It's been a busy couple of months since I last posted. Of course, we had a huge earthquake, tsunami, and (continuing) nuclear disaster. I am not in danger here and plan to move to Tokyo when my contract expires at the end of July (I'm job hunting now).
In April, the new school year started meaning new classes and a new group of first years. April is also cherry blossom season, which meant beautiful (but brief) cherry trees in full bloom.
Right now is Golden Week, when there are three national holidays in a row (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday). I'll be back to work tomorrow, though. We have our school festival coming up, which means a lot of extra work for the English Club. The festival is a three-day event -- the first day is a talent show; the second day is an open school event, in which visitors can come and see displays, performances, food booths, etc., from the students; the third day is an athletic meet with all the homerooms divided into three competing teams. On the second day the English Club has its own room, where we have to put up displays and have games and such. Very excited that it's the last time I have be in charge of it!
Finally, in food, here is a kind of traditional Japanese meal. It's grilled dried fish (himono) with plain rice and tamago yaki. Tamago yaki is an egg dish. You mix eggs with some sugar and soy sauce, then pour a little bit into a pan. Once it's cooked, you roll it up to one side of the pan and pour in some more egg. You keep doing this until you have a layered, rolled-up egg. I haven't made it very much (even though I love it), so my tamago yaki isn't as beautiful as it's supposed to be. I'll have to keep at it.
End video:
After the disaster, companies wanted to pull their TV ads because they didn't think it was appropriate to being running commercials. This meant the channels had to replace them with non-profit ads. Unfortunately, they only had, like, five of these in stock, so we had to see the same commercials over and over (sometimes back to back). This is one of them. It's about using the "magic words" ("thank you," "good morning," etc.). The animal names are used for puns. Example: "Sayonaraion" is sayonara (goodbye) + raion (lion). Anyway. It's cuter when you only see it once, instead of five times in an hour.
