• I see a 20-something dressed up as a glorified baby doll.   Her pink satin dress is lined with delicate lace.  She has frilly knee high socks and matching pink heels.  A massive pink bow sits atop a sea of perfect ringlets that softly frame her face and draw attention to her dark eyes and extensive fake eye lashes.  To top it off, she is powdering her nose while looking in a bling bling hand mirror.  Not a small one but a big, fancy one like you’d see old fashioned movie stars with.  And she has a teddy bear in her flowery purse.  She looked something like this………  And yes, this is a normal scene.  I’ve seen this outfit on more young Japanese girls then I can count.

• $2 apples!!!  I have to buy one!!!!  Fruit is so darn expensive in this country.  Yes, I actually did see an apple which cost about $2 and yes, I did think that was a pretty good deal though I still couldn’t bring myself to buy it.  Then there was the 3000 yen (roughly $30) fruit “basket” (if you could call it that) made up of one kiwi, one banana, one apple, one grapefruit, one mango, and one orange.  What a steal!!

• One thing that never gets old about this country is the random tunes that play in the most unlikely places.  It’s not uncommon to hear an un-edited America song swearing up a storm in a store.  Or you will hear super old school songs.  Or boy bands like NSYNC.  The other day I was at a pretty nice department store jamming to “Getting Jiggy Wit It”.  Got to love a little old school Will Smith.  My favorite though is a rendition of “Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music that plays at the grocery store. 

• “I can’t sit by the gaijin, she probably bites.”  This is what I imagined going through a women’s head as she and her friend discussed the last two empty seats on the crowded bus.  One seat was next to an old man and one was next to me.  You could see panic in her face.  She finally sat beside me, after apologizing of course.  This happens a lot.  People hate sitting by the foreigner.  It’s not that they hate foreigners, its that Japanese people are so polite to the point of awkwardness.  They don’t like sharing a seat with another Japanese stranger let alone the blonde gaijin.  Japanese are rather socially awkward sometimes.  But I’ve made this into a game which I like to play on public transportation here.  Sit in the middle of the subway seat and see how many people will go out of their way to avoid sitting by you.  Most….. haha   

  Colleen was standing alone just out of the reach of the waves as they lapped up on shore.  She was too afraid to even put her feet in the water.  I went over to her and gently took her hand in mine and was surprised when she took it.  Colleen hadn’t warmed up to me like some of the other girls.  She was so timid that the first day I got her to smile at me felt like a huge accomplishment.  She now smiles and even laughs, but unlike a lot of the other girls who hang on me like monkeys, she doesn’t like to hold my hand or give hugs. 

  I took her small hand, urging her forward a little.  We slowly waded out to our ankles, but she wouldn’t go much further.  I started thinking great, I’m going to be stuck standing here the whole time watching everyone else have fun.  But Colleen started to take tiny hesitate steps forward, clutching my hand tightly with hers.  We went out to her knees.  The first big wave hit and water sprayed up into her face.  I turned to her in a panic to find she was smiling, bigger then I’ve ever seen her smile.  She went deeper and deeper.  At one point she grabbed both my hands and lifted her feet so she was floating.  She laughed as I lifted her up over a big wave.  It was a beautiful moment—it always is—when you know that you’ve earned the trust of a child.  Little Colleen, one of the most timid girls I ever met was swimming in the big, blue ocean and absolutely loving it.

Don’t worry, Food FIRE is free

Men selling mascara haha only in Japan

People here love Jell-O.  This is coffee Jell-O at a local cafe.  It was strange, but not half bad.

This is Gigantor and this is his web.  It’s nearly as big as I am…. Because of his webs location, he catches more bugs then he knows what to do with.  His web is constantly destroyed when he catches too big a bug.  And every time, he makes his web slightly different—bigger or smaller and at different angles—trial and error to find the perfect placement for his gigantic web. Usually when I approach he scurries up his web and hides away.  But tonight I can home to find him in the middle of building his biggest and best web yet.  Maybe it was the one beer I had with dinner (yes, I drink so little here in Japan that one beer causes me to spider watch), but I stood there watching Gigantor for at least 20 minutes as he toiled away.  I got so close to the web I could have reached out and touched him.  I’ve never seen a spider creating its web, especially not on such a large scale, and it was really, well, beautiful.  It’s moments like this that make me remember and celebrate what an absolute marvel our planet is.    

The kids loved showing off their English skills by telling me the names of every animal they saw. 

“Ms. Laura, Ms. Laura.  Monkey!”

“Ms. Laura!  Elephant.”

Ms. Laura!  ANT!”  haha you get the picture.

