Welcome party!

Today was the entrance ceremony for the new 1st year students at the junior high school. In Japan, the elementary students don’t wear school uniforms, so I’ve seen them lots of times in regular clothes, but not looking so spiffy in their uniforms.

今日中学で入学式。　日本には小学生は制服が着ないから、毎年新しい１年生がかわいいと思う。

This evening we had a welcome party for the new teachers. Mr. I read information about the new teachers and we had to guess which teacher’s info he was reading. It was fun getting to talk with the new teachers and the ones who had been around for a while.

夕方に新しい先生のため歓迎会があった。I先生は新しい先生の自己紹介から読んだ。　私たちはどちらと答えた。　新しい先生と去年にいた先生と会話が楽しかった。

One of my favorite things at these kinds of parties is once the teachers start drinking, even a little, how much random English comes out.

えんかいで先生は飲むたびに、たくさん英語できる。びっくり！

At the end we took a picture. The first one was relatively normal. But this one shows more of the attitude of the evening.

最後に写真を撮った。　最少のは普通けど、この写真はえんかいの気持ちのほうが近い。

Totally irrelevant to the rest of the post, I started a new crochet project today!

入学式とえんかい以外は今日新しいかぎばりあみのプロジェクを始まった。

Photo Challenge Day 13

March 13: Art

The art I’ve been working on lately is a crochet project, I’m super excited to finish it and try to make something else. I’m probably about two-thirds of the way finished with it.

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The weather has been warming up, sadly. Today I had snowboarding plans with a student and we had to cancel because the snow (at least near the school) had turned into a giant icee. Yuck! Not so good for boarding.

Photo Challenge Day 6

March 6: Straight

Today I finished and sent my taxes straight to the paper wasters (aka. the IRS). Yay for not having to keep thinking about them after this. I love the cute stamps in Japan, for Valentine’s Day they had super cute Disney stamps.

Here’s the answer to Day 4’s challenge:

It’s a crochet hook. Mom (on the blog site) and Mandie (on Facebook) got it.

In other news I got the HNg (Hokkaido Newcommers Guide) for this year. Guess whose photo is on the front?

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Today was the last day of elementary school classes. I still am slightly in shock that this year’s students were third graders when I came and in less than a month they’ll be starting Junior High School. Time flies so quickly!

It was also my last ES class teaching with Mr. I. It was a lot of fun teaching with the same teacher for all of the classes. In part, because we had time to talk and change lessons as we wanted to. He was also always super receptive to my ideas for the ES English classes, which as a trained ES teacher, made me super happy.

Just because I’m still in awe of how much snow Niseko has every year, here is a picture of the Niseko snow this weekend. Wow!