Author Archive for Kevin & Cathy

Sapporo White Illumination Festival

Published by Kevin & Cathy on December 5, 2007 in Japan.   696 views 6 Comments

Konnichiwa!

We took a trip to Sapporo last weekend with our gaijin friend Matt (We’ve only known Matt for a few weeks, but he’s been around to help us with many things, as he is the only foreigner who A) works at city hall B) is fluent with both English and Japanese). The purpose of the trip was to go to the Apple store in Sapporo to make Steve Jobs happy by purchasing an Airport express (Which has apparently now been renamed the Airmac express, odd.) It’s interesting that every single wireless router we found here is significantly more expensive than we expected/could have found in Canada. Japanese-made items/electronics are definitely of high quality but I suppose that comes with a high price as well.

Sapporo is just a 50-minute express-train ride away from Takikawa. The train we take is called the “Super Kamui”, and is also the same train we took when we first came in from the Sapporo Chitose Airport (CTS). The train tickets came to around 3000+ Yen each for the weekend rate (around $28 CDN). We also bought RailMate cards. With the RailMate cards we will get discounted rates for our future train rides.

Strangely, Sapporo had no snow at all. In fact, it started raining shortly after we arrived! (Takikawa has been covered with a blanket of snow for over three weeks.) We walked around near Hokkaido University and bought some nice winter stuff. Winter is hitting us harsh and fast. Walking in knee-deep snow is awesome fun these days…

We went to the Odori area in Sapporo, which is the busiest part of Sapporo. It’s pretty much the central street, with a big radio tower and a giant park. The Sapporo White Illumination Festival was happening just as we were there over the weekend. Trees were covered with Christmas lights and people were drinking hot wine while listening to bad karaoke and staring at white santa. (as oppose to asian Santa, not that there’s anything wrong with an asian Santa…)

We fed our hunger for Apple products, took the Super Kamui back home to find our car buried under a foot and a half of snow.

Back at home, we cooked up a delicious shabu shabu dinner with the Sukiyaki grill we bought 2 weekends ago at the local second-hand shop called the Oki-Doki.

Sapporo is very fun, and just far enough away from Takikawa to be a “going to the big city” adventure. Soon will be the Sapporo Snow Festival, so we will be back before too long. For now, we will enjoy wireless internet, shovel the car daily, and eat good food in our humble apartment in Takikawa.

Cheers!

-Goodfishies

Goodbye Sam & Raf

Published by Kevin & Cathy on November 28, 2007 in Japan and Video.   467 views 1 Comment

Samantha & Rafael were the teachers here before us. We spent 2 short weeks together learning our way around Takikawa and the ins & outs of the job.


Sam & Raf left for Vancouver on November 25th:

Hey peeps!

How are things? Is everything OK, are you guys still confident about everything now that Sam and I are gone?

Just taking the initiative here and writing to let you know that our flight went OK, and that even though it was long we had a good time because the service was so good! Customs was a breeze, they simply asked us a few questions and let us through without checking our bags… I was glad of that because I’d bought so many things in Japan I was worried I’d have to pay tax.

I checked your Blog but unlike Kevin promised I did NOT see our good-bye video yet! Hope you don’t get lazy like me and stop updating it…

Well… wish you guys luck on your first week! Remember: breathing is good! It calms you down ;-)

Kev: if you forgot anything or need an extra hand planning a lesson email me and I’ll get back to you asap.

Thanks again so much for helping us at the station guys! I can’t believe how fast kevin chucked those bags inside the train -.-; oh, btw, we managed to check-in our bags in Chitose and NOT check them out in Narita! yeay!

Ok, thats enough!

bb!

Raf

Takikawa Kindergarden

Published by Kevin & Cathy on November 24, 2007 in Japan and Video.   524 views 3 Comments

One of our classes every week is at the Takikawa Kindergarden. We play with the kids in the morning and “try” to teach them English in the afternoon. They are the most adorable things ever but it can be quite exhausting at times. The kindergarden is right beside a temple run by the Izumi family. The Izumi family are our students as well as our guarantor.

We teach at the kindergarden (It’s called “youchien” in Japanese) every Friday. Here’s a video clip from our first day, the whole school gathered together in the gym for a special ceremony for Sam & Raf’s departure and our arrival.

Yes I know, they are adorable!!!

(There’s also a part one of the video where Izumi-san — the priest of the temple and the owner of the youchien — introduced the ceremony)

Later on, all the students formed a tunnel with their little hands together and we crawled through the crazy kid tunnel to complete the ceremony. (We have photos of this from the youchien and we’ll try to scan them at 7-11)

p.s. by the way, apparently kindergarden is supposed to be spelled kindergarten?! What?!

-8

Published by Kevin & Cathy on November 22, 2007 in Japan.   352 views 1 Comment

Thursday Morning

Takikawa is expecting a colder winter this year

We live in Japan!

Published by Kevin & Cathy on November 19, 2007 in Japan and Video.   823 views 4 Comments

Well- we made it!
After more than 6 months of planning, freaking, packing and stressing, we finally made it to Japan! (On top of that, we flew business class from Taiwan to Japan… in case you are wondering)

If we’ve kept you horribly out of the loop, we are living in a quaint little town of 45,000 people called Takikawa, on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It’s 45 minutes away from Sapporo by driving. We are here to teach English to a group of students of all ages. It’s a private business / freelance job and it has been going on for 17 years. Every year, a new couple comes over and takes over the apartment, car, fish, and everything else.

Hokkaido is famous for many things including its dairy and Sapporo beer, but perhaps most notably its vicious winters. We had been here for only 5 days when the famous Hokkaido winter started in full force. It has snowed every day since Thursday and it’s now currently -7 deg C outside with no signs of breaking above 0 in the coming week. Sweet. Apparently in the winter it can snow taller than Cathy in one night. (though she is really quite small)

(A little white air-born bug called the snow bug showed up right before it started snowing, apparently it’s a very Hokkaido thing as well)

Our first week here has been a little nuts. Our predecessors, Samantha & Rafael have been super helpful in getting us settled in and making us feel at home, but with only 2 weeks of overlap between us, there’s a lot to get done and learn. We’ve transferred ownership of the car and purchased our car insurance, transferred bills & account names, applied for our “Alien Cards” (mandatory I.D. for long-term foreigners), purchased our Hanko (stamps of our name) - important documents are usually “signed” with a seal in east Asia - and we have started our lessons and met all our students.

Between the two of us, we have over 50 students, not including our City Hall classrooms or our Youchien kindergarten classes! We have been learning our student’s names, their abilities, their workbooks and much much more. We are getting to know the town we live in. It’s quite a small town. The people here are very nice and generous. When we were at the photo place having our Alien card photos taken, the old Japanese photographer gave us a giant bag of mandarins. (which were amazingly delicious by the way)

It has been snowing hard and it’s looking like that the snow is here to stay….

Attached video of us on our way into Takikawa after landing in Sapporo Chitose Airport.