Adults are Funny

So, today was the Kurihara-gun kokugo benron taikai. Yep. Oh, that means the Kurihara county Japanese speech contest by the way. See, what you just experienced by not being able to read that is somewhat equivalent to what I felt for three hours today while fourteen kids from all over the area gave speeches in Japanese. Three years in college and then three months of living here and the best I could do was basically understand the general gist of what their speeches were about. Ouch. On the upside, the kid from our school got second place. He seemed good to me, but really I didn't understand a bit of it.

The interesting thing is how these contests go. I was st the English recitation and speech contest a few weeks ago and it was the same way. They announce the winners in much the same way we would. They started with the honorable mentions, then 2nd place, and finally first place. Then they give them their awards (mostly certificates) after that. It's not one thing where they announce 2nd place and then give that kid their trophy. They tell everyone exactly who won, then make them all come up on stage so they can be presented with their trophies and certificates. And they work backwards that time so the 1st place kid gets their trophy first, then 2nd, then honorable mentions, and finally everyone gets a certificate. You know, those ones that are supposed to mean something to you but they really just say that you were there that day. They always give those to kids thinking that it helps make up for losing, but of course we all know that it's really just putting the fact that you lost into writing which really isn't that great. And your parents wanting to put it on the wall or whatever doesn't help either.

Anyhow, tonight I had my Eikaiwa (English Conversation) class at the Social Center here in Semine. This is where I teach adults English. But since it was Halloween I decided to do it on holidays. I looked up the history of Halloween, simplified it, translated it into Japanese, got another English teacher at school to fix my translation and gave that out. Now, somehow one of my students had gotten the mistaken impression that today was my birthday so we had a couple of cakes as well as the candy and whatnot. I enjoyed it. Not much of a class, but we had a good time. I took my laptop to show them pictures of Halloween in America, which consisted almost entirely of my younger brother Liam. They loved it so much that I just ended up showing them most of the pictures I had. Not sure how much English we learned but I got some cake and stuff. Even got a birthday present. It's a coaster for a glass. But it's made out of fabric. It looks like those boats you make out of newspaper, but then you open it up and put your glass inside it. Really nice. Almost makes me wish I hadn't stolen this rubber coaster from Mos Burger last time I was there.

Almost.