Hanabi

On my eighth and night in Japan, I saw one of the coolest things I have ever seen.  Our boss, Naomi, took us to a friend's house in Ise, so we could watch the Ise fireworks festival.  The title of this post is 'Hanabi' and that means fireworks in Japanese.  So now you learned something and don't have to go to school tomorrow!

I'll get back to the fireworks later, I have a lot to talk about today!  Our first week of training was simple observations and lectures.  I say simple not because we thought it was simple at the time, but it seems simple compared to what we're getting into next week!  Last week, John and I learned all about the different books we would be teaching out of, what sort of classes we would be teaching and how old the students were going to be.  I was actually surprised to find out that a substantial portion of our students were going to be really little kids!  Elementary kids and the like, and many of them would be "zero-beginner" which means they have almost no experience with English!  We will also be teaching upper elementary, middle school, high school, and adult classes, and that some of these adult classes would be really low level beginner classes as well.  All in all it was a pretty busy and exciting week.  I spent tons of time at the OBC building, and we had lecture every day at 10:00 am, then an afternoon session with one of the current students, then we observed classes for the rest of the day.  It made for five really long days!  It didn't help that we stayed up super late every night, but it sure was fun at the time!

Friday was an exciting day for a couple of reasons.  It started by throwing a wrench in the whole "do the lecture thing in morning" plan, because we went to Tsu City Hall and officially registered ourselves as aliens!  We also got signed up for our National Health Care plan.  Its pretty cool.  Now, if I, say... fall off my bike and break my leg, it won't cost me very much money at all!  Right, Sarah?  Health care is cool.  It makes me feel all grown up to have my own health insurance.  Its weird.  Cool, but weird.

Today is Sunday, and tomorrow, Monday, is a national holiday of some sort which means OBC is closed, but Tuesday we start the second phase of our teacher-training.  Phase 2 means legit teaching.  Legit.  John and I are going to be teaching the first roughly 20 minutes of each class, introducing ourselves, and doing the warm up-review stuff, and then (fortunately for us) the old teachers will be taking over to teach the actual lesson.  We're going to do this for all the classes that we will be teaching for the next year, so next week looks like its going to be pretty darn exciting.

Now, back to the fireworks.  The day started off pretty normal, we woke up at noon after going out the night before and staying out till 4:00 am (gotta love the no bar close here!).  After that we took a train, my first train ride ever!! and went from Tsu to Ise to a friend of our boss's house.  We got there, and the house was beautiful!  It was right on the river over looking the location of the fireworks launching area, and we were at most, 1000 meters from the launch pad as I just decided to call it.  We got there around 5, and the fireworks didn't start until 7:30 or so, so we spent the first couple of hours attempting to socialize.  I say attempting because we were in a house owned by people that only spoke Japanese who were hosting two Americans (John and I) and about 8 Chinese friends who only spoke a little Japanese and mostly Chinese!  Fortunately, our boss's daughter was there, and she speaks decent English, so we were able to talk a little, but most of the conversation was done in a hodge podge of translated languages that nobody really understood at all.  It was a very international experience for me, to say the least.  The host family we stayed with was exceptionally gracious, they definitely kept us well feed and hydrated, that is for sure.  They had a wonderful barbeque, and cooked us all sorts of good stuff.  Everything beef, pork, chicken, scallops, shrimp, and mountain potatoes was sitting on our table.  They were big into the making us drink a lot of beer too, which we were all in favor of!  

Then the fireworks started, and my over-full belly was instantly forgotten.  This fireworks literally blew my mind.  They were bigger, louder, brighter and more colorful than any fireworks I have ever seen before.  The Ise fireworks festival is a sort of competition for Japan's fireworks companies, and each group got about 3 minutes to do their best and brightest.  The winner of that competition was most definitely the spectators, because each and every one of those 3 minute shows was more full of fireworks than the best grand finale that I have ever seen, and there were at least 15 of them.  It was amazing.  I might have already mentioned that but it is certainly worth repeating.  Amazing.  Sorry, I'll quit going on about if I can!  *blogger seems to be having difficulty with the videos of the fireworks that I took, but hopefully I can eventually get them posted.