chiba city international fureai festival

This weekend was the Chiba City International Fureai Festival! This is a big annual event hosted by the Chiba City International Association, and this year the International Relations Section also took part for the first time! The downside to this was that I was there in a work capacity so I didn't actually have a chance to look around at all, though this was probably also because I had a couple of other events going on that day - futomaki sushi-making and English storytime at the library! All in all, it was a busy day. :)

I got to Qiball a little bit before the opening of the festival to help set up. The International Relations Section had a little booth next to the stamp rally table (because what's an event in Japan without a stamp rally?! Gotta have one) where we had some posters introducing our sister cities as well as a bunch of commemorative gifts from them, which we gave to anybody who donated money (to be used for international exchange things like youth exchange programs, sister city events, etc). I think at the end of the day we'd managed to fundraise a decent amount of money, which was great!

From our perch on the third floor (the first and second floor were full of booths with food, arts and crafts, and goodies for sale from all sorts of international organizations in the city), I had a good view of the opening ceremony, which included a speech by the mayor, singing of 'It's A Small World After All', the appearance of Chiba-kun and Fuuta (the Zoological Park's mascot red panda), and an African drum performance!

The mayor and African drum performers!

Afterward I popped over to the CCIA to try making futomaki sushi, aka a really fat sushi roll whose insides were shaped to look like a rose! It was run by the Chiba Local Food Study Group, and they had all the ingredients and even aprons prepared for us already (which I think is probably the hardest part, haha). After showing us how to do it once, they helped us to do it ourselves - it was surprisingly simple, and they gave us a recipe to take home, so in theory I could totally do it again! Again though, the hardest part is probably making nice flat sheets of egg to wrap up so I don't know how successful I'd actually be. :P Still, I think mine turned out pretty well, and my coworkers seemed to appreciate them when I went back to the Festival and shared some with them. :)

Successful futomaki sushi!

Then I headed over to the Central Library to read for their English story time! This was my second time doing story time, but my first time in the story time room, which is a really cool round shaped room with a mini planetarium on the ceiling. I read The Snowy Day, which I remember reading when I was a kid, and the English version of two Japanese picture books, Groompa's Kindergarten and Miki's First Errand. All the kids seemed to know the last two books already, so it was pretty cool to watch their reactions to hearing them in English instead of Japanese! We also did Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes together (just like last time), which they seemed to enjoy - and they all actually said the words out loud instead of just doing the motions, which I thought was great.

Imitating the book; don't worry, I don't actually stand like that!

So it ended up being a long and busy Sunday full of work-related activities, but they were also interesting and fun so I can't complain! :D

flying february

...because it's flying by! Somehow we're halfway through February already and I haven't posted at all, oops. Things have been pretty busy and it seems like the pace is only picking up instead of slowing down - not a bad thing, but it does mean less frequent and less detailed posts. Oh well.

Things at work have been relatively exciting recently - I've gotten to do a lot more things that aren't just translating, yay. Last Monday I went to a seminar about expanding business into India, which is not directly related to anything I do, but was a chance for me to learn a little bit more about the kind of things Chiba City does as far as international economic exchange is concerned (especially relevant since I've started working at the economic planning section), and was also a chance for me to observe a professional interpreter and try and learn from her, so that was cool.

And then last Friday, I went on another school visit, to a different elementary school! It was basically the same thing as last time, except we ended up talking the whole time instead of playing games with them (for four classes in a row! Tiring), but I enjoyed it a lot. I'm actually going back to the same school at the end of the month to talk to sixth-graders this time (last Friday was fifth-graders), so I'm trying to think of some new and more interesting things to do than talk about than Southern food and school lunch (though I do think at least some of them were interested!).

