Going on 10 days of work in a row…

This past weekend was the school festival (bunkasai) at my base school. I went in for full days of work on both Saturday and Sunday, and per Japanese custom, teachers and students get make-up holidays this Tuesday and Wednesday. Unfortunately, I still have classes at my visiting school tomorrow and then a JET mid-year conference on Wednesday and Thursday, so no weekend for me. Supposedly, I’m entitled to two days of holiday now, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to take them. Maybe in December.

Anyway, the festival at Sugito Nogyo was much better than the festival at my visiting school. This one was both indoor and outdoor, and they were selling so many different things. Since it’s an agricultural school, they were selling lots of vegetables, some fruits, flowers and plants, rice, and bread. The Japanese love their bread. Both days, the lineup for the bread stall was massive. I didn’t end up buying any though I would have liked to. The fruits and vegetables were massive so I was afraid if I bought any that about half of it would go bad before I could finish it. There were cookie stands, stalls selling Japanese sweets and pastries, soup, takoyaki (balls of fried octopus), and places selling potatoes and sweet potatoes. The first day of the festival wasn’t as good because we were sort of hit with a typhoon. Luckily the rain and the wind weren’t too bad until after the festival was finished. On Sunday it was the complete opposite. It was sunny and really warm. Pretty strange.

Here are the photos:
Welcome.

A concert in the gym. A few of the students and a couple teachers sang.

One of the classrooms displaying plants.

A classroom displaying art.

A stand selling vegetable soup and another selling takoyaki. Both were good.

Events in the front of the school.

Onto the gardening and vegetable areas.

A pastry stand.

A stand selling sweets. I’ve found I’ve only started using the word sweets since I got here. The Japanese speakers of English seem to use this word frequently when describing things that are sweet. I don’t remember the Canadian equivalent word. Snacks?

A sweet potato. They eat it like a snack food it seems. A couple of the teachers were shocked, like literally their jaws dropped, when I told them that our sweet potatoes are orange on the inside. My supervisor said, “That doesn’t sound good.”

Some of the students. The students at this school are awesome (for the most part). I’m sure more of them are in my classes than I recognize.