2012年5月30日水曜日

A 2012 Student Odyssey!

Hi. I'll keep this intro short, as I'm trying to upload a video for the first time and doubt it will succeed, erasing anything I've written beforhand in the process (I type from experience). Anyways, here's (maybe) a video of our sister-school Odysseys' homestay with us last week (I hope).

2012年5月8日火曜日

ASSORTED SPORTS!

Hello all. Hope everyone reading in Japan had a thoroughly relaxing Golden Week. Here in Sendai, TGH partook in our annual (except for last year) UnDoKai (sports competition) last Tuesday. It was wedged in between holidays so it gave everyone a lot of time to prepare and recover, but not quite enough time as I'm still recovering. There were a variety of different kinds of racing events- from the intensity of the baton relay and the skillful balancing of the racket relay to the ridiculous silliness of... err... I'm going to call it the Gripping-the-ball-between-your-legs-while-hopping race. Sure, why not.

As you can see in the top left corner, we won our first heat in the racket relay. In the final we came in third, and that was as close as we'd come to victory that day. In the group-skipping competition we were less than wonderful, maybe because of the high skip/giggle crossover ratio. In the Tug-of-War we won a few rounds but lost out narrowly to the music course, which was full of boys. Not exceptionally strong boys but boys with girth- advantageous girth!

Win, lose or draw, everyone seemed to have fun and there were no serious injuries, besides my pride when I put on a head-over-heels wipeout performance in attempting to avoid a runner in my path during the Grand Finale Teachers VS Music Boys VS Soccer Girls VS Basketball Girls relay race at the end. Sorry I don't have a picture of that, but I'm sure one will show up on the internets somewhere. Maybe google something like 'Tokiwagi English Teacher Hilarious Bail'.