I made them hold hands with a buddy, but everyone has different ideas of animals they wanted to see or how long they wanted to spend at each exhibit.  Most of the kids were more excited to get their zoo passport stamp and eat their animal crackers then look at the animals but it was a fun day none the less. 

  hmmm… french fries

While I had a lot of fun hanging with my little ones, I left the zoo feeling kind of sad.  The chimpanzee exhibit, for example, is nothing more then a concrete enclosure with a lone branch and tire swing. I’ve never seen a more depressed looking animal.  When I mentioned how sad he looked, one of my co-workers looked at me like I was crazy.  “it’s just a chimp,” he said.  “That thing throws poop at people.”  I told him I’d throw poop at people too if it were me in that cage.  When I was child, I used to love going to the zoo.  I was the little girl playing zookeeper or vet with my stuffed animals and not looking twice at Barbie or baby dolls.  But as I’ve gotten older, I find that zoos just don’t bring me the same joy that they used too.  Animals belong in the wild, not small concrete enclosures. 

1st grade (Butterflies)—my first graders are crazy.  But their energy is infectious.  Sometimes it’s hard to contain their energy and transport into productivity and not time wasting but we’re working on it.  This is their first time to Friend’s Club so they are learning the ropes just like I am.  They don’t quite understand yet that Ms. Laura does not speak Japanese so they speak Japanese to me constantly no matter how many times I say I do not understand them.  Sometimes there are tears involved, and a game of charades then assumes as I attempt to figure out what’s wrong.  Are you ok?  Are you hurt? Do you need to go to the bathroom?  Did you loose something?  Etc….  Luckily we have a Japanese translator/helper/nurse right down the hall and I usually just end up going to see her.  Hiroe is amazing and I don’t know what I’d do without her.  My butterflies are so so cute , and I’m excited to see how they will progress.

2nd grade (Rabbits)—this class is a challenge.  Most of the boys knew each other and therefore are very chatty.  They don’t listen.  They makes jokes and fool around.  I always feel like I’m walking on a very thin wire with these boys… we want to encourage spontaneous English.  But we don’t want it to distract from class which it often does.  I finally can get through roll which was an accomplishment…  the boys would stand up and point to an empty seat claiming they were absent.  They would say here when their name was not called.  Or stay silent then giggle when their name was called.  Class management takes up way too much of class time.  And it’s unfair all my energy is put into the boys because all my girls are very well behaved.  They are a smart, fun group of kids though so if I can learn to channel their energy to learning, we’ll have a great year. haha easier said then done………

3rd grade (Voyagers)—this is like the dream class.  I practice taught with some of these kids so we already knew each other which helped. My Voyagers are fun, excited about English, good at English,  participate in class, and behave.  I always leave this class with a smile.  Not that I don’t love all my kids, but we are able to do fun activities and such because no time has to be put in class management.  We went on a secret mission to the lizard aquarium the other day (one of our stories has a lizard named Leo who lives in an aquarium).  They loved it… I told them we had to be very quiet and sneak upstairs and they got really into it, crawling on the floor past other classrooms and such—very secret agent.  And it was neat to see some light bulbs turn on in their little heads when they put whatever they heard in the story into real life context.  I know it will be be a great year with them.

5th grade (Riders)—another great class and a very, very smart class.  I’ve been told my class was kind of stacked with smart kids which makes it a primo candidate for observations by others looking to adopt the Meysen Curriculum into their schools.  Eeek!  They participate and like speaking English.  I may have been a bit buddy, buddy and too relaxed with them in the beginning though since they were so well behaved as a few have started to act up a bit, but compared to my younger classes its nothing I can’t squash.  In August, I get to travel for 5 days with my 5th graders on the Kansai trip to Osaka and Kyoto.   So excited! 

7th grade (giants)—I only have these boys for the first trimester and my job is to prepare them for their upcoming 3 week trip to America.  They are a good group of boys, but sometimes it’s like pulling teeth getting them to participate.  I only have them twice a week and it makes for a very long day, but I get paid extra for the hour so I can’t complain.

  The Meysen Curriculum is pretty straight forward.  Each level is made up of 3-4 songs, 3 poems, 2-3 shared readers, 2-3 chants, and 2-3 stories.  Each day I have to get in all of these in whatever order I choose.  Here are some of my materials ready for me to teach.

I either teach in the front of the room or the corner.  The boys sit on the floor and the girls bring their chairs to form a semi-circle.  Sometimes I feel funny reading a story to my 5th graders just like I read to my 1st graders, but they are used to it.  I just have to keep it exciting… which can be difficult reading the same stories/chants/etc like 20 times.

this is my tiny wall space that I got in my class.  I had like a day between other preparations to do my wall, but it turned out alright.  I have about 100 kids between my 5 classes so I just incorporated their class names instead of each individual.  I teach 1st (Butterflies), 2nd (Rabbits), 3rd (Voyagers), 5th (Riders), and 7th (Giants)