Local Neighbourhood Fireworks

Another full day at school today! It’s still raining though, so since my umbrella was still at school, I decided to just tank it and ride through the rain. Made a quick stop at 7-eleven on the way to buy some onigiri for lunch! I arrived at school at 8:15am, and there were only 3 other teachers in at the moment! One other teacher arrived later in the morning, but all around there were again only 5 teachers floating around. The English teacher wasn’t in today so I couldn't show her my self-intro powerpoint just yet, so I brainstormed and planned for the English Board, looked over Grades 1~3’s English curriculum, and prepared for the English Summer School happening this Friday to Tuesday. I managed to give myself lots of stuff to do by also planning the higher grades’ (4 to 6) lesson plans for all the way till December. The English teacher had given me a rough schedule of what lessons would be done each month, so based off that I also made my own rough lesson plans – it was a good activity that kept me occupied the whole day!

I got off work at 15:30, went home to drop off my school stuff and grab my camera for tonight! I then biked to another ALT friend’s house to help him with buying stuff online on Nitori (a great Japanese furniture shop), and also to enjoy the local lantern and fireworks festival that was being held in his area. It was a lovely little local festival, but still quite a large sized one on the banks of a river. They had lanterns with drawings done by the kids hanging all alongside the bank, and even had some lanterns floating on the river! It was all very pretty. There was also a decent line of food stalls with all the usual delicious festival food. The fireworks were being let off from a baseball field, and we stood around trying to find a spot, when a group of grandmas and grandpas just offered us into their roped off section with seats!!! They were so super cute and lovely, they kept trying to give us a lot of food and drink, and making sure everyone in our group had something – Japanese hospitality at its finest. I do think it was because we were a group of foreigners though! Glad I was with my other ALTs for this one because if it was just me I’m sure they wouldn’t have done all that as I blend in too well! The fireworks were actually pretty legit for this festival too. I thought since it was a small neighborhood one it would be very small in scale, but the fireworks were all pretty massive ones! It was also extra lovely because it seems like the fireworks were all bought from people and companies of the community, because before each one was fired the announcer would read out who the firework was from, who it was for, and a little message. There were super sweet messages from husbands to wives, thanking them for giving birth to their children, from parents to children for birthdays, and other heartwarming messages.

We decided to leave a bit early before the fireworks officially ended because some of us had buses to catch, and we all have school/work tomorrow so we didn’t want to get stuck in crowds on the way back home.