Today I got to have lunch at a new restaurant near Port Tower as part of our preparations for when people from Houston (one of our sister cities) come to visit in March, and also see the Japanese garden that we'll be taking them too, which was very beautiful. I also stayed late to call our sister city in Switzerland (Montreux), which once again reminded me that my French is not what it used to be. -.-'

Things outside of work have been pretty active, too! I went swing dancing for the first time in a while twice last week, which was super fun as always - I think on Friday I was probably dancing for a solid two hours, which was great! On Thursday and Friday I spent a little time exploring more around Chiba, and on Saturday I met up with some friends in Tokyo to go to the Square Enix cafe (before going to dance).

Then on Sunday I went to Chinatown in Yokohama for Chinese New Year! It was pretty crowded and it turned out the lion dance we wanted to see was more of a ritual than an actual performance so we really just ate dinner and wandered around for a while, but it was still a pretty cool experience. Afterward we wandered around Yokohama and rode the Cosmo Clock 21 (a ferris wheel that is also apparently a clock) and wandered around the little amusement park that was around it, which actually I think I may have enjoyed more than Chinatown, haha. Yokohama seems like a pretty cool place, so hopefully I'll be back there again!

And then on Monday, which was a holiday, I met up with some Chiba AJETers to go see the Kimono Beauty exhibit at the Chiba City Museum of Art again. Even though I'd seen it before, seeing everything again was still pretty interesting, and having dinner and chatting with everybody afterward was a nice chill way to spend the holiday, I thought. :)

There are a lot of applications due and events coming up in the near future, so it looks like I'll be keeping busy for a bit longer! I'll try to keep posting more regularly, though. :D

snow snow

This morning I woke up to snow covering everything, which was super exciting! After being told repeatedly that it rarely snows in Chiba and even if it does it usually happens in February, two snowfalls in January seems pretty lucky to me! Even though today was sunny and by the afternoon everything was gone, haha.

Anyway, a quick update on what I've been up to recently! Last weekend I went to Hakuba in Nagano Prefecture as part of the annual YETI ski trip with lots of fellow JETs, which was super super fun - more details here!

On Wednesday I went out for another after-work get-together with the ladies who work in the mayor's office (which includes my section), which was fun and tasty as usual! Then on Thursday I spent my first day of work at the economic planning section, which was basically just translating all day so it wasn't too different from normal, haha. They bought me lunch as a welcome gesture though, which was really nice of them!

Thursday night was my second kimono lesson, where we actually put on the kimonos entirely by ourselves (as opposed to the trial lesson where they basically did it for us). As expected, it's super complicated and remembering all the steps is definitely not easy, though apparently by the time the course ends I should be able to do it easily (let's hope).

The picture from the front looked super awkward, so here's a view from the back!

Then this weekend I spent Friday night and all of Saturday at the Chiba Film Festival, which I enjoyed a lot (you can read about it in more detail here!), and then Sunday at Disney Sea! I haven't been to an amusement park since I went to Tokyo Disneyland when I was abroad two years ago (also in the winter, as it happens), so this was super super fun!

It was a Sunday in January so it wasn't super crowded (still plenty of people though), but the fast passes for the newest ride, Toy Story Mania, ran out literally 20 minutes after they opened (before we had even gotten all the way in the park)! Also we kept checking the times for the standby line throughout the day and it never went below 120 minutes and at the most it was either 200 or 300 minutes (can't remember which exactly, haha). Which is long enough to watch an entire extended version of a Lord of the Rings movie, which is ridiculous! I wonder if it was worth it for everybody who waited. The longest we waited for anything was an hour for Tower of Terror, which was definitely the most fun ride all day (though my friend was pretty terrified). Anyway, it was a long but fun day, and maybe I'll be back again sometime (it is only 25 minutes away from me by train)! :D

We're the (unintentionally) matching red jackets in the back corner!

chiba film festival

This weekend was the 5th annual Chiba Film Festival! I went to both the pre-opening party on Friday night and the opening day on Saturday, though I had other plans on Sunday so I couldn't make it then. Anyway, it didn't seem like a very large-scale event, but I felt like the festival and the people organizing it had a lot of personality, which is maybe something you can only feel at smaller events anyway!

