新年あけましておめでとう！

Happy 2013, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely time at home for the holidays. I wish I could have gone back, although I had a fine holiday as well.

School is out for the winter so I had almost 3 weeks away from work. I was really good to have a break since I was getting quite busy near the end there trying to finish up things before the break and organizing the Christmas party in the English Lounge.

Korean food with my coworkers

I got some good presents too, including socks (my favorite ;D), a Japanese novel, a loaf of whole wheat bread, and dryer balls. Presents came with decorations, too, so I got in the mood with some lights, tinsel, and a mini tree.

presents under the "tree"

REAL Thanksgiving dinner! All the way from home~

After Christmas I headed down to Yokohama to stay with my host family for a week. They really enjoyed the cookies I gave them. It was kind of a full house, since their daughter was visiting also, and they got another puppy since the last time I had seen them. I got to visit with them, eat a ton of good food, watch some Japanese TV, finish The Casual Vacancy, play with the pups, and sleep a lot!

amazingly delicious sukiyaki

me and Roy-kun

New Year's Day

I also went to Hatsumode, the first visit to a shrine in the new year. I pulled average luck :)

It's a good luck charm for the home attached to an arrow and with a snake ornament.

Hope you all had a good new year too!

Tokyo Sky Tree

Back in November, I visited the newly opened, tallest tower in the world, Tokyo Sky Tree. Last time when we were all staying in Asakusa we could see it being built, and it was completed spring last year. It's 634 meters tall (The Sears Tower is 527m)!

up on the observation deck

The wait to get in was horrendous, but luckily you don't have to stand in line the whole time. There is whole Sky Tree Town to wander around in while you wait. There are shops, restaurants, mini-museums, showrooms for things like 3D TVs and Kinect, mini-art project exhibitions, a theater about how the tower was built...all kinds of stuff. One shop had a whole set of unique sock monkeys :P

This video played above the line for tickets. It's a cartoon map of the city and every once in a while it switches to show trivia about history and traditional Japanese things. I enjoyed watching it actually-

There is a glass floor you can stand on!

Unfortunately it was cloudy when I got up there, but you could still see so far! The city is really beautiful at night.

the Sumida River, looking towards Asakusa

There was a great International Beer Museum restaurant there that we went to after. There were about 5 different bars, each themed for a different country. The menu had the beers ranked and also the food labeled from each country to match with the beer.

Fashion Show~

A few months ago, Holly and I came up with the idea to have a fashion show with the students.

We had 4 student models participate in "Togaku's Next Top Model"

We organized the whole thing, including finding students to be models, having a rehearsal, decorating the room, buying/making prizes, inviting people to watch, and even modeling ourselves!

Do you like our runway?

We all brought our own outfits to show and then discussed them after walking (in English, of course).

One of the professors jumped in at the last minute in her Native American dress, because she had just come from a presentation and was all dressed up!

This is Mr. Cool, our winner, in all American brands-

We all came out again at the end, Project Runway style.

The boy at the bottom was wearing Sky Tree glasses, so this is his Sky Tree pose-

All the models together; the 2 with sashes are 1st and 2nd place. Holly and I made the sashes and the crowns out of stuff from the 100yen store, and they ended up being quite awesome! Also 1st got a gift card to H&M and 2nd one to Baskin Robbins, and the other 2 got candy and flowers.

So the fashion show was actually quite a success and we got many compliments from faculty because we did it all ourselves. It was pretty fun, even though getting students to commit and show up was much more difficult than I had anticipated. But, the 4 that did participate did an wonderful job and, the best part for me, they all seemed a little bit more confident after it was over.

We'll see if I have the motivation next semester to organize another lounge event~

Hip-hop

Today, I got to dance R&B style with the hip-hop dance club at Togaku, Extreme Steppers, at a Christmas party. Holly took a video for me so here it is!

I'm the one in the middle with gold on my jacket and short hair.

enjoy~

my work blog

So, at work at the EEDC (English Education Development Center) I've also been writing in a blog. The posts are about events we host here and also about American culture.

You can check it out here:
http://blog.tyg.jp/eedc/07/



The next post will be about the fashion show that Holly and I are hosting :)

JALT Conference 2012

So, let me tell you about the conference I went to Oct. 12-14 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka:

JALT is the Japanese Association of Language Teachers, so the conference was all about teaching English as a second language. Many teachers were there from all over the country, even some from other countries. There were talks and workshops, a dealer room for publishers, big presentations, and some parties, too.

The conference was right across from Hamamatsu City's train station at a place called ACT City. It's a huge area that has a building with two concert halls, a hotel, a big shopping center, a music museum, and 3 big exhibition halls!

 I was a volunteer along with about 50 other students. I did many jobs (some more fun than others haha) including giving directions around the conference, taking registration, moving and setting up projectors, and stuffing bags with materials. I was working most of the time, from about 8am to at least 6pm, so I didn't get to attend many talks, but I did hear a few tidbits here and there. At the parties, I got to meet some teachers from other universities and speak with them.

Everyone in the "intern room" on the first day for a welcome party with games and pizza-

The best part by far, though, was meeting all the other volunteers. Right from the very beginning we became a team so I felt like I could talk to anyone even though we had just met. And so many of them were so great! We had tons of fun working together, or talking during lunch, or staying together at the hostel. The last night, even though we were dead tired, about 10 of us stayed up to tell ghost stories. Unfortunately, most of them live about 3 hours away in Nagoya, but now if I go visit I will have people to meet up with!

I took the night bus there and back with Holly on Thursday and Sunday nights, and also got up super early to work all day, so basically I was a zombie for the whole weekend, but I took Monday and Tuesday off work so I had time to recover. All in all, it was a great weekend!

The JALT intern team

settling in

So I've been here a month now, and I'm really getting into the swing of things. I'm actually going to be quite busy these next few weeks.

My self-introduction poster for the International Exchange Center

This weekend I visited an English pub in Meguro and went shopping in Harajuku. The weather has finally changed into fall weather, which awesomely happened on my birthday. Also on my birthday I got to wander around Yoyogi Park, one of my favorite places ever!

Me with my carrot cake :)

Super awesome chair from Travis-

Cute soap dish from one of my students!

The EEDC (English department) has a blog which I've written for too. The first post by us, the interns, is here.

Tomorrow I will be joining in on a graduate school business class, so I'm a bit excited for that. I have to read a case study tonight to prepare, and then we will discuss in class mostly in Japanese. I might learn more this time than the students haha

This weekend I'll be working at the JALT conference in Hamamatsu. It's a big conference for English teaching in Japan, and I'll be there along with other student volunteers and some of the professors who will be giving and attending presentations. I won't have too much free time it looks like, but I hope I can attend a few presentations at least.

I've also been hanging out with the dorm cat, Mina, so here's some cute pics :)