ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

I let the students design postcards for different countries around the world. They chose the countries and we talked about what they know about those countries. They told me things that are famous and the things that they liked about those countries. They got pretty creative. Alex decided to do the ocean for one of his! :)  

Last week I wrote about the Yosakoi festival in Kochi! Well, what I didn't tell you is that the day after the festival, I woke up with a fever,a and a stuffed nose. I had the fever for 2 days, and was just kind of sick for a few more. But then I woke up one morning with a nasty cough. For those 5 days, all I had been eating was soup and bread. It took me 3 different trips to the doctor and a whole lot of different medicines, but I am finally starting to feel much better! I am going to sleep a lot this weekend, and hopefully I won't have to eat any more soup.


  

One thing I am most excited for is autumn because where I am from, Miami, we don't have it... it's summer all year round mostly.

I know autumn is a few months away but I just can't wait. I want to see the leaves changing on the trees and then the leaves falling to leave all the trees bear. I have never experienced it before, just like I have never experienced a spring or winter either before I came to Japan.

I am also looking forward for it to get cool again because summer has just been way too hot!

Are you looking forward to autumn? What's your favorite season?  

Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty swell!
Things are slowly, but surely, starting to fit to one another since coming to Japan and thankfully I can function alright in my day-to-day state of affairs. So I'm happy of these current happenings.

For anyone reading this, I have a basic question to ask and it's "have you ever left your home for a long time and miss home with all your friends and family back there?" That was me last week, but Japan is slowly growing on me and I think next month I'll be feeling more familiar with the language and environment and maybe make Japan a home for more than a year :)
  

Hello, everyone! After Summer Tour--which was a whole lot of fun!--we had five days off for the Obon holiday. I had the opportunity to do many interesting things during this time! I spent time getting to know many of the other teachers here, and it was a lot of fun. I went swimming in the sea in Kan-onji and saw many beautiful phytoplankton lighting up the water, matching the stars in the sky above. I went surfing in Tokushima and then went to the Awadori festival--it was amazing! After that, I went to Takamatsu for the fireworks festival. There were many bright and interesting fireworks that I had never seen before! For the weekend, I went to Osaka and tried takoyaki and okonomiyaki--both were incredibly delicious! I also went to the Osaka castle and did some shopping in this vibrant and lively city. Then it was back home to Shikokuchuo to rest up before another fun week of teaching!  

So, NASA wants to send a submarine to one of the moons of Saturn, named Titan. Titan is a moon that actually has liquid water covering the entire surface as well as ice, an atmosphere and clouds!. The region in which they want to send it to is called the Kraken Mare, which is the largest ocean on Titan. This is really cool and the United States government seems to be approving this mission. We are entering an age in which things like this will become common place and cease being stuff of science fiction.

I await what new wonders we'll discover.

- James Barbosa  

Lately I've been reading a lot of poetry, but its all been to study and not for fun. Some of it has been really good, and some kind of--hard. But within the last week or so I've decided to reward myself by reading more of my favorite poets. After all, they may appear on the test, so its kind of like studying, right? On top of that I figured I could share them with you.
Coming in at number one (although really I can't rank them) is Phillip Larkin, the man with the coke bottle glasses and the bunny above. He's an Englishman, born in 1922 to a small middle class family. He worked as a librarian which is probably the perfect job for a poet. Larkin was kind of a loner, or at least that's how he wanted people to see him. His poems are often a little sad, but also kind of funny. What makes his poetry interesting to me is that it often questions itself at the end, or comes of ambiguous, such as the ending of one of my favorites "The Arundel Tomb" :

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Larkin, like many artists, was also very hard on himself. He was offered the position of Poet Laureate (that's a super fancy title that basically means you are the best poet in England) towards the end of his life, but turned the position down because he no longer felt he was producing good enough poems. But I think his poetry is amazing from start to finish, so he'll always be the Poet Laureate of my heart. It helps that he looks silly in most of his photos, too.   

On my last blog I promised ot give you the inside scoop on Ritsurin Park as far as Pokemon Go is concerned. Well the park is great it has roughly 16 poke stops and 3-4 gyms.You can walk in circles endlessly collect everything and hatch some of those eggs. If you have never gone please leave the Pokemon Go at home and just enjoy the scenery. If you get the chance to see the lotus pond in the winter and in the summer you'll be mesmerized by the drastic changes. We have visited the park several time and now we decided it was time to get a yearly pass! There aren't any rare Pokemon inside thee park as far as I could tell in my 2-3 hours there. If you are looking to farm up a Nidoking this is the spot! Also make sure to grab the stamp page and get all of the stamps for a neat prize.

What are your favorite Pokemon spots to farm? Do you recommend any places like Ritsuring solely on the scenery?  

After Summer Tour, I was so tired that I almost didn't go to Kochi. My friends offered encouragement for both sides of the argument, and in the end, I got up early and gave it a try.

The bus took us to the Aeon first, where we had lunch and tried to ignore the heat. It was tough, but my teammates kept my spirits up and gave me lots of water. All day long, our team was shuffled from one location to the next, usually dancing 2 or 3 times in a row.


We danced in a circle location (that was pretty neat!) and in a small street (they told us to look out for buses) and in a large street that NHK was filming!

The large street seemed to be the heart of the festival, and it was terribly exciting! There were huge lights blinding the dancers, and they sent us down the street 2 teams at a time! I could barely hear my team's music over the others. It was here that Taylor and I were awarded the biggest medal for dancing at Kochi, which is in the center of a very big flower. I didn't mess up too bad when they ran out into the street to give me one in the middle of our dance.


