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| Tuesday, 30-Sep-2008 13:29 |
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My New Apartment
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The Hallway
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Spare Room AKA Dead TV Room
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It's also my "Study"
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My "bathroom area". Center is laundry and sink
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To the left is the "Bath" room. It only has a bathtub in it.
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To the right, the toliet. Yes that is a faucet on the toliet
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My Messy "Kitchen" Area
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Other Shot of the Kitchen Area
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"Living Room" Area
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Here at long last are the photos of my new apartment. Enjoy!
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| Sunday, 29-Oct-2006 05:42 |
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Halloween Party
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My Zombie Nurse Costume
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I got the idea from Silent Hill
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Mason as Spiderman. He won the Costume Contest
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Mason and Dan (Melissa's replacement)
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Robin, Laura, and I
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Colleen, Laura, and I
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The Halloween party was really fun ^_^ But then again, any opportunity to dress up is fun.
I got to meet some of the newer JETs. They seem very nice. Most of them. There was a married couple who dressed up as a corpse and his black widow. She made the costumes herself and they were awesome. She was especially fun after she got drunk and started telling everyone that she loved them! ^_^
The costume contest was kind of screwy. No one really knew what they were suppose to do. If you wanted to be in the contest you had to get a card and carry it around with you. You also got four stickers. If you wanted to vote for someone you put a sticker on their card. It turned into a total popularity contest, but I got some votes, and several people told me it was a rip that I didn't win which I thought was very nice of them. I did work my ass off on my costume and the people who won bought theirs, but they are nice guys so...::shrugs:: I had to rip seams and re-sew the costume and I also made the blood myself...
Later in the night, the girl dressed as Sadako and I broke out funky style to the bad music they were playing. There is something about wearing scary costumes that make you want to break character and dance really badly.
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| Wednesday, 18-Oct-2006 13:41 |
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Posing with women's underwear
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Making our own sushi
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Reading a magazine in a bookstore
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A few weeks ago, a bunch of AETs got together to take part in photo scavenger hunt. It was for charity. Here are the pictures from it.
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| Thursday, 14-Sep-2006 13:49 |
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School Festival
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The food booths before they opened
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When I came to Japan I thought I'd finally be tall...
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Tomoka fishing for water balloons
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Today was the booth day of the school festival. My teacher-friend, Tomoka was at school today so we decided to hang out and act like goofballs all through the festival. It was very fun. We also dragged a math teacher and home ec. teacher into our romping.
First was the opening ceremony for the festival. It was about an hour and after one of the teachers and the Student Council President gave their speeches, several classes performed dance or song numbers. Most of them were hip-hop, or "sexy dancing" as my students call it. One class did a great para para number. Two guys were in that group. One got really in to it and knew the moves perfectly, while the other one, sadly, did not. And a girl, who must have represented her whole class, sang a very beautiful Amazing Grace.
After that, the festival was officially open. We stayed in the gym to watch the brass band perform. They only played 4 or 5 songs, mostly from Totoro.
Most classes made displays in their classroom ranging from graffitti to demonstrations of what dried ice does. One classroom was entirely devoted to watching soccer games on tv. They also would face paint the flag of your favorite soccer team on your cheek or wrist. There was a haunted house, (there always is a haunted house), but the line was too long to see it. Instead we went to the balloon room. It was exactly what it sounds like. A room filled entirely with balloons. We had fun playing an impromptu volley ball game until the students kicked us out.
All third year classes had cooking booths outside. Since I wasn't at school the day they made the rounds selling tickets, I gave some money to a teacher and told her what tickets I wanted before hand. I got some delicious dango, a hot dog, and attended a tea ceremony. Also outside by the food was an area for classes to continue showing off their dancing skills.
After lunch it was time for the "lives". The first part of that was more dances by students, this time break dancing and hip-hop ballet with batons were added in. When that ended there were a succession of student bands that performed, about four. Most of them were all girl bands. A few were ok. One was really really good. It was an all boy band. The main vocalist is a very active second year. He never told me he was in a band! Usually when we talk, he's imitating Hard Gay or talking about horse racing. What teenager in a band doesn't brag about it?! He rocked out to Kudo Kumi's Cutie Honey and sang a few more songs I know, but don't know the names to.
Then it was time for closing ceremonies.
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| Wednesday, 2-Aug-2006 11:50 |
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My Australian Vacation
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It's summer vacation, which means I have a lot of time on my hands. So a friend and I decided to go to Australia for a week. We only had enough time and money to hang around Sydney and the area surrounding. We saw such places as the Opera museum and the Zoo. Also we went to the Blue Mountains, a national park outside of Sydney. It's famous for having a rain forest and the rock formation called the Three Sisters.
