English Outing

At my college, the only dormitory is reserved for all the first year students in the English department, and living here is a requirement for the program. Some second year English students also choose to do another year in the dorm, but it's mostly to improve their English, and they don't get a grade for the tasks and activities that are required of the first years. In past years, there have typically been something like 60-65 first year students living at the dorm, with a handful of second years. Due to the low birth rate currently plaguing Japan and some economic factors, the dorm is now at just over half capacity with 43 first years and only four second years.

Anyway.

One of the events put on for the dorm is called English Outing, and it's a day trip allowing everyone to get to know each other. All the foreign teachers go, plus the English department secretaries (Japanese), and the one Japanese teacher who is quite the shutterbug shows up to take pictures. The second year students can choose to go if they want--three of them went this time around. Typically I think this thing happens in April, closer to the beginning of the school year (April 1), but for some reason it was set for May 12, by which time most of the students were all reasonably well acquainted with each other. In any case, though, it was a fun day out and a chance for the teachers to get to know the students, too.

The site the students have been taken to the last few years is called Fukiage Seaside Park, about an hour away from the school. It's apparently the only park in the area that has a beach and also not-beachy, parky things to do. The students sign up beforehand for one of three activities--a walk on the beach, rollerblading, or cycling--and we spent a couple hours doing those activities before lunch.

Since apparently every activity in Japan is a photo opp, I had to pose in about forty or fifty photos in the entrance area of the park while we waited for the last teacher to arrive in his car. Here are the few I managed to get with my own camera.

Then my group, the beach group, posed for some photos once we got to the beach.

At which point most people went off wading in the ocean. Except for a couple girls who stayed on the beach with all our stuff, one of whom kept closely examining her sneaker for like five minutes. I later found out she'd lost her cell phone and was looking everywhere for it.

I wished I'd gotten a closer shot of these other two, who for some reason did not dress for the beach. One of them looks like a homeless person. She was wearing jeans, thick high-top sneakers, a long-sleeved jacket, and a hoodie, and found a walking stick and an empty jug and was carrying them around. 

Truth be told, almost none of the girls dressed for the beach. We weren't planning on going swimming (although I really wanted to), but most of them either didn't wear shorts, or they did, and in typical Japanese style also wore leggings or thick tights underneath them. Huhhrrr. So they had to roll up their pantlegs and fold up their leggings to be able to go in the water. All of them, even the Hobo, were fashion victims.

Anyway, we didn't get to spend much time at the beach, only about an hour, because the walk to the building where we'd have lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon was like a forty minute walk away. It was a hot walk, too.

Here are some shots of what that building looks like and the grounds:

Lunch was this: obligatory white rice, plus soba noodles, fried chicken, edamame beans, a tiny bit of corn on the cob (which I'd already eaten by the time I thought to take the picture. It's the yellow thing), some kind of salad, something else in that bowl that I don't remember, and a wedge of orange. I've learned that Japanese people hardly ever eat fruit, and when they do, it's like a bite. I don't understand how they get their vitamins.

After lunch we went to the building's gym and relaxed a bit before the afternoon group games would start. Some of the girls ate a bunch of snacks. I tried some. Japanese food will get its own entry later. There is much to say.

Anyway, here's the Hobo having some fun with her dormmates.

While this was happening, the teachers were all getting ready for group games, which involved English-based (sort of) games doing things like miming a word to teammates, making a representation of a word out of clay for the teammates to guess, etc. The final game, though, was a kind of relay obstacle course that had nothing to do with English. Each team member was placed at a station on the course and had to complete a difficult task when it was her turn. The turns started when the team members were able to transfer a rubber band from a Pocky stick held in the mouth of one person to a Pocky stick held in the mouth of another person, without using their hands. For those familiar with my Alia in Korea blog, Pocky is Ppaeppaero (aka Pepero). Here's a picture of both:














We chose to use the nude version for the game, to make it easier. One of the other food items used in the course is called Ramune, and it's a crazy drink--it's carbonated, and there's a little ball in the bottle that floats up the the top when you try to drink it, covering the opening. The girls had to race to drink a whole bottle. It's very difficult. Opening Ramune is also quite something, and I found an image with directions.
 


