English Test Theater

Correcting the 1st year English midterms....

A collection of interesting answers. <3

Q: If you call Ms. Natalie and want to ask her what she's doing, what do you say?
CORRECT ANSWER: "What are you doing (now)?"
A: "What is it now?"
A: "Wats?"
A: "What is this?"
A: "I'm speak English?"
A: "Whose Ms. Natari doing."
A: "I timu bont play." (???)
A: "Where you playing now?"
A: "What is are you doing?" (Hedging their bets...)
A: "iPley stabey."
A: "What time is it now?"

Q: Where is your house?
A: "Yes, it's summer."
A: "Yes, he bas"
A: "Here." (<3 <3)
A: "Yes"
A: "No."
A: "It's studying English"
A: "whet"

Q: (There is a picture that they must write three sentences about. A girl named Tomomi is listening to music, a boy named Kenta is running, and two children named Yuji and Miki are playing tennis)
A: "Tomomi moujituk."
A: "Yuji and Miki are tennising now."
A: "Tomomi is the music."
A: "I pley baseball."

Q: If someone is walking too quickly on a dangerously icy street, what do you say?
CORRECT ANSWER: "Be careful." "Don't walk fast." (or stuff like that, as long as it's proper.)
A: "bont"
A: "You are not quickly!"
A: "Be careful is fast."
A: "Don't warking fast!" (<3 <3)
A: "Don't fost."
A: "Exuce cus me?"
A: "No"
A: "Don't could road walking." (I wish I could give this kid a bonus point. It's obvious he's trying to say "Don't walk on a cold road" or something like that. Creative!)
A: "Don't farst."
A: "rood wooking."
A: "Look! lunning not!"
A: "Excuse me. Be careful." (This was correct. I just thought it was precious.)

Q: You don't know where Miyazu Station is. How do you ask someone?
CORRECT ANSWER: "Where is Miyazu Station?"
A: "I don't ho."
A: "Miyazu Station?" (Though this would work, probably. <.<)
A: "What's Miyazu Station?" (close, honey!)
A: "How is a Miyazu Station?"

Q: You see someone swimming in an area with a 'no swimming' sign. How do you give them a strong warning?
CORRECT ANSWER: "Don't swim (here)." or "Be careful."
A: "What do you do swimming"
A: "Don't is swimming!"
A: "Swimming be careful." (Really close! I thought this was a great try.)

Q: How is the weather today?
A: "I am studying English"
A: "It's crudy."
A: "It five-ten."

They tried so hard!! Well, most of them did....some of them I'm not sure what they want to be saying, but...

Twice in a week? WHAT.

It's me again!

I had elementary school today. The whole morning, the whole day, I prayed. I was like, "please don't let this be a horrific disaster that ends in me feeling like I got hit by a truck."

It wasn't. Thank God.

One of the fifth grade classes has a new teacher. I'm not really sure of the details, but I think she started from winter break. About ten minutes into class I got that she had about the same feelings about the class as I did, so that made me relieved that it wasn't just me.

But again, they weren't so bad today. I ate lunch with the fifth grade class with the new teacher and sat with the kids while they played Pokemon shiritori. Shiritori is a game where you say a word and the next person has to come up with a word that starts with the last letter of the previous word. It's pretty easy unless you limit it to something. Like Pokemon.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I could contribute to the conversation...but. I knew just enough of the Pokemon names in Japanese (and enough of the ones in English that were the same both ways) that the kids were really kind of confused. It was cute.

I'm zonked, folks. I can't wait to wipe out this weekend.

SHAAAAME.

First of all, I am SO SORRY neither of us has posted! It hasn't been crazy, we've both just been lazy. Lazy, crazy. Crazy, lazy. Let's call the whole thing off.

*dance*

Anyway! We've both been going through some..uh.. difficulties. I had a really nasty awful cold around Christmas that left me really shaky and with a hanagoe (froggy voice - the Japanese call it 'nose voice') for about two weeks. I'm pretty sure it was some mild bronchitis ...thing, but knowing my stubbornness about the doctor (which is completely without reason here, seriously) I just chilled out until it went away. Then as soon as that was over I had another slight problem that increased in pain and intensity until this past Friday. I won't go into details (because they're TMI) but like, I wasn't getting any sleep, I was shaky and nauseated with pain (and painkillers, woowoo!) but again, stubbornly, I didn't go to the doctor.

"This is WAY too embarrassing to go to the doctor for." I stubbornly insisted, instead relenting to taking 2+ hot showers a day and more baths than I'd taken cumulatively over the rest of the time we've been here.

Which is a real shame, because Japanese baths are awesome.

