February . . . Whew!

Kari writes:

I can't believe February is coming to a close already!  Yes, it is shorter than most months but even so I think it has gone by at super-speed!  Our weeks were jam-packed all month.  Starting with the Table Tennis Tournament!

Every year all the teachers in the area have a HUGE table tennis tournament.  Each school puts together 5 doubles teams and then duke it out elimination style against the other schools.  Unfortunately Aka-chu was knocked out in the first round.  But it was fun to cheer the teachers on!  Afterwards we ate yakiniku and drank beer - as all good school sponsored activities should end! 

The next weekend was our big teacher trip to Kyoto!  Kyoto used to be the capital city of Japan so it is chock full of interesting historical sites!  We saw so many castles and temples!

Byodoin Temple was under construction - but it is on the 10 yen coin!

Here we are at the entrance to Fushimi Inari Shrine

Which is known for it's pathways lined by thousands of red arches called torii

After some group sight-seeing we all went to a fancy dinner in downtown Kyoto. As we were walking I got excited every time I saw another white person!  It's so rare to see non-Japanese non-JET people in Tottori that I was so surprised to see so many tourists!

The next day we went to even more cool places:

Nijo Castle!  This castle has "Nightengale floors" which creak
on purpose so Ninjas can't sneak around!

The grounds at Nijo castle were gorgeous!
There were lots of neat trees and pretty flowers too!

Kinkakuji Temple is one of the most famous in Kyoto!
"Kin" means gold so it's pretty obvious how it got its name!

We were pretty impressed

The ultimate Kinkakuji experience - drinking matcha tea in the tea garden!

Up until this point we had been with various groups of Ian's co-workers.  We split off for the afternoon and visited Kiyomizu-Dera.  It was huge!  There were so many different gates, shrines, pagodas and such I didn't know what I was looking at half the time!  Something that was really interesting around Kyoto is that at various places you can pay to get dressed up in Kimonos!  So as we were at Kiyomizu-Dera we saw "geishas" using their smart phones.  It was an amusing juxtaposition!

A pink pagoda at the entrance

This is Kiyomizu-Dera!  Look at all the people!

Old-fashioned meets high-tech

After that we made our way to Sanjusangendo.  This temple is full to the brim with Buddha statues.  There are 1,001 statues!  You aren't allowed to take any pictures inside the temple so I found this one online:

It's a verrrryy long room I swear it took over 10 minutes to walk past all the statues!  Pretty impressive.  Then it was time to meet back up with the group and head back to Tottori!  

The next weekend was a triple whammy.  First that Friday night our good friend and fellow JET Ellen was involved in putting together and performing in a concert with some big name Japanese rock stars in our little town!  They sang a bunch of classic American oldies so we could actually sing along!  Afterwards I got to meet the local mascot "Cowy" which was a dream come true for me! heh.  But maybe even cooler was that we got to go to the after party to hang out with the band and listen to them do some karaoke!  Thankfully neither Ian nor I were requested to sing!  

Me and Cowy! *swoon

Then on Saturday morning Ian was a judge for the foreign language speech competition in our town.  There were speeches and plays in English, Korean, and Chinese.  Thankfully Ian only had to give his opinion on the English entries!  And adorable 5 year old girl told a condensed version of the Little Mermaid that she had memorized!  Pretty amazing.

On Sunday we joined the International Group to hang out at one of the nearby mountains.  There was a retreat facility up there.  We played some team building games and then got to try making Baumkuhen which is originally a German dessert but popular in Japan.  We mixed up the batter and then headed outside to roast it over an open fire!

This was actually super difficult - maybe part of that was
not getting any instructions in English!

The trick is the coat the bamboo with a thin layer of batter, then brown it and coat again. Once they cool off you pull the dessert off the bamboo rod and slice it up.  It has many rings inside like a tree stump because of the way it is cooked.  Pretty cool - but a TON of work!

Our finished product!  It did taste good. 

This last weekend we finally had some time to relax!  We took a little day trip to do some shopping and tidied up the house a bit.  We've also had a warm streak lately so our toes aren't so chilly at night!

I'll leave you with a picture of the Valentine's flowers Ian got for me!  In Japan Valentine's is a bit different in that women give chocolate to men!  But Ian is a smart husband and took the American approach to Valentine's:

I split the bouquet up to fit in my little glass bottles. 

He even shared the chocolates he got at work!  He's a keeper!

Tune in next time - we have some exciting travels planned for March and a visit from some American friends!

-Kari