Monday, November 20, 2006

Here are a few of my pictures from my stay in Japan when I went to Nagano High School.









Here is a funny picture from school. After a long day my friend Peter (blonde hair boy on the right), Lisa (far left) and my host brother's friend (I'm blanking out on her name), and I were all exaughsted. Coming out of Classical Japanese, a class dreaded by every Japanese student, I ambushed the group with my camera. Peter apparently was too demoralized after trying to understand what was going on in that class to offer a smile.






Classmates from Classical Japanese! Fellow sufferers! Take a camera out in Japan and one will find that instantly everyone wants their picture taken. These classmates couldn't let me go with my camera in hand without their picture taken.





English class for ichi nensei high school students. The man on the left in the Manchester United shirt is Paul Sensei. Paul, who had gotten a degree in history from university in England, decided that his life needed a little bit of excitement. The result was that he became a JET English teacher.

I and a number of the other exchange students from my high school in America helped out daily in his class with teaching English to the students. The day that this picture was taken, Paul was working with his Japanese counterpart, who is seen here. Because Paul had no prior experience with learning Japanese before his coming to Japan in 2006, his aid helped translate for him. They made quite a funny pair.

One of the days that I was in his class Paul was attemting to explain that Great Britain was made up of semi independent regions, being England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It took a while for him to get across that "England" was different than "Britain". The word for Britain in Japanese refers to England, as if England was all of Britain. Because of this there was a lot of confusion...

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