Jeanneabeck’s Weblog

On Friday I only had one morning class and then was free the rest of the day because of testing so while I was grading essays I uploaded some videos on Youtube on my FightouChan account.  Please check them out if you like! http://www.youtube.com/user/FightouChan

For instance, I uploaded some videos from our school’s chorus contest.  I should have done this a month ago – little did I know their classmates who are studying abroad in Italy, France and the US were waiting anxiously to see a video of their classmates’ performance. 

As for the name FightouChan, don’t ask I thought it was cool back in college.  Japanese people yell “fightou” or fight at sports matches and whatnot.  It’s like “do your best” or “go get ‘em.”  Chan is the suffix for a girl so some people call me Jeanne-chan, just as others might say Beck-san.   So I’m “little go get ‘em” or something. Works for me. 

Anyway, I’ll let you know on here if I post more Youtube videos, but if you already have a Youtube account go ahead and subscribe to my channel you’ll know if I post anything new.

I’d have to say all of the strangest drinks I’ve seen in Japan have come from Pepsi, and despite how horrible each of them have sounded my curiousity has always gotten the best of me.  First I found Pepsi Kyuri (Cucumber) while studying abroad in the summer of 2007.  Us international students dared each other, bought bottles of it and tried it.  This summer I saw Pepsi Shiso.  Shiso is a type of leaf used in various recipes.  Ryan actually kind of liked it but I’ve never been a shiso fan and did not appreciate it’s uniquely Japanese(?) flavor.  I just recently found Pepsi Azuki or sweet red bean flavor.  Why Japan? Why?!  Sweet red beans are used in a lot of traditional and modern sweets and actually tastes pretty good as part of a snack – but as the flavor of a drink? 

Since I want these “strangely interesting” blogs to be two sided, are there any strange soda flavors in the US or abroad now? …  I guess rootbeer is strange to them.

I’ve been enjoying some newfound freedom lately.  For the past few weeks I was seriously at school until 8 o’clock at night every night helping my kids prepare for the English debate competitions, which we had on back-to-back weekends.  Last weekend was my first debate-free weekend and I was shocked and amazed to be able to sit around and do nothing.  Same thing has been happening on week days too.  Getting home at 5ish instead of 8 or 9ish, I’m discovering I have loads of time I never realized I had before.

So what’s the big deal about debate?

I was never a debator, and in fact, I avoided the debate team just as much as I avoided the football team in high school because I found both pointless and intimidating.  It wasn’t until having to help coach Japanese students in English debate that I realized debate does have a point and intimidating is fun.  By the way, English debate does seem to be a pretty good way to help students learn how to speak English and do so confidently as long as you don’t train them to be killing machines.

At the regional debate competition, our two teams did well, placing fifth and sixth.  At the prefectural tournament, one of our teams was able to make it to the quarter finals and our two exchange students, who really took charge and lead the teams, got best debator nominee awards.  I was quite pleased.  The other day we celebrated by chowing down on snacks and reliving a few of the good moments of debate.  Mostly though, everyone wanted to forget debate.

This weekend I attempted to dress up our very bland Japanese house by glueing all the origami ninja stars the kids in Himeji gave Ryan and me on a string and hung them from the ceiling.  Everytime I look at them, next to our brightly colored Invader Zim Grr blanket that’s covering the majority of the shoji doors I get happy.  There’s a pile of origami balls of different sizes on our tv too.  The stuff of happiness.  The stuff of innosence and dreams.  I really need to write that school and say thank you.

The cold weather, forcing me to stay inside longer, has also forced me to deal with ways to both make our house more attractive looking on the inside and warmer.  Old Japanese houses are notoriously sucky in that there’s no central heating.  People, I guess, just curl up underneath their heated table or kotatsu, eat nabe or stew and wait until winter is over. 

I also took the beautiful Japanese style table running and tacked it on the wall in front of some of the sliding doors.  Sounds strange, but it’s been quite effective.  We’ve had to leave one door cracked for the cat to run in and out but the cold seaping into the room was quite annoying.  The table runner leaves just enough (or maybe a little too much) space for the cat to run in and out but keeps the rest of the door sealed.  Plus unlike keeping the table runner on the table, having it here will actually keep it clean. 

I found this past summer’s Iida Puppet Festival poster and put it up along with a traditional bandana from the same festival, but really I’m stretching it.  When we go back to America I think we need to find more posters to liven up our place for the rest of the winter months

The US Department of Defense through the Fulbright Scholarship Program has been offering scholarships for American college students to study certain critical need languages for up to a year in order to build up America’s foreign language proficiency and cross-cultural understanding.
https://us.fulbrightonline.org/thinking_clea.html

There’s some cool languages on this list and I always thought it would be fun to go to a whole different culture for a year on the US Gov and study a foreign language. Eligible Languages:
Arabic (all dialects), Azeri, Bahasa Indonesia, Bangla/Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin only), Farsi, Gujarati, Hindi, Korean, Marathi, Pashto, Punjabi, Russian, Tajik, Turkish, Urdu and Uzbek.

Japanese is not on the list and it made sense to me – with all the people studying Japanese and who are intersted in Japanese culture, there’s no need to put forth a scholarship for people to study it. Guess I was wrong…

For the 2010 Critical Language Scholarships for Intensive Summer Institutes program Japanese is one of possible languages!  Applications will be posted online tomorrow and the deadline is December 18th. While they haven’t posted exactly which universities/language schools scholars will be studying at, the chance to spend this summer in Japan looks too awesome to pass up.  Japanese language classes are only available for the Intermediate and Advanced level, which is perfect for someone who will have taken a year of Japanese at the college level.  However, I think someone who’s motivated could get a tutor or self study enough before that time.

Here’s the other awesome languages being offered for the summer and the levels you can study at:
Arabic, Persian: Advanced beginning, intermediate or advanced level; Azerbaijani, Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, or Urdu: Beginning, intermediate or advanced level; Chinese, Japanese, Persian, or Russian: Intermediate or advanced level.