Dancing, Sexy Shabe, and English time

I just wanted to share a few highlights from the last few days. This is mostly so I can remember as much as possible when I get back home and want to reflect on the trip but hopefully anyone reading this will find my experiences in Japan interesting.

I'm so excited that I get to be here for approximately 6 weeks still! I have the opportunity to experience the Japanese culture not as a tourist but as someone who gets to interact with Japanese college students on a daily basis and enjoy the students that grew up in a place I know very little about. I think it's great that I will be learning from these students this summer probably even more than they will learn from me.

On Thursday night we went to watch one of the students from Shuto University in his summer dance recital. Here is a video from one of the dance groups that performed:



It was so cool to be able to watch a common university event in action. One of my favorite things about being in Japan so far is that even though I stick out like a sore thumb with my blond hair, blue eyes, and Californian flip flops I have had the opportunity to enjoy the same things that the students do on a regular basis. After the dance performance, a few of the freshman girls came back to our apartment to eat ice cream and look at pictures of our friends on facebook. Simple things like that are just so much fun to me! Even though I haven't seen a ton of sites in Japan yet I feel very blessed to have met some fun students to teach me about their culture and I hope we can continue to enjoy each other.


The next day we had Sexy Shabe...shabe means discuss in Japanese and we have shabe night every Friday. This week was called Sexy Shabe because the discussion was all about relationships between men and women...in other words love and sex. The guys and girls had discussion separately because it would obviously be a little awkward to discuss all together. So the ladies had an adorable little tea party and I made some interesting cheese and cucumber crackers for the event. I couldn't read the label on the crackers I bought and I thought they were plain crackers but they definitely had a strong flavor. The students ate them all, so either they were being nice to me or I've discovered that being illiterate can make you a creative cook.

We also started a workshop called Intensive English this week where we will help Japanese students prepare a speech in English to give in front of our group in a few weeks. Interestingly, I have found it kind of fun to have the students tried to explain a word that they can't think of the English equivalent for and then we try to guess it together. Usually it works out pretty well which is encouraging to me.