Monday

Woke up at 7:00am this morning, rice for breakfast, and then I cycled to school since the weather is still super gorgeous. Nice busy day today with 5 classes, and I also received an apple from the librarian yay! She said it was super cheap and yummy (a bag of 6 apples for ¥360!) so she gave one to me to try. First up was 5-2 in period 1 today. A pretty nice standard class, and I feel like they were in a better mood today as it wasn’t too disorderly or noisy, and we finished all the planned activities on time. They actually remembered all the vocab (a random set of 28 words) pretty well! “Glove” and “globe” was definitely hard for them to pronounce though, with them pronouncing “globe” like “glove”. As expected the “v” sound is hard to pronounce for them, and also the difference between having a long “o” sound (globe) and a short one (glove). Next up was 3-2 and it was super noisy class today. Although we got through all the planned activities, it was really rowdy and we just couldn't get them to settle down today. Their homeroom teacher didn’t scold them as much as I would’ve preferred her too. Sometimes she does get angrier and use a sterner voice, but I guess today she must have been too tired or something. At least this class listens attentively to the song we play at the beginning, but after that it was just chaos.

3-3 in period 3 and it was still noisy, but much better. I think it really makes a difference when there are kids that genuinely like English in the class. For example 3-3 is still noisy and rowdy, but because there are a few kids who try hard and listen properly, that makes the class dynamic overall a little quieter and more well behaved. I still find it funny how they’ll remember things when we’re practicing it on the blackboard, but as soon as we move into the game they’ll forget (in this case it was the question “What sport do you like?”. They really liked the card game though (they had to go around asking people “What sport do you like?” and finding the people who had the same card as them), and kept begging to play it one last time. Next was 3-1 in period 4, and their classes always go the best. Today was really good, with them listening quietly, carrying out the activities obediently, and just being perfect students all around. Their homeroom teacher also came in with a nice idea before starting the card game – he got the boys to line up in front of him, and the girls in front of me, and they had to say “What sport do you like?” to us before they could start the game. That was a nice way to check who actually remembered how to say the question, and as a result the game flowed very smoothly.

Lunch with 4-1 today, and 4th graders are just seriously cute. They’re even cuter than the 3rd graders. Today’s lunch was vegetable curry (first time having sweet potato in curry!), a really nice salad that had cucumber, corn, cauliflower and broccoli, and a mandarin. Successfully learnt the names of the 5 kids today (the ones sitting near me) and they were so happy that I was trying to learn their names. There was kid being funny and being like “Please call me 店長” because he had a towel wrapped around his head like 店長 usually do. Spent the lunch break outside again today in the gorgeous sunshine, and the 1st graders were all crowding around asking why I was outside today. A lot of them were collecting leaves and acorns in their little hats, and there were many games of tag going around with various grades running and using me as hiding spot (I was wearing my puffer jacket and a lot of them are so small/skinny they can hide behind me!). Cleaning time was a bit rough today as the troublesome girl was acting up. The other kids cleaned great though, so I just had to deal with the one girl, but it was alright in the end. She’s the type where you just let her ramble and rant until the end and listen, and then do a little bit of stern talking to let her know what she did wrong.

Last class of the day with 5-1 in period 5, and it was a pretty good class. Bit of a scuffle at the beginning before we started between two boys, but they moved on quick enough. Like 5-2, they struggled with saying “glove” and “globe”, but they managed to remember all 28 words, and we had spare time at the end so we did the zoomed up photos powerpoint quiz I’d made earlier. Got off work at 16:20 today and cycled home. Went to pick up an ALT friend and then drove to Ikaho Onsen for the autumn leaf light up at the bridge! The drive there took a little longer than planned because of traffic, but we got there safely and found a parking spot. Had really delicious とんかつ for dinner (the pork cutlet was really juicy!) and then walked up the stairs to the bridge. It was so pretty! The autumn leaves were at their peak, and although there were people there, it wasn’t too insanely crowded (Kyoto has trained me well) so it was nice. There was one group of Chinese tourists who would not get off the bridge, and even the other Japanese people there were getting a bit annoyed (I heard a younger Japanese guy say きもい to his friend about the Chinese tourists! I don’t blame him). After we had our fill of the illumination and taking many photos, we drove just down the road to an onsen that was thankfully open all the way till 23:00. Most onsen in the Ikaho Onsen area are attached to hotels (旅館) so their “day-only” admissions close insanely early – all the ones on the onsen website I was looking at all said their opening hours were 11:00 to 14:00 or 15:00!!! So darn early. But I finally found one that opened till 23:00 (黄金) so thankfully we still got to go onsen! Had a great time relaxing and chatting with each other, and two Japanese grandmas also struck up a conversation with us in the onsen. One was from Niigata and she was just such a lovely cute grandma, and the other was a bit younger and was in Ikaho for a Salvation Army meeting! Her English was excellent because she’d lived in LA before, and also in HK for 20 years – her Cantonese pronunciation was great! We drank milk and I had ice cream afterwards before driving back home.