Sunday, October 24, 2010

First Day

Well, Friday was my first day at Kasahara Junior High, picture below. It has around 400 students, all of whom participated in the event on Friday. It turns out that it was a choir competition between all of the classes. In Japanese Junior High Schools, students stay with their homeroom class in the same classroom all day as the teachers come in to the rooms to teach the different subjects. Each of these classes sang one song, which took quite some time as there are 16 classes total and many of the 3rd years (equivalent of 9th grade) sang pretty lengthy songs. Not surprisingly, the third years were the most impressive. Of course, these weren't select choirs so everyone had to participate, which guaranteed that there were a couple students in each class that couldn't sing who stuck out quite a bit. Still, I was very impressed. My Middle School didn't have that high of a percentage of kids who could sing.


Anyway, that's it above. I hope to get pictures of the inside sometime, but I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to do so without it being too odd. Below is the Ibaraki Prefecture office. It's just a few blocks north of me, so it's a good way to be able to where I am in relation to my apartment when I'm out and about.

Just across the street from the school is my favorite restaurant so far. It's called Hamazushi and is a conveyor belt sushi place. (They make sushi in the back room and put it on plates on a conveyor belt that runs by where you sit and you take whatever you like. At the end they charge you based on the number of plates you have stacked up in front of you). It's pretty good considering it's price (usually runs about a dollar for one plate with either two nice sized pieces or six of the kind of rolls that you get in the US).

I apologize for the poor picture quality. It's a busy intersection with a long wait for pedestrians and cyclists if you miss your light, so I took this while riding the opposite direction. I'm mostly surprised I was able to get it into frame.

I only taught one class on Friday, so I'll be able to comment on the students more next week after I've had all of them in classes, so more coming then.

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