Nacht und Nibble

The one thing that seemed to make any sense today was lunch- straightforward- grab your food, and eat it with a spoon. Classes also somewhat made sense, although the question-asking activity for the 2nd grade (American 8th grade) bred a degree of chaos that is proving difficult to cope with in correcting and grading papers. I will just have to wing it I suppose. The middle school is, as I mentioned before, more formal and also just generally bigger than my other schools. I miss a lot of what is going on, and between that and having fewer classes I often find myself wondering what I am supposed to be doing with myself. No doubt this will correct itself as time goes by, but for the time being I really need to be on the ball to find out anything.

The Shiibata fighting festival was more tame than I expected (several people we asked said it was different from other years), and that, coupled with not being able to understand the announcements in Japanese, made for a bewildering night of wondering around Shiibata. I missed out on the fighting action (such as there was), but had a good time getting to know some other JETs from the region. Also, we went and checked out this sweet Jinja (Shinto shrine) which was all lit up for the occassion.



Also, here are some pictures of the Arakawa area that I snapped whilst out on my bike- during the morning on my way to work at Kanaya Elementary school. I love the mornings here, because the sheer amount of moisture in the air causes even the smaller rises in the terrain to be capped with opaque fog. Also, if you have not figured it out already- rice fields are ubiquitous in Niigata, as these pics will testify.




Finally here is a small shrine that I encountered, also on my bike. It was very little: big enough to house a medium dog or a small Kami. Any reading of the big writing on the pictured stone translates to something like Big Black Heaven, as near as I can tell (Cilla feel free to correct me), which has a nice ominous ring to it. The figures in the shrine, on the other hand, are not quite so intimidating.




One final note- Cilla, I keep forgetting to photograph that stuff in my fridge. I will try to get that up here in a bit. I still have no idea what it is, but I know that I will never drink it again if it can be helped.