Some pictures of Japan

There's a fishing pond about 20 minutes by bike from my apartment

I'm responsible for decorating the English bulletin board at school. This was my summer edition. In retrospect, I needed some decorations to liven up the gaps.

This is a lovely Japanese-style garden that I enjoyed when I visited Nagoya in November.

This is a construction site near my apartment. As you can kind of see, workers take tremendous pains to keep the site clean and organized.

Here I am at work on Christmas eve. Yes, that's me and not the real Santa Claus. I managed to fool most of the teachers, but the students were too sharp.

This is the lovely Yokohama skyline which I was able to see on winter break. It's actually nicer at night, but you wouldn't know from the way my phone takes pictures.

Winter Break

Today is my first day back at work after the Christmas break. Before the break nothing of particular interest happened, except that at one of the elementary schools I got to watch some of my students play hanafuda (flower cards) today. This is a game that I found out about through anime, and I've played a flash version for many years on and off. It's a game of luck not unlike poker, but for some reason I find it much more appealing. It might be because the cards are more beautiful. Anyway, it was fun to watch them play.

Oh, and there was Christmas! It snowed on the night of the 22nd, about six inches, and it was supposed to snow on and off the whole week without getting warm. This meant that I might actually have a white Christmas, I thought. I was trying to remember the last time I had a white Christmas—after consulting my parents, I decided that it was probably when I was in elementary school. But the week ended up being warmer than expected and it didn’t snow again, so it wasn’t just a little white. However, from the classrooms at my junior high school I could see lettuce fields still covered with snow, so I got a taste of a white Christmas. It didn’t really feel like Christmas, though. I greeted students and teachers with “Merry Christmas,” but nobody returned the greeting.

The end-of-year party with the junior high school was surprisingly fun. I really really did not want to go, but I didn't have an excuse and everyone except the two staff members signed up to attend, and as it is my main school, I felt obligated. I didn't really enjoy the previous party in September, but more teachers came this time, and some of them were fun. At the main party there were almost constant activities so I didn't get much chance to talk to people there, but on the other hand there also wasn't any awkward silence and loneliness like last time. I participated in one of the events by eating a cream puff to which mustard had been added. The point of the game was to look at the faces of the four people who ate the cream puffs and guess who had eaten the spicy one. Of course I was the one who ate it, so I tried hard to make a face like I had eaten something spicy, but actually I quite enjoyed the mix of flavors. It was kind of like wasabi chocolate, but even better.

The next night was the elementary school's end-of-year party. The food was fantastic, people were attentively pouring drinks, and the mood was very jovial and loud. I sat next to a third grade teacher who I've not talked to much. Honestly I don't think he's a great teacher for the grade level he's with right now, and I feel like he doesn't like my style of teaching either. But I think we bonded that night. I also had some great conversations, some of the best I've ever had in Japanese, with some of the other teachers. Thinking back, I should have worked harder to pour drinks--I really did a pour (hahah) job of it. If I am able to go to another party, I'll try hard to keep it in mind. We had planned to go to a snack bar again and sing karaoke, but we went to an izakaya for the second party and by the end of that, half the group was barely awake. So we called it a night and I got home at 11.

After those work parties, I began my winter break. For the new year I made some resolutions: continuing keeping a journal and try to be more regular, start (back) exercising regularly, and improve my spiritual life. I want to add two things to that--no more fanfiction and no more video games. For me, certain video games (almost all the ones I enjoy) are like drugs and if I get sucked into one, it's like a poison to my time. It robs me of the pleasure of other activities because I can only think about getting back to playing games. Fanfiction is also a drain on my time though I rarely spend more than a couple of days on a single good story. More importantly though, I think it reduces my satisfaction with my life, and it disrupts my sleep if I start reading a good story at the wrong time.

Since these two things take up the majority of my free time, I need to find a replacement. Grad school will take up a good bit of time, and exercise as well, but I need an activity for relaxation. I’m hoping that I can relax by programming, but if that doesn’t work I’ve also gotten interested in Rubik’s cube solving. And if I really want to relax, there’s always Netflix, but I find that I really have to be in the right mood to be interested in watching a movie or TV show. But to further encourage my resistance to video games, every day that I can journal, I'll write something that I did instead of playing video games.

Throughout my winter break I mostly stuck to these resolutions with no serious lapses, making it possibly the best break that I've had in Japan. Since I haven't started on my graduate school classes yet, I spent a lot of my free time programming, and managed to make a functional albeit basic application to assist with the memorization of texts (such as the Bible). I also went to Yokohama, which is a beautiful city. I didn't really do anything interesting there, though, because almost all the museums were closed.