Now, however, my Alex has come down with some kind of bug!! I have to say, (insensitively), that I'm glad that I finally have the opportunity to do something for him, since he has been very sweetly taking care of me and tolerating my whining for....um...the past month or so. So I'm really concerned about him (he's all achey and stuffy, poor kitty) but also really overexcited about what I can do. I'm going to try cooking stuff I'm not used to cooking, we'll see how that goes.

That made me think of taking pictures of the process which reminded me -- I have pictures of my classroom displays, but I left them at home - I'll put them up at the next post.

As far as non-awful things that have been happening, there are plenty of those too! We went to an Ebisu festival a while ago -- Ebisu is one of the seven luck gods of Japan, and he's all about protecting children and making money. Not sure if it's in that order. But he's a generally happy guy, and his main festival is in March, which is when all the gods go to some god convention somewhere else in Japan. So there are no gods and there's no use praying to any of them during that time....except for good old Ebisu, who happens to be deaf and just completely misses the summons. I like Ebisu.

Anyway, the festival was nice; we ate at a really fun restaurant afterwards that was basically a 'things you dip into things' restaurant (and it's close to our apartment! We're so taking people there!) and then the next day we went to Fukuchiyama for a movie.

The movie we went to was called "Nodame no Cantabile" (Nodame's Cantabile...that was easy) and was about students at some kind of music/performance college in Paris. It was a comic, it was an anime, it was a live-action TV drama, and now it's a live-action movie. I fangirled over the classical music the whole time. It was really....anime-esque though, and goofy...but it was really cute.

Lenny, you would love it, go see it, hee.

What else...um...I got nothin'. Alex made salsa for me. <3 I found out some of my vacation times, so that's good. But if someone wants to visit or someone wants me to come visit, you gotta let me know ASAP -- gotta fit in a visit home for the parents, and a couple visits here that I'm having arranged....mwahahaha.

Sorry for the stream of consciousness. How are you guys doing?

Just Soup

It's been a while since I've posted anything resembling a recipe, so I'm going to fit one more in before we finish out the year.

Before that, I would like to apologize for our lack of a Christmas post. I hope everyone enjoyed their Christmas! Ours was really nice. Nat had to work during the day, but we hosted a potluck with our English conversation group for dinner. Nat made meatballs and her pizza bread. I made my tomato bisque, with some minor alterations (addition of some finely chopped mushrooms and substitution of one Japanese leafy vegetable for another). We still haven't sent out our Christmas gifts or cards yet, but know that they will be on their way...someday.

There was lots of good food at the potluck. As always, there were leftovers, which are just as delicious!

The next few days were mostly lazy, on our part. Yesterday, I walked to the local convenience store to pay the internet bill. You can pay your bills at the convenience store! Isn't that convenient? You can also pay for Amazon.com orders at certain convenience stores and have packages shipped there as well. Amazing! I ended up being lazy the rest of yesterday and buying dinner at the convenience store as well.

Today, though, I made soup. It's somewhat my generic soup, but we had some kumquats on hand and I decided to use a few to flavor the broth (mmmmm!). As long as you keep a regular stock of tomatoes, onions, garlic and keep your spice cabinet stocked like I do, all you should need to leave home for this are the kumquats and some sort of base. If you don't keep some sort of soup base on hand, that is. If you do, all you'll need are the kumquats.

The result is a delicious bowl of soup!

Just Soup
(Today's variation includes kumquats!)
(feeds 3 or 4)

Ingredients:

• 1 Tomato, peeled, diced and mashed
  
• 1/2 a medium onion, chopped fine
• 3 cloves of garlic, chopped up however you like to chop up garlic (I like the bell-shape you get from slicing it, but Nat likes to smash it for stronger flavor. I go back and forth between methods. If you like, you can too!)
  
• 5 Kumquats, washed (if you have extra, you can eat them whole - peel and all)
  
• Soup base (I used 2 chicken "consomme" cubes which are quite a bit like bouillon cubes, but you could easily replace it with a can of broth or some sort of vegetable soup base.)
• Olive oil
• Water
• Salt - to taste
• Pepper - to taste
• Ground sage - to taste, though I think I used about a teaspoon...I think
• 1/2 tsp. Turmeric
• Oregano - a couple dashes
• A good pasta for soup (smaller pastas like orzo or alphabet noodles are best, but spaghetti or angel hair can work if you break the noodles down into small pieces before adding them to the soup)

Directions:

1. Make sure you're thinking loving, happy thoughts. This soup needs to be made with love, even if it's not in the ingredients list.
   
