Saturday, November 03, 2012

Happy belated Halloween!  I went to The American Kindergarten in Miyazaki and had a great day there.  Everyone was dressed so cute.  Emi let me borrow an outfit her daughter brought home from India!

 Emi Petersen, Mrs. Peta, me, Mrs.Erika

Faculty and students at 

The American Kindergarten

Our stash of Halloween candy!

Again, the mothers made amazing lunches with a Halloween theme!

Later that evening we went to a party at the church.  They had games, and balloons and food.

Scott and I went to the Mall in Miyazaki last Saturday.  Here are some m ore pictures of the parking lot.  People rarely park by pulling in forward!

We decided to splurge and go see a movie. It cost us about $50 bucks, but we thought it might be fun to see a movie in English with Japanese subtitles.

We looked at the posters and picked one rated PG12 called the Untouchables.  We asked them if it was in English and they showed us the pamphlet showing us which ones had subtitles, so we paid the money and went in.  The previews and the courtesy clips were pretty entertaining, then the movie began and we couldn’t understand a single word being uttered!  We looked at each other and started to laugh and said, “Let’s get out of here!”  So we went and tried to explain the problem and after 3 or 4 different workers “talked” to us they told us the movie was in FRENCH!  So they gave us our money back and we went to dinner instead.  Most of the restaurants have plastic renditions of what the food looks like!

I know I didn’t want to have Tako Yaki again.  It is simply Tako Yucky!  It is fried balls with pieces of squid in them.  Scott likes them, but they are not  my favorite, a little too chewy for me!

 What the squid looks like that is inside these things!

The train gets really crowded sometimes and there is standing room only.  While I was taking this picture some girls in front of me wanted me to take their picture, so I did.  They turned to Scott and giggling said to him, “You are white?”  It was kind of a question, and it was so funny!

Fashions are very interesting here.  You see a ton of girls wearing shorts with tall boots, and a lot of girls wearing shorts and dresses with hiking or work boots! 

But mostly they wear uniforms, and most of the men wear dark suits to work.  Here is a picture I took a few days ago while I was walking from the train station to the Kindergarten.  The sidewalk was full of both men and women out in front sweeping up all the leaves that had fallen from the trees.

We had a concert at the church last Sunday afternoon.  The women are supposedly quite famous in Japan.  I couldn’t understand much of what they sang, but the music was beautiful nonetheless!

Scott has been running every morning.  He runs between 4 and 6 miles everyday but Sunday and has been proud to claim he has completed a marathon each week for the past few weeks!  I don’t run too much, but I am walking over 3 miles a day just to get myself where I need to be!

My Japanese exchange sister, Amy, sent us a much appreciated care package last week!  We are going to put some of the items to use tonight making a Mexican dinner for our friends! Some of them said they have never tried Mexican food before!  We'll see if they like it after they try ours!

I went to the store last week and found this cheese.  Hong Nan was with me so I asked her what kind of cheese it was.  She was shocked that I couldn’t read English.  She quickly said, “Can’t you read English!  It is NATURAL cheese!” I’m glad it’s not un-natural cheese! I still don’t know what kind of cheese it is.  Hopefully I will find out tonight when I use it for dinner!

We are past the halfway mark in our time in Japan.  It has gone by quickly and we are looking forward to many more adventures before we go back to Idaho.