Sayonara parties

Well, my time teaching at Four Seasons Language School is coming to a close and I will soon start working at Aichi University in Toyohashi. Since this is my last week of classes, I have a few going-away parties with students and teachers. My first one was with my ladies class, which was one of my favourite classes. I have taught them for the past 3 years and although some of the members have changed, I was glad that the main three women were in my class the whole time. I have leearnt a lot about Japan and Japanese culture from them and will miss teaching them.
They took me to the Japanese restaurant across from Four Seasons, which is also where they took me when I started teaching the class. It was a wonderful meal and the chef used some ingredients that even my students had trouble naming.
On Saturday night, there was a sayonara party for myself as well as Ian, who is also finishing at Four Seasons. We went to our usual drinking hole and I was happy that most of the teachers could come out. Here's me with Ian:
And here's Ian with Rachel and Ayako:
I have another party next week with another one of my favourite classes, so I'm looking forward to that one too.

Community message board

Unfortunately, due to it being a busy March for me, there hasn't been many things I can post about. So today, I'm doing a short post on our community message board.
There are 20 houses in the small community near our house. I've done previous posts about some of the meetings and events that we have done with them. A less exciting, but new thing for us when we moved here was the community message board. The board has important messages and upcoming events that our community leader puts together every two weeks. The board also has a list of the houses in our community. He passes the message board to the next house on the list for them to look over. When they are done, they pass it on to the next house on the list, and so on. Below, you can see me going to the house across the street to pass the message board.
Told you it wasn't that exciting. Hopefully there will be some better, more exciting posts soon.

White Day

It's been a busy past month, and so unfortunately there haven't been many exciting photos to put up on my blog. The last entry was for Valentine's Day, where (in Japan) women give gifts to men. Ayako made me lots of yummy food on that day. And so a month later, on March 14, men return the favour on a day called White Day.
In the morning, I made Ayako some strawberry pancakes:
For lunch, I made grilled cheese sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. In the afternoon, I baked some chocolate chip cookies (some using white chocolate chips):
Here's Ayako enjoying a cookie:
And for dinner, I made a chicken casserole with cheese and mashed potatoes with herbs. Ayako was happy to enjoy some homemade dishes that I prepared.