Finally getting around to posting about last weekend. Sunday we had three of Kuniko’s international students over to make lunch, and then afterwards the Okamotos over for a taco party.<\/p>\n
After a slight mixup at the station (one student caught the wrong train and came a little late) we did a little bit of shopping and then came back to our place to cook up lunch.<\/p>\n
Kuniko’s idea was to show them how to make some traditional Japanese dishes, so together they made oshizushi, shogayaki, and tempura. I generally tried to stay out of the way but occasionally I would step in and help out. I helped Myra (from India) peel shrimp, and showed her some of the tips I picked up peeling shrimp living with my aunt and uncle in San Diego. I also helped Barbara (from France) grind down some raw ginger into a usable paste for the shogayaki. Hinzy (from America) acted as kind of a supervisor for the group, and did a lot of work with the tempura.<\/p>\n
Lunch turned out to be quite big, and by the time we finished (and had dessert from the grumpy baker on the first floor) I was stuffed. We played a little bit of Wii to burn some calories, and then headed to Saty to take some purikura to commemorate the event. From there we sent them home and headed back to get the taco stuff ready for dinner.<\/p>\n
A couple of impressions from lunch… Kuniko gave them all the instructions in Japanese, and generally they did OK. I was surprised how each of the students relied on English for communication, despite coming from three different countries. I guess it would be tough to fumble through Japanese since everyone is studying at a different level. Still, I would think that they would welcome an opportunity to speak some Japanese.<\/p>\n
Another thing I noticed was how hard it was to think of them as high school students. They acted much more mature than the students that I’m teaching nowadays, and hanging out with them in a relaxed party atmosphere made it that much more difficult. I had a good time talking with them, and I think they really enjoyed the afternoon.<\/p>\n
I was pretty full by dinnertime, so I was a little worried about hosting a decent taco party, but in the end we did OK. The Okamotos came on time at the train station and we walked them over to our place. They marveled at how close we were to the station… they live in the sticks, 30 minutes to the nearest train station by car! <\/p>\n
Although we live closer to the station, our place is pretty small compared to their house. The benefit of living way out in the country is that you have more space to build, and so I’m sure they also were wondering how we could live in such a small space. <\/p>\n
The taco party was nice, and we chatted and ate while looking at vacation pictures and talking about how things are going. I noticed again that Ikuko stuck to Japanese and hardly spoke any English at all. It seems like she is studying English at home (she’s got all day long at home with nothing more than laundry and dinner to do) but she didn’t seem to want to try and use it. I think she has just lost a lot of confidence in her English skills. <\/p>\n
Her husband is a really quiet guy, so it was a little tough to get him to relax and enjoy himself. He doesn’t really drink (so tequila was out of the question), but we played a little Wii and he kind of loosened up a bit. <\/p>\n
Afterwards we walked them back to the station and said goodbye, and Kuniko and I chatted about them on the walk home. She kind of felt like I do – Ikuko has a lot of free time during the day and it seemed like a good opportunity to study, get a degree, teach students in her home, or do something more. Her English was really good, and it seems like a waste to just let it slide away.<\/p>\n
So we were pretty tired out after all the entertaining, and the worst of it was that it was Sunday and we had to go off to work the next day. We had a great time, but I’m was in desperate need of an energy boost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finally getting around to posting about last weekend. Sunday we had three of Kuniko’s international students over to make lunch, and then afterwards the Okamotos over for a taco party. After a slight mixup at the station (one student caught the wrong train and came a little late) we did a little bit of shopping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-lD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}