As Promised

Okay, I finally uploaded/fixed up the pictures I took!! Yay! So if you want to take a look, here they are.

If you want to see the whole image, you have to right click and choose 'View Picture' since this is only showing half and I DON'T KNOW WHYYYYYYY



This was my lunch that I took a picture of that one day. The main-looking thingie is a croquette, which had potato, ground meat of some sort, and cabbage inside it.



This is the view from the music room. You can see Amanohashidate on the horizon, the line of pine trees. It's actually just a very thin strip of land, but we're directly facing the bay that it crosses, so...



Some of my students! They're so cute.



The kids are practicing dances that they made up for the Sports Festival. Each class practices together in the hallway. Now they practice outside so they can spread out.



Here's the school band. I love them. <3 They're playing the theme from Ponyo (In Japanese, not the stupid (so I hear) English version), the theme from Lupin III, some Star Wars, and a bunch of other stuff that I think might be too tough for them....but good on them for trying!

Also, yesterday was my first day teaching at Ishikawa elementary school. It was so freakin' adorable. One kid kept asking questions about American food. "How big are American hamburgers?" "Are American hamburgers better than Japanese hamburgers?" "How big is American pizza?" "What do you like on pizza?"

The teachers tearfully shook both of my hands in theirs and thanked me fervently after the classes. One of them said, in Japanese, "I think the students are going to get very close to you very quickly." And the other said, "You're a fun and interesting teacher. I'm very happy to work with you." I was a little taken aback but blushed a lot and thanked them. They seemed to stare at me in absolute awe when I was speaking Japanese with them...I guess the elementary school program doesn't really require its teachers to speak English well, since it's not technically an English class, but English practice... so they were all immensely relieved that I could speak Japanese.

On the way downstairs after class, I saw two little first graders, who couldn't have been older than seven, dressed all in white with little chef hats, working together to lug a huge pot of food up the stairs together. It was the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Then when I got back, I was watching the kids practice for their sports festival. One of them was sitting aside, and I asked her, "How are you?" to which she promptly gave me a pathetic look and said "NO."

I couldn't keep myself from giggling.

"How Are You" is translated to them as "Ogenki desu ka?" which is literally asking "Are you healthy?", to which the logical answer would have indeed been "No." I sat with her and talked a little bit - I couldn't figure out what was wrong with her, but she said something-byo (-byo means 'sickness' so I could really only figure out that she was sick) so I left it at that.