here, there, everywhere

Please excuse the video quality, I know it's not great. Apparently, much better video WAS taken that night by a news crew: the week after our vacation, one of my students excitedly burst into class convinced that she'd seen me dancing away on a television travel program about Gujo Hachiman. Though no one else has confirmed it, I do remember seeing the film crew and Kimiko, my student, was able to tell me what shirt I was wearing and how I had my hair, so I have a sinking suspicion that the flailing gaijin she'd seen was, in fact, me. Once the flames of horrified middle-school-esque mortification abided somewhat, I did start to think that it was kind of cool that I have quite possibly been on TV in China*, Vietnam** and Japan now. I know, compared the to the rest of my family, that's nothing, but, still, three times isn't that bad for the camera-shyest of all the Tokuda-Halls :-) And that pretty much wraps it up for our vacation, which was too short and lots of fun. Now I can go back to writing about our day to day lives, which means, these days, about how insanely painfully horribly inside-of-a-supernova hot it has been for the last month. On bad days, it gets to be about 96 degrees Fahrenheight in our kitchen, which makes doing anything - blogging, writing e-mails, studying Japanese, cooking, wearing clothes - feel like an unthinkable ordeal. Fortunately, on Wednesday night, the skies opened up and we got to feel our first typhoon. Iain and I jumped our on bikes and rode down through the pouring rain to the river - past cars uneasily navigating the suddenly flooded streets and the frank stares of the few remaining pedestrians wrapped in full-body raingear. It was *amazing*.




* when I was interviewed at the beginning of our summer camp back in Hai Ning in July 2009. I burbled a lot about teaching children how to express themselves, unaware that I would spend the next four weeks holding up flashcards of farm animals and then allowing the kid who responded fastest to fling a beach ball at the bullseye drawn on the board. They loved that game. 


** when Noa, a soon-to-be-coworker, and I were interviewed at the American Club's Big Day Out back in May 2008. This video may not have aired, thanks to the fact that neither Noa or I had any idea what Big Day Out was and were thus unable to provide any sort of meaningful insight - I'm pretty sure my interview was just me going, "You mean it's like, a thing? In Australia? Not just an excuse for expats to drink cheap beer in front of a giant kangaroo poster?" Incidentally, this was the same day I later met Iain! Fortunately for me, I managed to be a bit more articulate then.

I had forgotten how tiring Bon Odori dancing can be. After three or four dances, we stopped to get some french fries (soy sauce mayo flavoured!) from one of the food stalls; the rain that had been falling lightly got a bit heavier, and we wandered back to our hotel through empty lantern-lit streets, leaving the rest of Gujo Hachiman to their dancing.

* Also, like Homer, I wouldn't mind eating the world's biggest hoagie: a year spent in Philadelphia clearly had a bigger influence one me than I realized. Mmm, hoagie.