Non food news

Teaching is going alright. I can't say I'm a perfect teacher, but I do my best to teach the kids the best way I know how. I also try hard to make them like me, which means making them laugh a lot. Usually I'm pretty successful. It's not that hard. All I have to do is pick up a fake apple and pretend to gobble it up noisily like Cookie Monster would. Or, I can jump up and down like a monkey, making monkey noises and scratching at my armpits. It's gets them every time.

However, one little girl didn't like my monkey routine last week. Instead of laughing till she fell over like all the other little 6 year olds in the room, she sat there and frowned at me. Then, she pointed at me, which is apparently very rude in Japan, and yelled "hen," which basically means weirdo in Japanese. The little girl called me a weirdo!! What? She's like six, she's supposed to like this kind of ridiculous humor. What a tough crowd.


Here I am...


But I have no problem making a fool of myself if it makes the kids relax and laugh a little. Recently, in one class where the kids were maybe, oh say eight years old, I was teaching them parts of the body. In the lesson plan it said to sing the Hokey Pokey, dance moves and all. I was pretty sure the activity would fall flat with most of the students and we would have to move onto something else pretty quickly. Well, would you believe it, the kids actually loved it! They couldn't stop laughing. Honestly, I think they just enjoyed it because near the end you have to "put your bottom in, put your bottom out, put your bottom in, and shake it all about..." Yeah, you can imagine. They really got a kick out of watching me put my bottom in and out, and of course, shaking it all about. They liked it so much that they all stopped dancing just to watch me, in all my ridiculous glory.


Loretta Lynn

Let's see. The band is doing fine. We've been practicing together for about a month now, I guess? We practice for about four hours every Sunday night and we now have seven songs. Two of them are covers: the Loretta Lynn song, "Fist City," sung by me, and a song by Nick Cave, sung by Daniel. The rest are Blazing Cranes original songs. The last song is still a bit of a work in progress, though. Andy wrote the guitar and bass parts initially and then I tried to write lyrics and a melody on top of them. I've never written lyrics to anything before, so I don't know how good they are, but it was fun to try. Since I wrote the lyrics, I also get to the sing the song which is always fun. However, we all keep feeling that something is missing from the song. We keep changing things every week about it. It's frustrating, but at the same time it's nice to all be working on a song together as a band. The first line of the song is, "I wanna be as big as a pony..." That's all I'll tell you. I'm looking into buying a second hand electronic keyboard so that I can practice on my own between our usual weekly practices at the studio. I also think it would help me in writing more lyrics or melodies in the future. I am wishing I hadn't quit my piano lessons quite so eagerly back in middle school.

I've had fun being in this band not only cause I enjoy music and singing, but because I've enjoyed getting to know the other band members a bit. I've also been getting to know a lot more people in my guesthouse, which is nice. I've even begun talking to the many Japanese people that so intimidated me before. It was tricky cause most of them don't know much English and until recently I didn't know any Japanese. But my Japanese is slowly improving and I'm trying to practice by talking to more people. I started talking to some Koreans who live in the guest house, cause their Japanese is really really good and they're really friendly. I was amazed at how much I was able to say to them in Japanese. They were pretty surprised and impressed, too, I think.

Shimokitazawa ( i didn't take this picture)

A few weekends ago I went to a club in Shimo Kitazawa with Andy and Daniel from my band and another Japanese guy from the guest house named Shin. The club was having a 50s/60s night. So the music was all American 50s/60s style. It was all really obscure, amazing stuff. We couldn't stay very long because of how early the trains stop running, but we had an awesome time dancing our hearts out to the music. We did the twist, we did the-- well, I don't know the names of the moves, but we did them all. The place apparently filled up after we left, but while we were there we were the only people dancing. The walls were lined with awkward Japanese people dressed in 50s attire. Apparently they asked our Japanese friend if we were comedians from a TV show or something. They couldn't understand why a group of people would dance in public so vigorously and unabashedly. Crazy foreigners.

Anyway, Shimo Kitazawa is a cool place. Reminds me a little of the village in NYC. Here's a link to an article on Shimo Kitazawa: http://krax.typepad.com/krax/city_tokyo/index.html

Not much else. Recently made plans to visit Kyoto in early August with my mother and grandmother who will be visiting. Really looking forward to that. I also enjoyed using as much Japanese as possible to speak to the travel agent when I was reserving the package tours for Kyoto. She knew a lot of English, but still seemed to prefer speaking Japanese to me, so I just rolled with it. I understood quite a bit more than I expected to.

I also recently bought a plane ticket to attend the wedding of one of my very best friends in September. I'll be using four of my 5 paid vacation days available. I'm extremely excited. I get to be a bridesmaid for the first time. I get to wear a fabulous orange dress. I get to see my family, and her family, and a bunch of my closest friends from home. I get to be present at a very important day in a good friend's life. What's not to look forward to?