The second to the last of the beginning of the end

Aaron + Michael Go to Japan: The Kite Factory from Joe Smith on Vimeo.

Good goodness! Where to begin? It’s been so long since I last wrote. As of now, K-SEP 2008 is done, finished, and put in its grave. It was a wonderful beautiful trip, which I will never forget. But don’t let me get ahead of myself. First we have to cover everything else.

To begin, I have to give a big shout out to shabushabu, which took place some time before we went to Shibuya. It’s basically a Japanese restaurant where you order five plates of raw meet and boil them in a big pot at your table. It was a lot of fun and a lot of food. Thankfully, Jaimie was there to walk us through, otherwise I think we all might have just started eating the raw meat, thinking it’s cultural or something. Peter ate at least forty-five pounds of meat and then slept for two days.

After Shinjuku, Aaron and I were beat down, but I’m afraid that was just too bad. We had an Olympic Center to go to, so we packed our things and headed for the buses on Monday morning. We got on the bus, but I don’t really remember anything past that because I fell asleep. I awoke in Yoyogi and we all filed off into the Olympic center.

For those of you that don’t know, Tokyo hosted the Olympics at some point in the sixties and built a huge center for all the athletes to live in while they participated in the world games. Of course after the Olympics ended, Tokyo had buyer’s remorse and started renting out the space to businesses and organizations that needed space to do things and exist in. Really. You can rent that place for anything. It’s mostly business conferences and seminars, but I honestly don’t see why you can’t have your birthday party there. Their cafeteria is pretty good too.

The three days in the Olympic center were pretty much the same as in Kasukabe, except that now we worked thrice as hard. My class continued drawing and I continued to film them to get the footage I needed for the presentation video. The boys all finished their projects the first day here, as I expected. The boys all took the project and did the exact amount of work expected of them and nothing more. Both girl groups, however, had asked me if they could do two full color pages each. I said yes, of course, so the extra time was for them.

I spent the extra days actually teaching cartooning techniques to the boys. They were pretty enthralled by it, and I could see their drawing styles improving right away. I also had the supreme enjoyment of getting Japanese kids to act weird in public. For the video, I put together a class intro and made each person do something bizarre, like pretending to ride an elevator or jumping out of a broom closet or punching a brick wall. Some were reluctant, but most of them were surprisingly willing to embarrass themselves in front of the businessmen walking around.

As night of the first day rolled around, it was time for a shower. We had been told before that this was no ordinary showering experience, but I didn’t really believe it until I tried it for myself. There was an actual bathhouse on the campus where we did our washing. You have to shower, soap, and rinse all before you get in the tub. The tub water is not changed and is only for soaking in. Thus, you must be perfectly clean. Oh, and also, you have to be naked in front of everybody. At first, I was kind of unsettled by this and didn’t want to wash. “I can go for three days without washing. It’ll be fine.” But of course, my dislike for uncleanliness outweighed my dislike for my own public nudity. So I got in, showered, and soaked. You have a tiny baby towel to wrap around you when you walk around, and you put it on your head when you soak. As I sat a-soakin’ in the heat, I realized how it all works. I didn’t want to see anyone’s weiner and they didn’t want to see mine. So you just stop worrying and relax. I did, and it was nice.

The second day we taught and taught, and during our break time we took the kids to nearby Yoyogi park. It had fountains and flowers and grass! And that’s about it. But still it was fun. Five of my kids went. We joined some other groups in a game of tag, in which I got tagged during the first two seconds of play. The grass in the park was laced with large stones that will gladly roll under your feet and slip you up if you run too fast. My fear of looking stupid combined with my fear of breaking my ankle again kept me from running too fast. Also, I’m out of shape. So after about ten minutes of running, I gave up and pretended to be a zombie. That way I could chase the kids on my own my time while saying “brains” and “Muir es vivir” a la RE4. They got a kick out of that. I just got tired.

The Olympic center was a lot of fun, but I’m not sure what else there is to say. So I won’t say anything. Next!

Back in Kasukabe, we were preparing ourselves for our final presentations. Everyone was hard at work editing and collecting materials. Except for Bippo. He spent the whole time renaming my computer files to “Michael’s pictures of dudes” and “Michael’s basket of dumb ideas.”

On Thursday, Aaron and I began our class time with ESL exercises as always. We had a lot of presentation preparation to do with the kids, so we just threw out what we had left. And it turns out all we had left was a worksheet I had made about American holidays. This was most certainly a poor combination of MS Word and Google images, but the kids didn’t know the difference, so we handed it out. Now, most people would use normal holidays like Easter and Valentine’s Day, but I figure we should really American it up a little. So I threw in some Labor Day and Columbus Day and other confusing favorites. Not to mention, I picked the most ridiculous pictures for each holiday.

We gave the worksheet, the kids finished, and we began grading papers. Aaron hadn’t seen the worksheet before, so as he struggled to explain Columbus Day and looked at the stupid picture of Leprechauns I put on the page, he started laughing. “These kids are so confused!” he said. I started laughing too. “I know!” I said. “Where did you get this stupid picture…(laughing)…of a baby…(laughing harder)…dressed as a pumpkin?!” We really started laughing now. “Google images! It was the first one that came up!” The kids started laughing too, but they weren’t sure why. Aaron and I stood in front of thirty students and did nothing but laugh for a solid four minutes. We tried to stop, Lord knows we did, but it was downhill guffaw train with no brakes. The kids all laughed too, but probably more because we looked like a couple of idiots yukking it up for no reason at all. And maybe that was the case.

That day was bittersweet. It was our last time in the classroom, and all our kids finished their projects that day. We still had two more days, but we would never teach them again. One of my girls gave me a manga we had been talking about. She said she had two, so I didn’t feel as bad.

That night was a night of laborious labor. We had presentations that next day and a ton of raw footage. Both Aaron and Peter had video projects, and I was simply cutting a video of the kids’ comics dubbed over with their voice acting. Even so, I had to edit the intros and I did a good amount of title card trickery to spice it up a bit. Anything to make sure their comics were received well.

I won’t get into the boring details, but I started editing at 4:00pm and finished at 3:00am. Yeah. I can’t really complain though because we all stayed up pretty late. Aaron stayed up until 5:00am.

Needless to say, the next day all the K-SEP teachers were exhausted, but energized with the excitement of showing their presentations. There were great photo presentations, plays, and several videos. Even though I taught cartooning, I opted to do a video because standing on stage and reading comics to an audience doesn’t go over very well. I should know. I did it last year. But my video this year was great, I think. I’m not sure the students got it, because it may have been too weird. I used a lot of the multi-colored title cards with weird music that I’ve been using in the vlogs. But I’m incredibly happy with it, and how often does that happen?

The next day was the closing ceremony, but I think that and the rest of our adventures should be saved for a following blog. A vlog is coming, as we still have at least fifty minutes of footage.

-Michael