My Birthday!

Brad used to tease me that I tried to stretch my birthday out to a month. Can we go see this chick flick? But it's my birthday... that sort of thing.

This year my birthday kind of snuck up on me. Maybe its because I usually associate my birthday with the beginning of summer and for the first time in my life I have a full time job that goes through the summer. However, I can safely say that I have never in my life had to work on my birthday--thank goodness for it being a Saturday this year!

Anyway, to celebrate we went into Ikebukuro in downtown Tokyo. Before Brad and I met up with some friends to celebrate we went to a cute little cafe called the Milky Way. They have the biggest sundaes ever! This was going to be my birthday cake because unfortunately for me Chocolate Satin pie doesn't ship very well. :) It was huge! and delicious! After that we met up with some friends and started out the night at El Torito, one of the only Mexican restaurants in Japan. Then it was off to karaoke. The karaoke place that we usually go to is modeled after a Bali resort (so the rooms are very tropical resort esque) and their specialty is honey toast. Honey toast is what Winnie the Pooh dreams about. It is a loaf of bread drizzled in honey with fruit, chocolate, ice cream, and whipped cream on top. Since it was my birthday it was free! And of course, since I have something in common with Winnie the Pooh, it was delicious!

This is at the Milky Way cafe. This had fruit, ice cream, chocolate, cake, whipped cream etc etc all in a glass with dried ice in the bottom so it was always fogging up. Yum!!

Johnny, Brad, me, Yoko, and Chris at karaoke with the honey toast. Fun!

After that we said goodbye to Chris and Yoko (Chris just finished his contract teaching with a company in Tokyo and will go back to the United States for a couple of weeks before starting his new contract at a different location with the same company in July. He had to be moved out of his apartment by noon the next day and I really appreciated him coming out to celebrate!) and then went to Roppongi with our British friend Johnny to meet up with his girlfriend and watch the USA v England World Cup game.

Brad and I early in the morning watching the game. 

The game started at 3:30 in the morning. Roppongi is known as the "party district" of Tokyo and is also where  a lot of "gaijins" or foreigners live. By about 3am the bar we were at was packed with foreigners! It was so much fun singing the National Anthem with fellow Americans in another country. It was a really cool experience! The game was really fun to watch but I unfortunately couldn't stay awake and fell asleep during the 2nd half. We ended up getting home around 7:30 in the morning after the game was over. It was a long night but so much fun! We definitely made the most out of my birthday celebration!

Unfortunately we haven't been able to watch much of the World Cup since most web sites that stream the coverage require an American IP address. (Our TV isn't hooked up to get cable.) We've been keeping track online though. Japan is crazy about the World Cup!

Taikusai (Sports Day)

Disclaimer: I had to get permission from the head of the board of education, my principal, vice principal and English teachers in order to take pictures at the school. Because they are so particular about taking pictures in general, let alone putting them up on the internet I'm only putting up a few where you can't see anyone's face and some video's from other Taikusai sports days. Once I'm no longer working in Japan I will post the other pictures and videos. 


Taikusai is like a grown up version of field day. But unlike field day it is a huge deal! Taikusai is held on a Saturday and the week previous to it it almost wholly dedicated to getting ready for it. That means many days outside, and few, if any classes. My school has 5 classes of 7th, 8th, and 9th grade with about 35 students each. At the beginning of the year a class representative chose a colored ball out of a box to determine which color team they would be on. There was a yellow, blue, green, red, and orange team. Each team had one class from each grade level in it. I was chosen to help the yellow team. 


Each team has to come up with a few cheers, choreograph the cheers with movements and props and perform in front of everyone on Taikusai day as well as perform in each event. Each event is somehow scored and each team competes for a prize (a really old--but cool trophy that they get to keep in their room for the rest of the year).


The week leading up to taikusai was horrible! It was extremely hot and dry (I guess I can be thankful that it wasn't humid yet) and we were out there for 4-7 hours during the day. Sunscreen is extremely hard to come by here to (who'd a thought?) So I got extremely burnt the first 2 days before I was told that I had to go to a pharmacy to get it. So now I have a good little bottle of suncreen about the size of power bar gel pack that I paid $7 for (thanks Cindy for sending us a big bottle in the mail!) And I have a super cool farmer's tan now! 


{Side note: They have skin whitening gel here--it is not cool to have a sun tan (sun glasses are also somewhat of a no no here too. I think they're associated with the Japanese mafia or something...). Women wear huge visors, long gloves, pants and long sleeve shirts outside. I don't know how they do it when its so hot! Literally the only skin showing is on their face, but its covered with a visor! }


The field behind the school is just a big dirt field, and because it didn't rain that whole week (which is unusual) it was also extremely dusty. So not only were you sweating because it was hot, but the dirt was sticking to you. They were actually spraying the field down with a fire hose during the breaks. 

The big dirt field behind the school.

 
I'm just glad that I'm not a Japanese school kid because I felt like I was going to pass out just standing in the sun for that long, let alone having to do physical activity all day with only one hour break for lunch and 1 water break the whole day.

Anyway, they completed in traditional events such as running races and relays of all kinds. They had the 100 meter dash, the 1000 for girls, the 1500 for boys, the 4x200, the class relay (boys ran a 200, the girls ran a 100), and the boys relay and the girls relay. They also had tug of war, the ball toss, the centipede (mukade) relay, the class jump rope, the team cheer, the eye of the hurricane game and I'm sure I'm missing some more. 

Thankfully it rained the night before the actual sports day so it was a little cooler and not as dusty. The day turned out to be really fun. I got to run the 1000m run with the girls, the 4x200 against the 8th grade boys with 3 other teachers, and do the ball toss with all of the student's moms (the PTA ball toss lol). 


Oh yeah, and my team won too! 

Woot woot! Go yellow! (I definitely lost my voice for a couple days after taikusai--but I think that was partly because I was sick too...)

These are not my students! But they did do this event. 

This is the ball toss. Again, these are not my kids but I wanted to give you an idea of all the activities.


This is called mukade which means centipede in Japanese. These are not my students and at my school they only had 6 students (not the whole class like in this video) doing the relay. Their feet are tied together with 1 long rope and each team of 6 has to go as fast as they can across the field and back to tag the next group of 6, trying to beat the other team.

It was a very exhausting day but it was fun to be outside and see everybody working together (for the most part). I think healthy competition is really good and I like how there is such a huge emphasis on physical activity in Japanese schools. That is one of the things that I really do think the Japanese have right. 

And another thing I love about the Japanese. Of course after putting so much effort into planning the event and being outside for so long, the teachers still scheduled a drinking party for that night. 


Exhausting! Good thing they scheduled Monday off of school!