Uneme Dance

About 2 weeks ago, Misty (the new teacher at Amity) and I went to the "Wear Yukata and Practice the Uneme Dance" event. The women taught us how to put on Yukata (see earlier blogs for what this is) and properly tie the obi.
Many people see the obi as a belt or sash, but it's really the Japanese corset. You can't move too much in it, you have a hard time standing and sitting, breathing is a task, and yet they still expect you to dance. On top of that, there was no AC in the room and it quickly got hot with so many people!
My new favorite word is gyu which means "tight" (pronounced gyew- rhymes with few). Every time we'd pull tighter on the obi, they'd say GYU! So I kept saying, and the Japanese women just thought that was a riot. Gyu! Gyu! Gyu!

Here's Misty and I all dressed up and ready to dance :) She hasn't bought a yukata yet, so I lent her mine for the dance practice.
The group was mostly women. The obaa-san (grandma/ respectful old woman) next to Misty is the woman who was the main organizer. She's president of one of the culture clubs, I think, and we met her on a bus tour. After dancing she was trying to give us tips for wearing yukata. She pointed directly at me and said "For slim waist, put some towels under obi to keep beautiful shape." How nice, rig..
STOP!
I haven't had a slim, slender, or anything in between waist since ... never. Unless you want to say that 5 year old can have a waist. This requires some intense reinterpretation.

This, I'm pretty sure, is what she meant to say, "For squishy waist, put towels under the obi to keep the straight, flat body line we find so beautiful in Japanese traditional dress."
It's quite fair to say that I'm not built for the Japanese traditional dress, unless you want to talk about those creepy men who do nothing but watch anime in their free time. (Sorry otakus! I know you aren't all bad, or perverted, or men!--> Otaku has come to mean something different in our time. Today it's more acceptable for any person who has a strong liking for anime or manga.)


Some words for the video:
hidari= left, sounds like hee-da-rlee
migi= right, sounds like mee-gee
ton ton (I think)= the sound or drums or clapping for keeping rhythm

Creepy Crawlers

After much begging I'm going to do a brief update. I obviously could never be a journalist as I can't even keep personal deadlines.

Part 2 of Parents in Japan is still coming, as is Cami, Sarah, and Steph's Golden Week adventures. In the mean time, check out photos from the Golden Week trip here:

Cami and Sarah in Japan

Cami and Sarah came to visit, and while we took a similar track as I did with my parents, we saw all different kinds of things!

Since April I've also be working at Teikyo Asaka High School. It's a contract under James, but I go all day Wednesday and have 5 classes. Kids seem to be kids everywhere. I've got some good classes, and some extremely active classes. The big differences ( off the top of my head) are
1. Teachers change classrooms, not students. This is actually irritating as it cuts into my lesson time.
2. The boys and girls are super shy and rarely talk to each other, let alone me. And they are separated on different sides of the classroom
3. The teachers are more willing to say "The students can't do that" than help them.., say, sound out a word.
4. The boys fix their pants right in the middle of the classroom! I don't mean they drop their draws to the floor, but they unbelt and unzip and fix their shirts right in front of all the girls and teachers! Maybe this comes from the comfort of changing in the classroom. While boys and girls change separately, there aren't any locker rooms so they change for PE in classrooms.

As for outside the classroom, well now that it's warming up to summer again there are bugs EVERYWHERE. I don't know if you know, but I DON'T like bugs. I loved girl scouts and garden camp, and I still love camping, but bugs beware! I'll take you down! Except for when I freak out and run away. Do you know that at Garden camp I got the "Bug Freak Out" award?

Currently there are spiders all over the apartment building (Aida, don't look!). They aren't your run-of-the-mill black or brown spiders. Oh no, they are evil creatures that could only be sent out by some dark demon from the underworld. These spiders have round dark speckled bodies, and eight nail-pointed legs that are black and red. I'm sure one of them is just waiting to jump in my hair so it can crawl down and chop into my carotid artery and effectively kill me.

The other quite nasty bug is the bee. There are normal bees in Japan, but then there are the super sized monstrosities that clearly waltzed through some TMNT Ooze. The one that attacked us today may have actually been a wasp, but I wasn't going to get close enough to find out. Either way, it had been to McDonald's one too many time as it had become super size.