Some Stuff I Did

Sorry that there haven't been any updates in a while. I've been busy and tired when I've not been busy. A few days ago, at the turtle school, they were having a club day. In elementary school, they have clubs, but they only meet something like once a month, whereas junior high kids meet every day, as far as I can tell, and stay at school until around 21:00 playing tennis or arranging flowers or whatever it is that they do.

So, anyway, they asked me to come to the kateika club, which is like the home ec. club. They were doing chatsumi,茶摘, which is picking tea. So, we went out to somebody's garden with the leader of the community center and some old woman (?) and picked tea for a few minutes. Then we came back and made tea, which basically just meant microwaving the leaves, smashing them, microwaving them a second time, smashing them again, and then putting them into teapots with hot water. It was very good tea. It was ocha,お茶, or green tea, but supposedly, in the fall, the same leaves can be made into bancha,番茶, which is some other kind of tea. The vice-principal gave me the school's camera and asked me to take pictures, so I did that instead of actually making the tea. I also took pictures with my cell phone, so maybe I'll upload those soon.

And just two days ago, I got to do some taue,田植え, which is rice planting with a fifth grade class. Usually they tell me about these kinds of things weeks in advance, but this day, they just called at around 8 in the morning and asked me to bring shorts and whatnot. It was cool.

I don't have any pictures of that because I was actually doing it, and it's not really possible to work a camera and plant rice at the same time. Planting rice involves standing in shin-depth mud and putting little seedlings in the mud and water, as guided by a wooden triangle frame thing, to ensure that everything stays pretty much in line. You form a whole line of people, and take turns being in charge. It goes like this:

everyone plants rice

leader: dekita? (done?)
everyone: dekita! (done!)
leader: isseinode! (ready, go!)

everyone rolls the triangle frame over and plants next row of rice

Good times were had by all. But now, I have a track meet to get to!