Parent's Day!

Today was parent's day for the third grade at one of my schools. This meant that I went in with my fellow AEA Rumi to each teach one of the two third grade classes. It was a normal lesson except that there were about 20 or so parents, some with younger siblings of the students in tow, watching from the back of the classroom and through the open windows to the hallway. (Japanese schools are set up so that the wall of the classroom that faces the hallway is made with an entire row of windows along the top half.) I was more then a little self-conscious. However, I've taught that class once before and the teacher is very nice and speaks very good English (at least compared to most of my other teachers) so I think I did very well. I think that maybe the students were a little nervous too, they behaved very well and it seemed like everyone was paying attention and trying to participate. When I left it felt kinda like I was running the gauntlet, having to walk past all those parents in the hallway, not just the ones for my class but also the ones who had been watching Rumi's class too.

Karaoke and Photos.

Eli and I did Karaoke tonight for the first time. We went out with some of the other JETs for dinner and afterwords we all found a Karaoke place and got a room for an hour. In Japan karaoke isn't like many places in the US where everyone who comes signs up and takes a turn and listens to everyone else. Here there are small rooms where a group of friends can pick songs with a remote and sing with wireless microphones along with the music. A tv screen shows the lyrics and lights them up when you are supposed to sing them. There is usually a video going on behind the lyrics which seems to almost always have very little to do with the song itself. The big difference being that you are in a room with just the people you came with.

After hanging out with our friends we headed back to the train station to go home. Our tram got us to the station just to late for one of the trains so we were going to have to wait around for 20 minutes. When the tram was pulling up I noticed a sign for a karaoke spot near the station so to kill time we decided to go see how much it was. It ended up being cheaper then the one we had been at with our friends, and since we had had fun with them we decided to try this spot out. Turns out it wasn't just cheaper, but they also had a much better selection of English songs. Eli and I ended up staying for an hour at this place too, just the two of us. Turned out when we went back to the train station that we had to wait for 2o minutes anyway, but we had fun in the mean time.


In a previous post we mentioned that we've started a photo sharing website. We've been adding some more photos to it so check it out. There is a link on the right hand of this screen which is called "photos." It seems that there isn't a way for you to comment on the photos unless you also have a Picasa account, so if you have questions or comments and don't have an account then it would be ok to comment to this post for now, or e-mail us. Just be sure if you do that you explain the photo that you are commenting on, so we don't get confused as to what you are talking about. And keep checking back at the photo site because we're working our way up to the present in uploading photo files so more will be coming soon. :)