Beach Party

After a successful first week (or rather three days) of teaching, it was time to celebrate! Lucky again for me, when JETs decide to go do something fun together, they usually end up coming to a place near where I am, e.g. the awesome beach in my town.  In this case, most of the JETs from Amakusa and Kami-Amaksua (about eight people total?) came to the beach and then came over to my apartment.  Note: Kami-amakusa is the city just north of us that bridges the gap between the mainland of Kyushu and the Amakusa islands.

With summer vacation time past, the beach was pretty deserted: no jet skis, no wake boarders, no 'surfers,' no ice cream stand, no yakisoba stand...no free yakisoba and beer from strange old men.  OK.  Just fine.  We still managed to make a BBQ and chill on the beach, throw a frisbee around, watch the sunset, and float in the warm waters a bit and talk about our first weeks.  A funny threesome of college-age students showed us how to light the fire for our BBQ (coals for BBQs are very different in Japan, and you have to buy these little pellet/wafer things to help you get the fire going), and afterwards they attempted to talk to us in English.  I love how much easier it is to talk to strangers in Japan: you always have a reason to start a conversation, like "I'm a foreigner. I am different. Let's talk about that," or "I can speak English.  You want to try practicing English. Let's do that."  

After the sunset, we headed back to my apartment for some games and food, including bilingual Apples-to-Apples, Nertz, Taboo, and a weird pictionary like game where you alternate between drawing pictures and guessing what the previous person drew.  This pictionary game ended up being the most hilarious; I did fall on the floor laughing at the point when I presented the sequence of pictures that started with the word "Beachball," followed by a drawing of a beach ball, beach, and person playing with a beach ball, then proceeded by a guess of "I'm on fire" (the person who guessed this argued that the beach ball looked too much like the fiery eye of Sauron), followed by a picture of someone on fire with a strange thought bubble, ending with the guess "I'm a super-saian you don't know."  Another funny sequence started with "snowboard" followed by a picture of a snowboard, which someone guessed was actually a picture of "superman falling out of a black hole"  (that's a scarf, not a cape...).