After the games were over, we awarded prizes to the teams, in order of points achieved in all the games, and got ready to go home. Cleaning is a big thing in Japan apparently, another subject I'll be talking more about, so all the girls had to clean the gym before we left. In past English Outing trips, they had trouble with the owners of the facilities being too picky about this, despite the girls cleaning everything spotless, so they changed to the current venue.


After cleaning was done, we got on the bus and took the hour-long ride home. Everyone was very tired. The End.

Miyama Pottery Village

Miyama Pottery Village is about a half an hour's drive outside of Kagoshima. I went there with two other foreign teachers and one of the Japanese teachers, plus her family a couple weeks ago. First we went to Oda sensei's house for lunch--salad, tempura, fried chicken, and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting about. It was kind of a lot of food. Then we had like the best strawberries I've ever had after, with coffee slash tea. The thing about Japan and coffee, though, is people don't seem to realize that foreigners often take sugar with their coffee, although they do remember the cream. So a couple times I've not wanted to be rude and had to drink bitter yet creamy coffee.

After lunch we took two cars (in Japan they drive on the left, by the way) to Miyama, and our first stop was actually a glass-making gallery. This chick below is the glass blower, and she was doing a demonstration when we got there. She starts off with a ball of glass at the end of this metal rod, which she then heats for a moment in the kiln.

The she spins it around on this mechanism for a second to cool it off a little.

Then she uses this heavy-duty cloth to help her roll the glass out into a shape. In this case she's making a drinking glass. Then she repeats this process several times, making the glass more glass-shaped each time.

Tools.

Here you can see it becoming more like a cylinder. She's using a little blowtorch to help her.

At one point she flash cooled it? in water. I was glad I got the steam in the shot.

Nearer the end of the process, she trims the top edge.

Here she's using a cone-shaped implement to help herself along with the shape.

The end result is this, after they go into some other kiln--though I'm not sure if they get heated again, or if it's just a slow cooling process. All her explanations were in Japanese of course.

Here's another blowtorch shot. Those cabinets behind her is where she seemed to be putting the glasses after she finished with their shape.

On the left side is her gallery, which I actually didn't take a photo of, because I didn't want to be rude. This woman's husband is the salesman. On the right side is the work area.

I bought this ring because it was cool. It was a little pricey at 2900 yen (about $35), but whatever.

Our next stop was a traditional "black pottery" shop, where again I didn't take any photos inside. You can imagine the kind of stuff people made in high school pottery class, though, made with dark-colored clay. This place was of course expensive, too, but I don't know why. Just because it can be, I guess. Most of the stuff in there could easily be made by someone who knew a little bit about a throwing wheel or who could be patient enough to do a bunch of cookie-cutter designs and put them together to make something bigger. A lot of it, though, frankly, looked like trash. They were trying to charge like fifteen bucks for little things like chopsticks holders for the table, but they literally were just pieces of clay torn off from a flattened piece, the edges not even smoothed out, which were then pressed with a finger to make a little indentation and then pinched on one side to make a little handle or whatever. They looked like a three year old made them. And there were other things just as crappy, too.

Here's a cute little area map made out of wood, which we passed on the way to the next shop.

This place here is a "white pottery" place, where they make hand-painted ceramics. This kind of stuff I can understand charging a lot for, because you really can't do it yourself. This is all that intricately hand painted stuff you see, with all the fine lines and flowers and so forth. It's really pretty. In the ground floor windows there, there were some artists you could watch working. I didn't want to bother them with a photo. Sorry.

In front of the building.

There wasn't a shop there, so we crossed a little park, where we saw all this wood, plus a bunch of old school kilns outside.

The ground was full of broken pottery on the sides of the footpath. Cool.

Here's the shop. There were some kitty things in there that I considered getting for me and my mom, but it was totally too expensive, unfortunately.

In the windows were these giant urns.

And across from the shop was this building labeled the Consulate General of Korea. It's no longer in use (if ever), I assume, but apparently that's there because all this pottery came from Korea when Japan invaded Korea and brought back all these master potters. Then they passed down the specific skills and methods and such.

Around it was a garden.

Traditional sandals outside the Korean building.

We're still hanging around the Korean building. I guess when it's rainy, this is a little crick.

And then finally I asked someone to take a picture of me before we left.