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.

Happy Valentine's Day

On Valentine's day, Ayako was busy in the kitchen making up yummy meals for St. Valentine's day. For lunch we had heart-shaped omurice:
Along with red velvet cake:
For dinner, we finally got to use the fondue set that Barbara and Jason gave us for a wedding gift when they came over last May. We dipped strawberries, bananas, apples, kiwis and marshmallows into the chocolate:
Hope you had a happy Valentine's day too!

Hunting for Oysters

In the winter here, it's a good time to go picking oysters in the lake by our house. Here's a nice shot of a man searching for oysters to catch:

Saturday drive to Kuma

Since the beginning of 2009, I've been trying to go for a 20-30 minute walk every day. I usually walk one route, but decided to try a different route last Thursday. I went towards to the elementary school near our house, and walked up behind to a small shrine there (sorry, no photos). It was nice to walk a new route and break the day-in, day-out routine. So on Saturday, I thought that going for a drive outside of the city would be a nice change of pace as well. I decided to drive up to the small village of Kuma. The last time I was there was in October 2005, which was shortly after arriving in Japan. We started off the drive and as we turned the corner near our house, we saw a couple thousand ducks (Tufted ducks & Wigeons) resting in the bay area:

We then started driving north and first stopped at a dam on Inasa Lake:

As we continued north, I took some of the very narrow roads through the forests. I love the winding roads, but I always have to be careful of oncoming cars. Luckily today, I hardly met any other cars, and never had to back up to let anybody by:
We finally got up to Kuma, where we stopped at a popular restaurant for soba noodles. Ayako had the (not-so-common) thick noodles:
I had the more common thin noodles:
Very yummy:
We looked around at the store there and saw some daikon radishes being dried outside:
We then had a nice drive back home. It was a beautiful day for a drive today, so I'm glad we took good advantage of it.

Four Seasons night-out

On Friday night, a number of teachers and friends went out to a new Mexican restaurant in Hamamatsu to greet the new teachers on our staff. Here are some photos from the night:

Setsubun day

On February 3rd, there is a special day in Japan called Setsubun. Actually, it setsubun refers to the start of each season, but the start of spring day has special traditions associated with it. It seems a bit early for the start of spring, but oh well. Below you can see the materials needed to celebrate Setsubun:
At lunch time, we ate eho-aki (lucky direction roll). This is more of a regional tradition from Osaka area but we thought we would try it. Ayako made a large sushi roll with 7 ingredients inside. We then had to face north-east (this year's lucky direction) while eating the sushi roll. We had to eat it all at once without stopping and while remaining silient.
It was a bit difficult and I couldn't enjoy the sushi roll as much as I would have normally. Here's Ayako eating here eho-maki:
We decided afterwards that it was fun to try but we won't be doing it next year.
The next part was at nighttime, when demons might visit your house. We had a box of soybeans that we used for this. I opened the door and threw out two handfulls of soybeans while shouting "Demons out" in Japanese, and then quickly shutting the door so the demons can't get in:
Next, I threw two handfulls of soybeans inside while shouting "Luck in" in Japanese:
As part of the fun, I also put on the demon mask that came with out pack of soybeans:
I had heard my students talking about this tradition last year, so I was glad to have tried doing it this year.

Moonset

On Sunday, I was brushing my teeth before going to bed when I noticed that the moon was really low in the sky. Ayako and I were able to watch a pretty yellow moon set below a mountain range. It was my first ever moonset.

A visit from Eri & her family

On Saturday, we had a previous co-coworker, Eri, and her family over to our house. It was almost 3 years ago that we saw her and her husband, Munsu. You can see our previous visit here. Since then, Ayako and I have gotten married, and Eri and Munsu have had a baby boy, Shuto:
Shuto is now a year and a half old and he was very well behaved during their visit. He was fairly quiet except when pretending to talk on the phone or when he would talk with our thermos, which is shaped as a cat:
Ayako made some very delicious apple pie and pumpkin pie. Munsu shared his portion with Shuto, who actually ate half of it:
After watching him eat and drink, I could see how he got his round belly:
It was nice to see Eri and Munsu again, as well as to meet Shuto. Hopefully it won't be so long until we see them again.

Eiki's Bon Voyage (Boa Viagem) Party

Since our friend, Eiki, will be going to Brazil for a year starting from March, we had an early 'Boa Viagem' party for him. Christine and Sam came to our house earlier in the afternoon, so we went for a walk by the lake, and did some skateboarding as well:
They liked the old woman carrying 'daikon' (Japanese radish):
We then started playing silly games on the path with the skateboard:


And here is Sam doing a yoga pose on the railing at sunset:
We returned home and Keiji, Eiki and Emi came later on. Here's a nice shot of Eiki and Emi:
Ayako made lots of yummy sushi and Eiki brought many 'gyoza' (Chinese dumplings):
We gave Eiki and going away card and some small gifts. Keiji then interviewed Eiki (using wasabi as a microphone) about his feelings on receiving the gifts:
We then played Charades. Can you guess what animal this is?:
Answer: turtle Next is the charade for 'mind':
And a charade for the movie 'Meet the Parents":
We then took a break for dessert. Ayako made rum and raisin ice cream. Here she is showing us how much rum went into it:
Here's a couple of group shots we did at the end of the night:

Everyone went home at the end of the night except for Eiki and Emi who stayed over night. Here us having breakfast the next morning: