic toy crossbow at paper cut-out birds) and fish (use a magnet fishing rod to catch magnet paper fish) for their food. It was a game of mostly luck but fun none the less.
For the skits the students had to work out a conflict they were given about a foreign looking person in some difficult situation. Basically, we remember all the times we wished someone had helped us in some difficult situation and wrote them down and had the students reinact them. This was prep work for future interactions they will have using English to help foreigners.
We also had a "Thankful Tree" as you can see in the picture below the tree is full of things we are all thankful for including family, friends, good students, good teachers, Jesus, and...rock bands.
Last of all, after the Thanksgiving party we were invited by 2 of our students to join them in watching the newest Harry Potter movie. So we rushed out the door, ran (literally) to the station, took the $1 bus, ran (yes, again) to the cinema to make sure we got our seats. Although we really enjoyed talking and hanging out with our students we were rather dissatisfied by the movie as it didn't line up much with the book...
One more thing, last week at English club we had the students make commericials. Sounds easy yeah, but not with nonsense items such as a squeaky hammer, peace-hand stick, and huge bowtie. We had such a laugh we thought y'all'd enjoy it too! (sorry, you'll have to turn your screen on its side or just turn your head!)





Friday, November 12, 2010

Colors of Fall

Though we've been super busy these last few weeks, we did have some time last weekend to go to the final days of the Fall Festival and enjoy the beautiful fall colors. Maybe we just haven't been home in awhile and can't remember what it's like there, but the colors of the changing leaves in Japan (atleast Hirosaki) are so vibrant and beautiful!


This spot here (with all the red behind us) is our favorite place in the park in the fall. The leaves are so red, it's simply amazing to look at!!

And Iwaki looks just wonderful with the mixture of the colors of the setting sun and leaves.




Also, though nothing to do with the colors of fall, yesterday was a special holiday here in J-pan:


POCKY DAY!!!!! (11/11- 1 looks like a pocky)


.. so of course we had to do some major celebrating by buying some delectable special edition Pocky!

YUM!

Monday, November 1, 2010

The Last Halloween

Well, we had our final To- O Gijuku English Club Halloween party, and at least we can say we went out with a bang! We "bribed" the students into wearing costumes with a bag full of candy-goodies for 1st and 2nd place and a $5 gift card to McDonalds and $5 gift card to Baskin Robbins for the 1st place winner! They must have really wanted those gift cards because everyone turned up in a costume, with many of them being homemade (including a wolf and Disney Halloween Mickey)!! One of our students even made her Halloween costume the night before while listening to Christmas music- now that's the spirit :D




And, we had the traditional game of "Bobbing for Apples" with a twist. Each apple had a challenge on it, and the teams fought for candies!

Of course a Halloween party wouldn't be complete without some scarecrows, so we did a scarecrow relay race with a student from each team as the scarecrow! We have to admit that they were some rather stylish scarecrows!

And, this year we decided to add in a boot stomp contest, as this was one of Angie's favorite activities that she remembers from her childhood days. It was rather chaotic and wild, but definitely a blast! After the boot stomp we had a scary-treasure hunt, in which the students could only use flashlights (the party was at night so most of the lights in the school were off) to find the clues to the final treasure of candy! Our students absolutely hate going through the school at night in fear of the ghost that haunts the school, so of course we made sure to put some of the hints in dark, secluded places! One of the teams had to sing a song to keep their spirits up as they went down the dark stairs to the kendo room for one of their clues.

Finally, to top off the night we did the traditional "pumpkin" carving or as close as you can get to pumpkin carving in Japan. We were very happy to finish our third and final Halloween party with all of our fingers and no loss of blood! We must admit that, although we had a great time at the party, we were rather sad at the same time as we realized this was the last Halloween party we'd get to have with our students. We're on the verge of 150 days (TOMORROW!) and are starting to feel the sadness set in as we come closer to saying goodbye to our students. And actually the day after our Halloween party, we had a speech contest at our school (we've been helping 2 of our students prepare for it over the last 2 weeks), and one of our student's speeches was about how we and his homeroom teacher have influenced his life since he's been at To- O Gijuku, which only made us even sadder to leave. We know we need to make the most of our last 150 days with our students and are looking forward to it!