2. Peel two of your kumquats, mash and remove the seeds. Add the kumquat juice and pulp to your mashed tomato and set aside.
3. Saute your onion and garlic in olive oil until they start turning brown (I usually do this in my soup pot to cut down on dirty dishes).
4. Add mashed tomato and kumquat to the pot, stir a few times and start adding water. I usually use the adding water step as an opportunity to clean out my ingredient bowls and not waste the last bits (get the last of that delicious mashed tomato off the sides and into the soup!). I just fill up my pot to a reasonable level, but since there are several types of cooking pots out there, I doubt that is going to help you much. This recipe should make three bowls of soup, so use as much water as would fill three and a half bowls (to allow for evaporation and pasta absorption). You can always add more if necessary. If you are using a liquid soup base, use that much less water.
   
5. Bring to a boil.
   
6. Slice two crosses into each of the three kumquats you have left. The cuts should be just deep enough to cut beyond the peel and each cross should be on opposite sides of the fruit. Add these to the soup.
7. Add salt, pepper, sage, turmeric and oregano and let cook for about five minutes and taste the broth to see if you need to add anything. (I keep a small sauce dish on hand for this purpose).
   
8. After you have the flavor right, add your noodles and continue cooking until the noodles are tender.
9. Remove the three whole kumquats.
   
10. Serve and eat.
11. Do NOT spill all over the counter!

Okay, so you may spill it all over the counter if you really have to, but just remember that you're going to have to clean that mess up.

I didn't spill this soup, but last week's chicken noodle was almost a waste.

I shall leave you with a picture of Toshiko and me from our Christmas party. Toshiko's the one in Christmas socks.

Typical.

It's snowing in Iwataki!!

Not incredibly heavily, but there's big flakes blowing around and it's starting to stick. I'm really happy about this. I hate cold weather, but if it has to be cold, I'd rather it be cold and snowy than cold and just BROWN.

However, I also have Not-So-Angelic elementary school to go to today.

They insist I have lunch with the students (which is cool) but today the classes I'm teaching are both after lunch. Before, I thought this meant I could have lunch here and go to elementary afterwards.

Nope.

They're expecting me today at lunch, which is at 12:20. That's cool. The thing that gets me is that the students have like an hour of time between lunch and fifth period, which starts at around 2:20? So instead of leaving at 2, I'm leaving at 12, eating lunch with the kids, and sitting like a rock in the teachers' room for an hour. Awesome.

A little while ago, the administrator of the elementary school called. I perked up my ears, since, because of the snow, most people have been like, "You're riding your bike to Iwataki-sho today? That's kind of dangerous, isn't it?" and I'm like, "Well, it's quicker than walking.." so I thought it would be something along those lines. For a moment I was like, "Awh, they're worrying about me! That's so sweet."

Turns out it was just a reminder for me to bring money for all the school lunches they have me eat with the kids.

Typical. X3;

Snow!

So our first snow of the season fell yesterday morning. Our first slush fell the day before, but that doesn't count. There's not much of it out there, but it's still pretty.

It's also still falling (though it wasn't when I took that picture), so who knows how it will look later. I don't even know how it looks now. The windows are all fogged up.

Yup, snow.
We were told to expect the first snow sometime around mid-December to mid-January. We were also told that a high count of stinkbugs supposedly foretells a lot of snow for the following winter. We had a lot of stinkbugs. Do you remember those pictures of our pet spider? Well, all those lumps in her web were stinkbugs.

Speaking of our darling Nephila (yes, we named her), she's gone. She disappeared some time ago, leaving a lonely web behind. She may have been knocked down by the particularly strong winds we had the week she vanished and decided to rebuild where she landed...or she could have been eaten by a bird. Who knows. She's gone.

We sort-of miss her.

...

Sort-of.

Anyway, two days ago (the day of the first slush of the season), I woke up earlier than I normally do and headed to the grocery store without checking the clock. I knew when I had woken up, roughly, and realized partway there that the store was likely not open for another while. As I approached the store, I noticed that it was not blaring music and the lights didn't appear to be on, so I promptly took the next turn and began an adventure! Lucky for you, I took my camera along.

Okay, so it wasn't so much of an adventure as an "Alex walks up a hill along a road he's never been on before and back down it," but still, I have pictures.

We shall start with this: the closest Buddhist temple to our apartment (at least I think it's the closest). The picture isn't actually the temple itself (at least, not the main building). The structure directly behind the tall stone with writing carved into it is just the entrance gate. The buildings to the right appear to be part of the temple compound, but the main building is that rooftop to the right. It doesn't really look as impressive as this picture, though, so don't worry that I never took a picture of it. Do you see the pond on the right? It has a tree hanging over it, held up with crutches. I'm assuming that it is a flowering tree because it fits with the Japanese sense of aesthetics...that and it doesn't look like a maple. I'll have to check back in the spring.

