Japan

My students photographed life in Huntsville and compiled a book for our Japanese counterparts.  I showed it to the principal at the elementary school we visited.  She will try to reciprocate, but they do not concentrate on learning English in elementary school and she doesn’t want to create an undue burden on her teachers.  I [...]

I mentioned to my son’s neighbor that there is a teacher at the elementary school down the street who went to Japan with me.  I couldn’t remember her name since she was assigned to another city, but knew she lives in Annapolis.  I went online and looked her up.  Just after I found her, our neighbor [...]

Got a new grandbaby.  Her name is Vyera.  Was able to arrive in time to see her born.  It actually takes a lot longer to have a baby than one would think.  On TV, it happens so quickly.  Not like that very often in real life.  There is a lot of waiting.  So, we are [...]

When you enter a house or many buildings and rooms, you must remove your shoes.  Be sure your feet do not touch the floor outside.  I got pretty good at untying my sneakers and then taking one off, placing my foot inside the room, lifting the other foot, removing my sneaker, then putting my second [...]

Tonight we had our final activity.  It was a stand up banquet.  Tough to take photographs that way.  We had a slide show/video show from the 10 different cities people visited in Japan.  Wow!  Japan is really different.  We had teachers in Okinawa wearing very casual clothes to us in Hiroshima being very formal.  Students [...]

Bath time was interesting. At 10:00 pm, Keiko-san told me to go take a bath. My bedroom was right out in the living room next to the kitchen. Was I to get ready for bed and put on my jammies? I asked about this. I had to dig out my clean underwear and jammies with [...]

We got to see a wedding at the shrine.  Well, it’s the picture taking part.  Someone could research the significance of it all.  Here are the bride and groom posing for pictures.  The family let me get to the front to get a few nice shots.

Slippers are everywhere. We wore them in our hotel rooms, in museums, in the schools, and then in our home stay. You take off your shoes when you enter. This happened every place we visited and our home stay was no exception. They provided us slippers so we didn’t have to dig ours out of [...]

It is 20 degrees centigrade in the house. I put the futon on overnight brieflyWarmed me up quickly. They don’t use heaters here like we do. There are a couple of electric wall units up high. One is in the bathroom, one in the kitchen. They are for heating and air conditioning. I ask a [...]

What a gracious family we are staying with. I say “we” since Andy-san is staying here now as well. His host family had an accident and couldn’t accommodate him. My host family was able to have Andy-san and me stay with them. I will sleep in one part of the living room. It is a [...]