So Friday night I headed over to the Chiba City Civic Hall (I think that's what it's English name is, anyway), which I'd actually never been to before. I really only went into the small exhibition hall and the little lounge/cafe area, but it seems like a pretty nice facility for events (which is the kind of thing I've started to notice even though I don't actually organize any events, haha).  For the pre-opening party, they showed some amateur films made by students from nearby universities and even had a mini-concert at the end, including the newly composed Chiba Film Festival theme song! I thought the student films were pretty interesting (I was especially impressed by one made by someone who said she had never even held a camera until college) and I though the theme song was super catchy. :D

Then on Saturday I went right back again for the first day! I had bought a one-day pass (which only cost 2600 yen - not bad at all considering a movie in Japan is usually around 1800 yen), so I was able to go to all the screenings, and in fact I actually did stay there the whole day and watch everything (what can I say, I love movies!). There were four screenings: 'Azemichi Jumping' directed by Fumie Nishikawa, 'Socratic Love' directed by Ryousuke Hayazaka, a collection of slightly strange/fantastic shorts directed by Masahiro Muramatsu, and 'The Dynamiter', an American film directed by Matthew Gordon. I think my favorite was 'Socratic Love', which was a a quirky story about a couple and a picture book (my summary definitely doesn't do it justice but it's hard to explain).

One of the coolest parts about the festival was that the directors were there as guests (for all but the last movie) and after each screening there was a short Q&A session - for the collection of shorts, a bunch of the actors were there, too. Everything was all in Japanese so I can't say I understood everything (this goes for the movies themselves too), but it was pretty awesome to see a work and then be able to hear from the director right after.

They also gave us seat cushions for the screenings, which I certainly appreciated after sitting there all day, and had things like handmade Chiba Film Festival coasters and bookcovers for sale! All in all I'm definitely glad I went, and I would love to go back next year, too. :D

yeti ski trip

This weekend, I went on a ski trip to Nagano! It's a yearly event organized by YETI (Yamanashi English Teachers International), and JETs and their friends from all over come to participate - I think there were something like 100 people there, which is crazy. Even crazier considering even though I said it was organized by YETI, I'm pretty sure one person did basically everything, which is really impressive.

We had a decent sized group of people coming from Chiba, so we all met up for dinner before hopping into a giant 10-person van to carpool to Nagano! It took a little over 4 hours so we didn't get there until after midnight, but it was a fun car ride involving funny stories and Disney singalongs, so it went by pretty fast. When we finally got there, I was super excited to be in a place that was entirely white with snow (even though it made the roads a little scary).

We stayed at a place called the Resort Hotel Lady Diana, which felt more like a lodge than a hotel (which was great). The room I stayed in had a little loft with little stars painted all over the walls and ceiling, which I loved. Anyway, after settling in (it felt like a big slumber party with four futons next to each other!), we went to bed to get some sleep before skiing/snowboarding.

View of our loft from the ladder (it was kind of hard to get a good picture)

The next day, we got up bright and early to head out onto the slopes! We went to Hakuba-Goryu Ski Resort just up the road, and which included both the Goryu and Hakuba47 ski areas. It wasn't too cold (I took off my hat and put it in my pocket because it was warm and promptly lost it, oops) and the snow was nice and powdery (my supervisor tells me that Hakuba is famous for having good snow), which was great.

I had originally signed up to ski for one full day and snowboard for the next morning, but a few days before we left I decided to switch them around, and I'm glad I did! I've only snowboarded once before, but it came back to me pretty quickly and so we decided to go all the way up to the top of the mountain. We stopped around halfway down for lunch and then split up into two groups - a fellow beginner and I decided to just go all the way down while the more advanced people moved to the other mountain. It turns out it was a good thing we did too, because apparently they had to go through some black diamond areas, which we probably would not have survived! That said, both my friend and I found the afternoon pretty challenging as the sun went away and we got tired, but we managed to make it safely back to the bottom!

Winnie the Pooh on the slopes!

