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?!
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.
Latest Comments