New Year's Resolutions

Hi Everyone! So, around New Year's we asked students to write their New Year's Resolutions on little paper hearts and then used those to decorate a bulletin board. Now that it's Spring we rearranged the hearts to make a cherry blossom display (the top picture).

I thought it was pretty so I wanted to share it with you all, and I also included detail shots of my favorite resolutions. I hope you can read them on these pictures, because they're pretty great. I made one, too, and it's "to practice Japanese every day," which I certainly do not do.

Thanks for reading, I should be updating again soon because I'm going to Osaka next weekend (to get a tourist visa for my big trip to Vietnam next month) and then the week after that I'm meeting my parents in Tokyo and then going with them to Kyoto the next week. So I should have lots to write about!

Cate

Baseball Game

Last weekend I went to a pre-season baseball game to see the Hanshin Tigers play the Eagles. Japanese baseball is fairly similar to American baseball in a lot of ways, but the fans are completely different. The Tigers are famous for having rowdy fans, though the stadium wasn't too crowded because it was Spring Training and it was a Monday afternoon. Every time the Tigers were at bat, everyone around us (we were in the Tigers cheering section) was singing and making noise along with men who were shouting encouragement and playing trumpets. Each inning there was a different man leading the crowd.

Instead of a seventh-inning stretch, they had a big balloon release. We all blew up big ballooons with special caps on the ends (to release air slowly) and then let them go during the special balloon song. It was a very pretty sight to see all the balloons fly into the air and I also enjoyed the balloon cleaning squad on the field who waited for the balloons to fall and picked them up before the players came back out. A single balloon escaped their attention and was flying around but the right fielder got it in the end.

American Bar

These photos were taken at an American Bar called GB's that Mark and I go to a lot (because it's halfway between the train station and his house). The first picture shows my dinner, 'Country Morning,' which was an omelette filled with ground beef and cheese and covered in ketchup, plus a giant piece of toast (that was the only time we had dinner there - usually we just get Miller and American potatoes, which are french fries with a pat of butter on top). The other two pictures show the decor, which is very heavy on license plates. The plates seemed to all repeat the same ten or so states, but they had my favorite plate, Utah, so that's ok. They also have American food containers on a shelf along the top of the walls. You can't see the containers in the pictures, but they have a random selection including Folger's coffee, macaroni and cheese boxes, corn, Nestea, spam, and ketchup. I'm always interested to see how America is portrayed abroad, so I hope you enjoy this little look at American-themed dining in Japan.

And a side-note about how the rest of the world sees us: we were doing subjunctive in class the other day, and a student made the sentence, "if I were American... I would eat hamburgers every day."

Bye bye,
Cate