After that we all regrouped at the hotel before heading out to a nearby onsen, which felt amazing after a full day of snowboarding. They had an outdoor bath, too, which meant I got another chance to soak in a hot spring while being snowed on - probably one of the best feelings ever. :D After that we had dinner back at the hotel and just chilled for a bit before going to the big party, which I think almost everybody on the ski trip came to. Highlights included the annual 'boat race' with the US vs. the World (sadly no victory for the US) and meeting lots of other JETs and people from all over!

On Sunday morning we managed to drag ourselves out of bed to spend a little more time on the mountain before leaving in the afternoon. Like I said earlier, I had decided to switch it up and try skiing again (which I haven't done in years), and almost as soon as I started going down my first hill I decided that I liked snowboarding more after all, haha. Admittedly I was already sore and tired to start out with from the day before, but somehow snowboarding just felt a lot easier than skiing! Guess I know which one I'll be doing if I go back next year. :)

I only managed to do a few more runs before it was time to go back to the hotel and pack up. After a quick lunch and a late start, we piled back into the van and said goodbye to Hakuba! The ride back was a little quieter this time, since we were all exhausted, and thanks to a couple of detours we didn't get back to Chiba until just barely before the van was due at 8.

It was hard to believe that the trip was only for a weekend - somehow it felt way longer, which was awesome because it was super fun. I had been debating whether or not to go, so I'm glad that I decided to go after all: got to spend some quality time with friends from Chiba, meet some new people from all over, and try snowboarding (and skiing) again in a place covered with snow! :D

new year, new adventures

Wow, I've failed at posting recently! I was doing a pretty good job of (roughly) weekly updates before, so hopefully I'll get back to doing that (if only so my parents don't worry unnecessarily about me like they did over New Year's, haha). Anyway, a lot has happened but I am too lazy to type about most of it in too much detail, so instead I present a quick summary of fun things I've been up to:

- Kimono Beauty exhibit at the Chiba City Museum of Art (read all about it on my travel blog here)
- International Relations Section/International Association joint New Year's party (super fun; my predecessor even came down from Tokyo to join in)
- lunch at my coworker's house in Ichihara (got to meet my other coworkers kids too)
- first Tokyo Swing Night of the year (fun as always)
- trial kimono lesson (signed up for actual lessons, starting tomorrow!)
- a day in Tokyo with Satou-san, followed by dinner with his family (more details here)
- west coast swing dance party in Shinjuku (hurray for west coast!)
- Tokyo German Village (details and pictures here)
- Les Miserables and the first snow! (including stranded friend who spent the night)

Today at work I went over to the Economic Planning Section, where starting next Thursday I'll be working for one day a week! I'll still be doing translation, but exclusively whatever kind of international economic exchange stuff they want me to do. It'll probably be a little bit weird to be working over there at first, but I think it's a good chance for me to interact with some more people at work and learn a little more about what they do, so I'm looking forward to it. :)

The next few weekends (if not the weekdays) are going to be pretty exciting (a ski trip, a film festival, and Disney Sea!), so look forward to some long (and hopefully timely) posts!

tokyo german village

On Sunday, I went to the Tokyo German Village in Sodegaura (I honestly have no idea why Tokyo is part of the name) to see their Christmas illumination! Despite the fact that it's a little hard to get to if you don't have a car (we had to take a taxi from the station), it was really beautiful and worth it.

When we got there it was still light out, but the lights were all already on and we could tell it was going to look amazing when it got dark - which it did. There were tons of lights spread across some little hills, including lots of the parks characters, which for some reason seem to be mostly half-pig half-angel (according to their site here).

Anyway, we ran across lots of fun designs such as a dragon spread out over the hills and hot air balloons, plus things like flamingos, penguins, and Santa in a boat! There was also a magician performing tricks and a light tunnel leading to the ferris wheel. Unfortunately there was a very long line even to get tickets, so we didn't think it was worth it to wait (I do love ferris wheels though), but if I come back I'll be sure to get on it next time!

I think in this case pictures will do better than words to convey what it was like, so I'll end my description here. The illumination is going on until March, so there's still lots of time to go see it if you're in Japan!