This picture is of a place called 猊鼻渓 (geibikei) gorge and it was cool. We went down a boat and it sucked because we were forced to sit in the middle and we couldn't see much of anything. We had to take the stones in the picture below (you could buy 5 of them for 100 yen, or something around a dollar) and try to toss them into the hole. I got 2 of them in, the one you see below which means "love," and another one meaning something like "good relations." I'm expecting to get a girlfriend in the near future because of it. Stupid blog uploaded the stone picture sideways. Argh...
Afterwards we went to a cave that had shrines and bats living in it. Very cool, except I had a hard time getting a picture of the bats. Those bastards.
We had a Japanese Olympian and former graduate of one of my schools, Sugawara Chieko, come to our school. She hasn't won any medals but she's going to London for the next games to try and win gold... I guess that's obvious huh. She's a fencer if you're interested, although you're probably not. It was cool she came anyway. She had some cool speeches and talked about her dream during middle school. She didn't have one. She just went through her middle school life. But she encouraged the kids to think of their dreams. I didn't really have a dream back in middle school either.
On the 12th of November I went to Fukushima for an event called 松明あかし taimatsu akashi. They burn big pillars of wood that they had paraded around earlier in the day. It was awesome to watch everyone really get into it and enjoy themselves, seemingly forgetting about the situation Fukushima is still in. When I get to school I'll try uploading a video. I'd tell you what the meaning behind the burning of the pillars is, but I never found out and am too lazy to look it up. After I got back to Kesennuma I only glowed for an hour, so it wasn't too bad.
Japan has borrowed some Chinese characters for use in their writing, called Kanji (in Japanese). It's different from a traditional alphabet in that each "letter" is actually an entire word, which means there are a LOT of Kanji. Most people's names here in Japan are written in Kanji, which means, because each character is a word, that each name has a meaning that is pretty easy to guess (more or less). One of the students who writes me letters has the name Sumika, which is written as 純花 and means something like "pure/genuine flower." When I wrote her back, I told her that her name was very pretty and that my name didn't have a meaning (yes, I know that's sort of a lie, you history buffs). She wrote me back and this is what she said: "Your name has dust in it. That means gold powder, right?" Sweetest 7th grader... I mean sweetest girl ever. Yeah, if only my name actually meant that.
First
click here and watch some of this. You don't have to watch all of it. Now, what you just watched was part of a pretty big anime/animation/comic/manga called Naruto. He's doing a move called
螺旋丸 "Rasengan" which means Spiraling Sphere or something like that, sort of like a Kamehameha if you watch DBZ or a Hadouken if you know Street Fighter. If you know neither, screw you! Anyway, I have been giving my students this move for a while now for fun, and one day as I was walking into class a kid in the front goes "ready, set..." and then the ENTIRE CLASS stuck their hand out and yelled "RASENGAN!" at me. It was the most awesome thing ever and I wish so badly that I could have gotten it on video. I naturally gave the class one back and I think I scared the Japanese English teacher a little bit.
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