I continued on the road and it was abruptly rural. This is not to say that we don't live in a rural town, but we live in the town part of the rural town and most of where I need to walk is also in the town part. So, it was quite startling to suddenly find I had wandered into the rural part. It was the walking into it that made it startling, not that it was there. We'd ride past several rural locations while being driven from one event to another, so I knew the rural was there...it just took some more active presence to make me realize it.

Oh, right! Pictures!

So I did a terrible job of taking pictures of the actual farms, but I got some interesting pictures, nonetheless. Here's the edge of a bamboo grove near a farm and the farm's shed. Did you know that bamboo is actually a species of grass? Amazing! Just imagine mowing that every week! But, yes. Those trees which don't appear to be able to support their own weight are bamboo.






Next up, persimmons!

I apologize that the subject of the picture is so dark. I blame the lighting and the poor angle. But "up" was the only angle available to me (it was a tall tree on a hillside), so here it is. The persimmon tree is standing next to a palm tree. It's hard to tell, but they're waving hello. There are still a bunch of persimmons on the tree. They are much smaller than the persimmons we normally get in the grocery store, but you can sometimes buy small persimmons too.

Now, let's get a look at this hillside.

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's a dirt path (with the occasional bit of wooden stairway) zig-zagging its way up the hill. Most of the trees are cedars of one variety or another. There are some evergreens of other sorts mixed in as well. The hillside was rather pretty, though, so I just wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see it too.

I continued climbing until I came upon a road at the hill's crest. Across the road was one of the elementary schools Nat teaches at (she's teaching there today). I decided to turn around at this point and I saw the bay (if you look, you can see the Amanohashidate). Turns out it wasn't much of a walk, and the rural bit I had encountered was only a tiny bit of winding, hillside road that Nat bikes up every Friday, but I still enjoyed it. Seeing the bay, though, made me decide that I wanted to walk by the sea. So, I meandered back down the hill. By the time I was nearing the road to the sea, a fine mist of snow pieces (there was no way anyone could really call it "snow") began to fall. As I approached, I noticed that the road to the sea had a police barricade. I decided that it was a bad time to visit the sea when a fire truck joined the police. So, I wandered through some back streets for a while, noticed a few stores I had never seen before and eventually made my way to the clock-on-a-signpost to check the time. The grocery store had just opened! I bought my groceries and went home. Later that day, the mist of snow pieces turned into a downpour of slush...which Nat had to bike home in. Poor Nat!

A hilltop cemetery behind the Buddhist temple.


.

Of Christmas and Teeth

This temporary filling is weirding me out. It's kind of made of foam or something and I keep messing with it. rawr. I'll be glad when the real one is in after the 25th.

We had a party on Sunday night. Alex played Santa; a bunch of ALTs and Japanese people came. Toshiko gave us a ride (thank you Toshiko!) and it was a ton of fun. Alex made deviled (angeled?) eggs and I made pizza bread, my new favorite pizza-type recipe since pizza dip.

...I should make pizza dip.

Drooling aside.

I got the cutest Snoopy mug!! It comes with a little matching teaspoon! I almost wanted to send it home to Mom but I LOVE IT SO MUCH. MINE. Maybe I'll give it to her when I come home. :)

Our Christmas presents are going to be kind of late. In all honesty, it's really hard to buy presents sometimes, simply because we don't have a car and have to rely on other people to get to places like Mipple (our local department store) in order to do our shopping. I've got a few things for a few people, but I really want to finish out before we do our sending.

If anyone's got anything specific they want, please comment and we'll see what we can do!

I really want to take another trip to Kyoto for shopping and stuff since I think I'm pretty used to the city now, and there's a whole lot of cool things I can pick up there. But every weekend has had something pop up to make it impossible for us to go. Grrrrr.

Though maybe I can find some good stickers in Kyoto, too. I brought some awesome stickers from the dollar store for my classes when I first came here and now I'm almost out of them. They're really weird things like sparkly, strangely colored vegetables. (green carrots, blue pumpkins, purple mushrooms and the like.) The kids just adore them, and the ones here in Japan are cutesy and all but they lack that ridiculous American flavor. Oh well.

We're going to be having another party on the night of the 25th for our English conversation members. The thing that stinks is...I HAVE TO WORK! T____T (that's a crying face). Because the school was closed for so long due to Swine Flu, it cuts into winter vacation. So...work for me. :(

Oh well, it won't be SO bad.