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| Saturday, 1-Jul-2006 16:53 |
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Sayonara Party Take 2
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Today was the Sayonara party to say goodbye to the people who are <strike>deserting</strike> leaving us to go back to their country of origin. The theme was "Baller"  After some people complained that they didn't know what a "baller" was and others complained that they looked it up and found it to translate as "girls, dress like whores" the party planners tried to define it as "Ball gown-ish". Uh-huh. Right. So my little gumi-tachi decided to stick with what we were originally going to do, which was dress up like Japanese Subcultures.
Kerry and Robin were resplendent in their ghetto Nagoya Gal attire. Colleen deemed it to hot to adorn her Gothic Lolita (AKA Alice dress) but she still looked nice and classy. I went as Gothic.... I am noting the lack of surprise here.
Melissa also went gothic. I was on the train to Robin's, when she texted me. I told her what I was wearing and she became very excited. She asked me where I had bought my dress and if it was expensive. At the party, Melissa was there in her brand new goth dress that she had bought on the way to the party ^_^ Her boyfriend was doing the Tengu thing and wearing the geta with the one, very large spike. It was refreshing to see the guy holding on to his girl for walking-support for once.
The party was fun. We actually could eat! Me and Joe were sneaky and got to the food first, so we at least were full ^_^ The slide show was nice this year. Everyone sends in pictures of the people who are leaving or things that they will miss. It was kind of hard to see some of the pictures though. I had to keep pointing out to Joe and Kerry, "Oh, that's a picture of you I sent in".
After the party we all went to karaoke. Big surprise there. Kerry was cute and tipsy and I got to walk arm and arm with her to the karaoke place ^_^ Little did people know that I was secretly video taping them singing...hee hee hee. I will try to restrain myself, and keep it off Youtube ^_~ I think it is interesting that while I was walking around in my gothy kimono, nobody (but the foreigners) commented on it. But, due to the karaoke room being hot, when I took the kimono off and was just wearing a black skirt and tank top a bunch of guys told me I was cool (or かっこいい to be more accurate). Why wasn't I cool in the gothy kimono?!
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| Tuesday, 27-Jun-2006 02:14 |
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| Thursday, 30-Mar-2006 11:13 |
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Tokyo Ninja Attacks
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Over spring break my friend Dalton visited me! We had a fun filled week running amok through out Japan and I have the pictures to prove it! The second day of our vacation we went in search of a ninja village. It was a real town that trained ninja back in the day. The village gives tours and they have a house bedecked with traps, a museum and supposedly demonstrations of the show. The website said it was only an hour from Kyoto. It lied. It probably have taken only an hour if the gods and winds are favorable, but alas some of the stations only had a train that came through once an hour. So the trip ended up taking 4 hours. And when we finally got to the village we found out that the shows started that weekend. Grrr... The house was still neat. We saw the castle in the area and a shrine to the Haiku master, Bashou.
Then we hit Tokyo. I got to finally go to Tokyo Tower! And we went at night when the city was all lit up and pretty. I am so in love with this city. We attended an Anime Convention (pictures weren't allowed there) and we saw Senzoji temple which is dedicated to the goddess Kanon, whose statue was pulled out of the sea hundreds of years ago.
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| Tuesday, 3-Jan-2006 00:00 |
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Kerry, Colleen, and I at the JET Christmas Party
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Colleen, Robin and Kim
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He's one of the supers in charge of us all
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I've been meaning to update this for forever. Life just kept on happening. This is how I spent my Christmas. The first few pictures are from the JET Christmas party. I think they accidently booked it at a Hostess bar. Old guys kept wandering in and these really pretty girls (who weren't any of us) kept appearing out of nowhere to poor them drinks and dance with them. It was all very suspect.
My friend Ambera and her husband came to Japan to see me. We spent most of it in Tokyo. We saw Ambera's favorite singer, Gackt, in concert. We also got to pose by the famous Hachiko statue in Shibuya. It's the dog statue below. It's seen a lot in movies and anime.
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| Saturday, 15-Oct-2005 00:00 |
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Oiran Parade at Nagoya
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I went to see the Oiran Parade at Osu Kan-nan shopping arcade in Nagoya city. Oirans are kind of like geisha, but where geisha weren't suppose to sleep with the customers, Oirans did (for a very high price). Which is also why their obi (belts) tie in the front, not in the back like geisha's do. Also their costumes and ornaments are much more flashier than geisha's. I don't know if these were real Oirans or not. I think that the real Oirans have been disbanded but there is a society to keep this piece of history going. So ladies dress up like them and parade around but they don't do the prostitution bit. So anyway. There was a parade with a few of them today.
The parade was really neat, even in the pouring rain. It was in the shopping arcade so we weren't in the rain, but the day was pretty dismal out. There were TV crews there that thought it was pretty cool to tape the foreigners gawking at the Orian. I had to duck and hide behind Robin. I don't like cameras. The guy didn't even ask us questions, he just put the video camera right in our faces! And after that the other spectators started taking pictures of us too! Some people in our group got revenge by taking pictures of them right back ^_^
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