Day 53 in Japan - A nice chunk of meat

Finally, after 2 weeks of teaching, I have done my last self-intros today! I had to do 28 repeats of the same lesson, but I am now free of explaining that my Mum is a high school teacher, my Dad is an engineer, and my brother is very tall. I realised that as the periods are 50 minutes long, so 24 X 50 = 1200 minutes, or 20 hours of talking about myself. Almost a full day of doing nothing but talking about me. Wow. So no different to normal, really :P I had three good lessons, and got some good planning for my science lessons done. And I caught a lizard in my classroom and released it outside. My kids think I'm Steve Irwin now - to be fair it was a proud and might beast that I tamed.

Oh yeah, you can call me St. George, Dragonslayer.

After school, we recorded the speeches for the speech contest for the Akashikita E.S.S. club kids. There were two girls who gave lovely speeches - one speaking about how her grandfather resurrecting the Bonodori festival in her local area had inspired her to take action in her plans for the future, and the other talking about how the pervious ALT at the school had taught the students the Hula and how they slowly came to realise that the hula was her way of saying thanks and being thanked in return. That didn't make much sense (I AM THE GREATEST ENGLISH TEACHER IN THE WORLD, SHUT UP), but it actually made me cry a little bit when she read it. This was the same girl that was crying last week because she didn't think she was good enough to be in the contest, and her speech made me cry! I am very proud of the both of them. I also got to experience the domain of the Broadcast Club (like the Sound Crew) at school - an odd little recording studio with cables all around the walls that smells an awful lot like feet. If only they had lighting to play with as well I would have felt completely at home. It's rather odd to see a bunch of cute and enthusiastic little Japanese schoolgirls fiddling with sound desks rather than jaded and cynical old dudes who nip out between musical numbers for a smoke.

This is skipping, Japanese-style. The whole class lines up to compete
 against other classes to see who can skip the longest or something.
Those are the boys jumping, and the girls have just finished.

Dinner tonight was fantastic - I have been missing meat, and tonight we had a nice lean piece of pork. Marinated in garlic, tonkatsu sauce, salt, pepper, sesame oil, and a bit of whatever else we had lying around. It was absolutely great to have a bit of meat that wasn't minced, sliced to less than 2 mm or coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Ummm, I didn't take a photo, because I ate it too fast. Sorry. I'll cook it again.

Food Highlight of the Day: Pork fillets with epplant and carrots with soy, lime and molasses. But that's not the highlight. The highlight was the caramel cheesecake tart for dessert. This glorious cream-covered cheesecake treat had the most-high honour of being the most delicious cake that I have eaten since I came to Japan. For the brief period between me tasting it and finishing eating it.