Going to Hakone 3 - 7th grade seminar

We went to the Kanagawa Prefecture Natural History museum today so the students could fill out a hand out. It was in Odawara, so I finally got a chance to go there. They had a lot of cool things there, but it was a bit small for me. I thought that it would have been bigger or something or that there were more things to do, but there wasn’t. I mean we finished going through the whole thing, quite quickly, which was something I didn’t really enjoy about the trip there. I mean they had some pretty cool dinosaurs there, well at least their fossils. Some of them were fake, but most of them were real bones that they found somewhere. You could actually touch everything too so; I was on a touching spree with the fossils and other fascinating artifacts.

Then we went to a very famous place in Hakone called Suzuhiro, which is a place where they make processed fish. It’s in almost every bento box that you could buy in Japan, so it’s pretty famous. I thought the lunch was just average though. We had oden, but that’s usually a winter food not a summer food. So that was a bit weird. They made a lot of things there that didn’t seem very good. They had a large anko display too where you could buy Jumbo Anko, which is red bean paste inside of a breaded bun. It wasn’t very big, well not as big as jumbo for American standards at least. But that’s just a bias opinion.

We then went to the Hakone School and unpacked our things to get ready to prepare for dinner. It was curry rice, but the students would have to prepare everything for it. The students would all get changed and then we played a game before all the cooking preparations began. I showed them a few games that we could play without using any English because I don’t normally teach this class, so I needed to warm up to them first. We did a paying attention game with patting our hands to the ground and the direction it would go to. I thought it was good for a starter’s game to get everyone used to me and the way I teach. But soon after that, the students needed to get ready to make dinner.

We set up all the tables in the big room and then the students started cutting the different vegetables and all the things for the salad and soup. They would have to make the whole meal and since they were only in the 7th grade, it wouldn’t be a task that is very difficult. I think that everyone in Japan should know how to make Japanese curry since I think they are all taught at school and at a young age. The home economics teacher was on the trip so she cooked it, while the students did the cutting and other things to learn how to cook it. I learned how to make some good curry too. I was paying attention as they did it, so that I could begin to make it for myself too. It doesn’t look very hard, but who knows until you try right?

Dinner followed soon thereafter. We always have a ceremony before we eat where the home room teacher says a few words about what’s next and what just happened and how they need to eat in a mannered way. Everyone needs to have everything set before anyone can eat. It’s just traditional that way so no one is left out. I like that about Japanese culture and how everyone is always included. Dinner turned out to be pretty good, and I enjoyed it. After the clean up time of dinner, the next item on the agenda was studying.

I studied Japanese from the Genki textbook. I was working on the vocabulary, and realized that I have forgotten a lot of them. I couldn’t write Kanji anymore, and I was having some difficulty with hiragana, which is something that I couldn’t really believe. It was so easy for me before, so I’m wondering how much more I could forget if I hadn’t asked another teacher to help me out. It was a real awakening for me to get my ass back into gear and to start studying some more otherwise I’ll lose my ability to read and write Japanese. I mean I was messing up things that were in Chapter One. That’s the foundation for all the Japanese that I know too.

During the study time, the students were taking their baths. After everyone finished it was time for bed. I went before the female teachers to take my bath in the bath room. It’s a bit big for just me to go alone, but at least I’m the only one with the most privacy since I’m the only male in the house. Then the female teachers went and I went to sleep.