We finished out the day/night at Kochi castle, performing one last time on a very big stage! I felt incredibly proud that I hadn't gone home early, that I'd survived dancing in 90 degree weather. I saw one of my students, I won 2 medals, I lost a naruko, and I practiced a lot of Japanese.
I would love to do yosakoi again next year!  

This summer has been quite busy and hectic, and has led me to put on a little weight recently. But now that summer is slowly passing by, it's time to seriously get back into some kind of exercise routine. I feel like I have gotten weaker as well, so I am going to have to take it slow at first. But I really want to get started soon, because I will be making a trip to the states soon to visit my family. I don't want to go back and have everyone say "Wow, you haven't changed since you left!" even though I have changed a lot these past two and a half years! One of those things being me getting into good physical shape, though you would not think so at the moment, hahaha.  

During the Obon Holidays my best friend and I went exploring! One place that we went to was Okayama Castle because they were lighting it up! It was so beautiful! The theme of the lights this year is fireflies. The only weird thing that happened was that I had bad allergies that day and couldn't stop sneezing! We thought we missed the lit umbrellas but they still had some out! It was so pretty! We also got to see candles making a picture from the top of the castle. I had so much fun and it was so beautiful!






  

It's been a great week here for me! Like I mentioned in my post last week, this is such a fun time to be out exploring in Japan, as this is the time of year when the fesitvals come around! Last weekend, we had the Takamatsu festival, which we spent two days at, and got to see some really great Japanese music and live dancing, and this weekend we're planning on heading over to Marugame for the Basara festival on Saturday, and then Sunday there will be a smaller local festival in the town of Kokubunji that I'm also really looking forward to going to! I'm reminded this year about how much I love the festival food and the atmosphere and how much fun everyone has being in a community event together!

Have a great week!  

In Home Stay Club we made these small geography games to learn the flags and locations of different countries. Each student chose 4 countries and drew the flags on the inside of the paper toy. We took turns quizzing each other using a giant map of the world. I enjoy looking at maps and imagining travelling to those places. It also brings back good memories of my trips. Are you smart when it comes to geography? Do you know the capitals and flags of other countries?  

Recently we had an influx of new teachers arrive. These teachers need to get themselves set up at the city office and bank, among other things, when they first arrive. Of course, many of them will most likely not have the level of Japanese to do that on their own, so they will require help. More and more I have been the one to help them out with this. From the first time I moved to Japan, I have tried to handle most things on my own. In my case, I ended up getting help from a person who became my friend afterwards. When I started helping other teachers, I muddled through it with the assistance of some of the city office staff who had maybe ten words of English in their vocabulary. The most recent occurrence, though, I managed to get through without any hiccups, and with me being able to understand more than half of what was said! Granted, a bit of it was assumption based on past experience, rather than understanding the individual words, but still able to handle it! Of course, I still have a long ways to go in the actual speaking department. Really need to make some time to do some studying.   

On Thursday I went to Kochi to dance in the famous Yosakoi dance festival! It was a really special day, but it was so hot! It was almost 50 degrees Celsius, and I could feel the hot pavement through the bottoms of my shoes! I had to take many breaks, and I had to sit out of a few dances so that I wouldn't get sick! My teammates all won so many medals, and one of the young kids on my team even received a cookie decorated to look like a medal. It was really cute! I received two medals as well, one from the Masugata street and one on the main street! Our last dance was on the stage at Kochi Castle. It was definitely a very special way to end the festival!



  

Since Pokemon Go has come out we've been doing a lot of exploring to catch Pokemon!

Recently we found that Utazu has a very nice park that has many Pokestops! But not only is it good for Pokemon, it has a beautiful view. We were there one day around sunset and it was beautiful.

So many people are there catching Pokemon, from children to seniors! It's so great.  

Hey, what is up everyone!

The past week I’ve been exploring Takamatsu and I’ve been seeing all these places called “Hard Off”! These places have a ton of manga, DVDs, CDs, and old and new video games! One thing I love, besides music, is old video games. I grew up playing Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo games and being able to go to Hard off and buy old video games for cheap prices is just really awesome!

I sadly didn’t buy any games or anything yet, because I don’t have a TV yet to play any Super Famicom games on it yet, but I really hope to soon! Do you also like playing old video games? My favorite old video game is Tetris on the Famicom!
  

Another summer tour has come and gone. It was quite a busy time, from getting everything set-up, to the performances, to clean-up, but in the end it was all a great time. If you were not able to make it this year, well, there is always next year! I highly recommend it, you never know what may happen! This year's theme was the Olympics, and we came up with quite a number of fun activities to go along with it. All the students seemed to have a great time of it, and not to brag, but I think everyone enjoyed my rendition of "Old Macdonald" this year; they all were very enthusiastic taking part in it, and I even ended up going a little overboard by singing it longer than we were supposed to, hahaha. As always, looking forward to next year!  

So whenever I have free time I like to try to do something new, which mostly involves cooking or baking. Last weekend I decided to make a no bake cheesecake. It was pretty basic except I had to add a little Canadian twist to it and add a maple syrup glaze on the top. It came out pretty good, however the texture is very different from a cheesecake that you'd normally bake. But it tasted awesome!

- James Barbosa  

Last weekend I went to Mitoyo and carried the dragon with Mitoyo's International Exchange Group. It was a lot of fun. Only one of us actually new the dance, so that part was a little messy, but carrying the dragon was surprisingly easier than I thought it would be.