Teaching!

So, it's been a long time since I posted anything here.

I've been teaching for two or three weeks, now! I say "teaching"... what I mean is doing my Self Introduction Quiz for 15 minutes or so, taking questions of varying strangeness from the class and then letting the main teacher take over while I read out some passages, perhaps choose children to answer a question or set a question.

The self introduction goes something like this....

Good morning, everyone! My name is Gwyneth Jones... you can call me Gwynnie! OK, we're going to play the Gwynnie... Quiz!... So, first question, where am I from? Hmmm... am I from - America? Am I from.. Britain? Or am I from... Japan?
This is of course accompanied by a lot of smiling, acting like an idiot and holding up colourful cards with pictures of the options. I then tell them... Britain! - and get them to clap themselves if they got it right. I then tell them about Britain... including getting out a world map and getting them to guess where it is... then asking - "so - who likes soccer? Do you know... Manchester United?" - showing them a picture of Old Trafford stadium and pretending that my house is right next to it. Well, technically I lived in Old Trafford for a while, but the picture I use is of my house in Wales....

Update! - Starting Schools!

Hi!

I realise I haven't updated this for a while, I'm sorry. Sooooo..... since the last time I wrote, I actually left Hamamatsu - to visit Fukuroi, a whole 15 minutes away on the train, with Saba. We strolled around, got bored and then took a bus to a place called Hatta-san temple. We walked up a delightful path littered with restaurants and market stalls, and tried the local delicacy - dumplingy bean paste things on sticks! Yum.


Eventually, following a group of giggling Japanese schoolgirls (calm down, boys) who seemed almost as confused as we were, we reached a million stairs. There were little shrine stop-offs everywhere, where people prayed and gave donations.


At the top of the stairs was a big temple, which I failed to take a photo of because I decided it would be disrespectful. We walked around for a bit, cleansed our hands and wafted incense towards our faces (basically copied whatever the other people were doing...) and hoped that we didn't look TOO much like tourists!