Monkey Mania!

Back in August we were lucky to hang out with these guys at the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary in Ubud, Bali.

This guy was by far our favorite though. Check out his advanced tool usage:

The other day JL and his sister bear went to the monkey onsen in Nagano. They made friends with these guys:

and this little cutie:

and watched this intimate parent/child interaction for a while:

Last night we had tons of fun playing cards with a fellow MN couple who is also teaching in Japan. What fun to be able to talk about Minneapolis and bikes and community organizing again. Thanks for coming J & A!

Happy Holidays!

First of all, thanks to everyone who has sent us holiday cards. The wall o' love is really shaping up nicely and we're feeling quite loved.

We made a lot of Christmas cookies the other day:





Our Christmas appetizer was inadvertently color appropriate:


We woke up Christmas morning, opened the shoji screens and found this:


The first snow of the season and it came right in time for a white Christmas!

John's sister brought us a lot of treats from home including all these books. We should be pretty set for winter reading now...


On Christmas night we had a party complete with white elephant gift exchange a Wii bowling tournament. Then we sang karaoke until 4am.


Christmas in Japan was pretty different from Christmas at home, but it sure was fun.

We'll leave you with this (in front of the music box museum in our town right now):

Christmas without Christians

We're realizing this is the first time we'll spend Christmas in a non-Christian country. They're all gearing up for New Year's here. Christmas is like a fun little precursor for Japanese people. You should have seen the kids' faces when I told them that Christmas was a bigger deal than New Year's in the US! So far we've gathered that Japanese people eat chicken (ie KFC's bucket o' fried chicken), sometimes sushi and always cake on Christmas. John got asked to his teachers' Christmas party, on Christmas. See, how it's just not quite the same?

Oh sure they're playing Christmas music at the grocery store and all, but they're mostly weird muzak versions of the old favorites. Yesterday at 7-11 I heard an instrumental version of Mariah Carey's All I want for Christmas.

I actually think it might be more of a bummer to be away from your family in countries that do celebrate Christmas because everything is closed and everyone's with their families. Here everything will be open and everyone going about their business while it's a special day for us. For instance, it was lovely to see the Christmas decorations go up in Madrid but it made me even sadder that I was spending my first big holiday away from my family. Another year I was in Mendoza, Argentina. Restaurants and stores were all closed and I just had to kind of wander around the hot, empty town knowing that everyone was enjoying big meals with their families.

We're feeling super excited about Christmas this year though because John's sister is coming!! She'll be the best present ever. But we're still missing the rest of you this holiday season. Drink some eggnog and eat some cookies for us, yes?!

We got this in our mailbox last week - a paper Shinto talisman to keep the demon gods at bay. Obviously we put it right up by our door where we're supposed to. We don't want to take any chances :)

Silk Museum

We visited a silk museum last week after the mochi making. Apparently that area of Japan was part of the silk road up until a few generations ago. Every family kept silk worms in their attic and sold them to cooperatives that exported them. We even met a woman who said her friend's parents used to have them upstairs and she could hear them munching on leaves. Here are some things we learned about silk worms:

1) They only eat the leaves of mulberry bushes.

2) 1 cocoon can have as much as 1 kilometer of silk.

3) They eat silkworms in China and Korea.

4) Silkworms are completed domesticated and have been crossbred so many times that they are blind and helpless in nature-just little silk making machines, they are.

There were lots of displays like this of the silk worms


and their cocoons and silk.

Probably the coolest part though was all of the dyed silk.

Teaching Junior High

For a blog about a couple who teaches in Japan we sure haven't written much about teaching yet...

Last year at this time we were maybe the busiest we've ever been. We had about 4 jobs between us, JL was finishing school and we were applying like mad for jobs in Japan. I remember at the time thinking that there was no way I was going to like teaching English to Japanese tweens. I figured I liked teaching in general, I knew I liked living abroad and it was a good opportunity to experience Japanese culture and save some money.

Luckily and surprisingly, we REALLY like Japanese junior high kids. They're awesome. They're a hoot. They're pretty serious about schoolwork and are well-behaved (at least at my school). Even when they're not, they're usually pretty smart at English or are at least refreshingly thinking for themselves. As a bonus, they treat us like celebrities. I mean, John got voted Teacher of the Year at a school he's only at 2/3 of the time. Some classes only see him once a month. In some of his classes they line up as they leave and personally thank him for the class. When we were in Kyoto we found we missed kids in the 12-16 years bracket and struck up random conversations with junior high school groups we saw at temples.

Don't get me wrong - the Japanese system of teaching English is horrible. Rote memorization, mindless repetition and writing sentences over and over are all standard activities. Most of my teachers are more innovative and open to communicative activities (the purported reason that we're here). Still, the students have tests to take and high schools to get into. Speaking is not included on high school entrance exams, which doesn't help.

From what we've heard and read, the average score of Japanese TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) takers is the lowest among all Asian nations except North Korea. Japan ranks just below Myanmar. Yep, the system is broken and it's kind of a bummer to be part of it. That said, basically anything we do is an improvement upon the textbook.

It's funny to think that last year we were writing cover letters and now we're Josie Sensei and John Sensei (or Ms. Josie and Mr. John, depending on the class).

Making mochi

Last Sunday we participated in a cultural exchange where we made mochi. It's rice that has been smashed to a sticky glutinous substance. Japanese people eat it especially at the New Year. I don't love eating glutinous things myself but it sure was interesting to make.

First you put the rice in the big wooden pestle.

Then you sort of knead it with the big wooden mallets like this:

Next you smash it with the mallet all the while turning it and adding more water.

It's finished when it looks like this:

We then formed it into little balls. We ate it with adzuki bean paste, with edamame powder and with daikon and soy sauce.

Luckily there was also a Japanese soup and a salad because you can only eat so much mochi. It's like Ethiopian injera bread - it seems to expand in your stomach.

All of our teachers are jealous that we got to make mochi last weekend so we feel pretty lucky!

If you send us a holiday card...

We'll put it up on our Wall o' Love!

Here's the Wall o' Love so far:

Don't you want to be part of it? Pretty sure 3 stamps will do it!