Mid-Year Seminar (aka Skills Development Conference) Enkai

Last week, all the ALTs and some of their Japanese co-workers came to Kobe from all over Hyogo to participate in the yearly Mid-Year Seminar. This year however, the name has been changed to "Skills Development Conference". 

We basically spend 2 days in meetings talking about lesson plans, and this year we talked about the new course of study for English students in Japan. Lots of boring but useful things. Luckily, for the past two years, I got to be an ALT helper- one of the helpers who run the individual seminars. It's pretty fun, I get to meet a lot of the JETs, and also stand up front and teach things and lead discussions, and best of all, I don't have to do the homework :)

Every year, all the ALTs go out to dinner afterwards (it's very rare that we're all in the same place), and this year, the helpers all went out as well, along with two members of the Board of Education who are in charge of the JET Program in Hyogo. We went to a really cool Okinawan restaurant with a fish pond inside. The food was really pretty, and quite delicious, so I chose to document it. Here it is: 

Glass noodles, crab, "sea grapes", and shiso in a rice wrap. 

Sashimi with assorted sauce.

"Ceasar salad" (the Japanese seem to have a very loose definition of ceasar salad) with prociutto, poached egg, tomatoes, avocado, mini croutons, and a ton of dressing.

Tempura shrimp with mayo.

Salted pork. 

Umi Budou ("sea grapes"), a kind of kelp. Odd texture, but not a bad taste. 

And here are my fabulous fellow enkai-goers:

Yay work parties!

Engrish!

"Is 'tartlet' spelled with an r or an l?"

"Meh, who cares? Let's just cover all our bases and put both."

For some reason, Japan loves the "No ___, no life" phrase, and they come up with some really creative ways to fill in the blank. 

My absolute favorite are these gift bags that always have puppies saying really cute Engrish phrases.

There's actually an exclamation* point at the end of that, just in case you thought it was just a jumble of words and not an actual sentence. 

*edit: I had originally written "explanation point", because that's the kind of thing you write when you've been in a non-English speaking country for too long. Just like this afternoon when I momentarily thought, in front of an entire class of students, that the past tense of "fight" is "fighted".

This will certainly be continued..... :)

Okinawa! continued.....

I competely forgot to post about these guys from my trip to Okinawa!

They are a much cuter, much more colorful variation on the famous Okinawan Shisa, which look like a cross between a lion and a dog, and are placed in pairs (one with a closed mouth, and one with an open mouth) at the entrance to a building or on the roof to ward off evil spirits.
While I was there, a bought a small blue pair of Shisa figurines, which I keep in my own entryway at home :)