Taken at the end of January

In an earlier draft of this post, I celebrated the coming of spring and remembered that last year, it had been cold until April. Ha, silly me. Spring has not yet arrived and it is still cold. We’ve got about four inches of fresh snow over the last week and they’re calling for more next week, case-in-point. No, this post will be about winter and what I’ve been up to since it began give months ago! Before that, though, the highlights…

• I’ve been playing the flyswatter game with a lot of my classes lately. You put flashcards or write words on the board, split the class into two teams, give each team a flyswatter, send one person from each team to the board, say a word, and give a point to whichever team hits the correct word first. Super easy, little prep work, and the kids LOVE it. I did it in a middle school class last year, and when I said the word, the two kids slammed into each other. Completely unfazed, it was like they were both convinced that the correct word was on the other side and if they could just get past the other player they’d win.
• Finally implementing a long-time idea of mine, I held a nabe (Japanese hot pot) party at school with my teachers! The aim was to create a time for teachers who were interested in learning English to come and practice. I held it after school around dinner time so everyone could come, eat nabe, and speak English, then go back to work when we were finished. In all, 7 teachers came and stayed for the whole event and 3 floated in and out. Many teachers came to me in the days after requesting that I hold another one because they couldn’t come to the first one! Can’t wait until I have a chance to do it again!
• In the middle of winter, I helped in an attempt to break the world record for number of snowmen built in an hour. I actually wrote a whole blog post about this one, so click here to read it!
• I wrote an article about winter sports for Connect, a magazine put together by JETs! One of my friends is the Sports Editor and reached out to me for a submission. Click here to go to the magazine’s website, and scroll down to the digital edition of March’s magazine. My article is the second to last on the table of contents a couple pages in, titled “From One Centimeter to Eight Hundred!

As you can see, I’ve been up to a lot this winter. Unlike last year, where my activities were limited by my dislocated shoulder, this year I obtained no such injuries! I went skiing once, decided I didn’t like it (I may be biased), and picked up snowboarding instead.  I went to Madarao about 4 times, Togura Onsen twice, and Nozawa Onsen once before the snow stopped falling and things started warming up. Or at least… things were warm for a week… SO ready for spring!

I also went snowshoeing this year. My co-worker and I organized an event where participants played a game of capture the flag in the snow. We also added in an element of flag football, where everyone had a flag that enemy players could rip off and temporarily take you out of play. It was lots of fun, and I might try to do something similar next year!

Hopefully it’ll warm up soon. This year didn’t seem nearly as cold as last year, but winter just doesn’t want to leave haha. Can’t wait for green!

Until next time!