Cold comes to Nagano

First night of the year where it was proper cold yesterday, down as low as one degree centigrade. It won't be long before we start seeing frost in the mornings. I do love this time of year, I have to say.

Over the mountains from us in the ski resort of Hakuba, it's already started to snow. You can see pics of it here. None here in Nagano yet, but soon, soon, soon ...

Chris Ward
November 12th 2013

The ultimate cat-sessory?

Spotted this monstrous thing in a shop in Shinagawa station in Tokyo last weekend.

Cat-shaped lipstick ...

 

Chris Ward

November 7th 2013

Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to the All-Japan speech contest we go ...

We won!

For the fourth time in three years, my school won one of the Nagano-ken Commericial High School English Speech Contest trophies.

Two years ago we won the Speech division, while last year we won both Speech and Recital. This year my student Sayuri retained the Recital trophy that she won last year. My other students finished 6th and 10th in the Recital, while in the Speech we were unlucky to finish 4th.

I'm a bit of a speech contest coaching demon, with four 1sts and two 2nds over the last five years, but at the end of they day I can only coach if I have good students to coach, and as always they busted ass to do well. I'm very proud of all of them.

Here's me holding the two trophies we won last year, after cleaning them up ready to take them back.

In an ideal world, I would like to win 1st, 2nd, 3rd in both Speech and Recital divisions, but it wasn't to be. Maybe next year ...

Here's the winners and the judges and all that. My students are front third from left, and back fourth, fifth and sixth from left.

Well done all!

Chris Ward
November 5th 2013

Nice car ...

Saw this beauty outside my local 7Eleven this morning ...

I'd say that's most of the cast of Anpanman, a kid's cartoon. The driver was a middle-aged office worker who gave me a sour look when she saw me photographing her car.

Come on, let those cuddly little bread-men cheer you up ...

Chris Ward
Sept 25th 2013

Construction a-go-go part 1

Next to my modest little house there used to be an overgrown wasteground area that my cat loved to hunt in. A few months back it was sold off and now it's being turned into a construction site. I'm rather sad about this but it has been fascination to watch it all change from trees, flowers and weeds into concrete and mud.

Here are a few pictures of the change so far.

 

 In this first picture you can see how it was before, looking from my house. All the houses in the background have now been torn down.

  

 And a sprint picture from a similar angle. That white house is to the left of the line of four in the first picture. All this (except the white house) is now soil and concrete.

 My cat, Miffy, might not appear too disgruntled, but I can assure you she is.

 The trees and vegetation has all been scrapped away and now they're preparing the land to put in big lumps of concrete. That little house with the red roof is where I live. Neither writing nor teaching are making me, the wife and the cat rich, but I enjoy both. It belongs to my school.

The digger shows up.

And the destruction begins. All these houses are coming down so they can build an access road. No idea where all the tenants went.

That line of four houses is now gone. The fifth, detached, one on the right is still there, although the tenants are gone and its been gutted. I assume at some point they'll pull it down too.

And the current state of play. The houses are gone and they're putting in drainage ditches or whatever they're called.

They're making a ton of noise outside as I write this. I'll post some more pictures in a few days.

Chris Ward

21st Sept 2013

Sunrise over Tokyo

Just got back from a little holiday in the UK and these are a couple of pictures of the sunrise over Tokyo, taken around 6am from the Haneda Airport monorail. Got back to Nagano to find that it's around 30 degrees still, quite a shock after getting to the mid teens and the endless rain back in the UK.

I guess it's nice to be back. I always get the usual longing to go home again (long term) straight after a trip home, but I think that's more to do with missing the family. Still, hopefully it won't be too long before I can get over again. Need to sell some books ...!

Chris Ward
20th September 2013

Spring is (supposed to be) in the air ...

Sunday 21st this year was Nagano Marathon, and for the sixth time in eight years I slept through it (of the other times, once I was helping out with some charity stuff while in 2010 I actually ran it!) but when I woke up and looked outside to see the snow(!) I kind of felt sorry for the poor people slogging round Nagano's streets for five hours. It's very, very rare to have snow this late into spring. Once in twenty years, a co-worker said.

It did a great job of crushing my daffodils too, although it had melted off by the afternoon.

Still, you know it's spring in Japan when the bugs start to appear in the hardware stores! Won't be purchasing one again this year ... the cat would probably just eat it! Found out one of my co-workers actually breeds the things, which is interesting. Apparently if they top 8cm they're worth a fortune. His best he told me was about 7.4cm. Don't give up ...

Chris Ward
April 25th 2013

English Day in Fuetsu High School, Iida

Today, despite being Saturday, I went down to Iida in south Nagano to help out at Fuetsu High School's English Day. There were six foreign teachers in total and we had to do a variety of activities with a total of around 40 students.

Due to Iida being in the butt end of nowhere, I stayed over at a mate's house the night before and we made our way down together. Still, it required a 5am start. We were on the road at 5.50am, and while the sunrise was nice and all, I'd have much rather been asleep!

Fuetsu High School is set in a really pretty location halfway up a hill from the main part of Iida town.

For my special "world culture" activity, I taught the students how to make English tea. There were six groups of students, and because the first couple went pretty heavy on the milk I had to water it down to make it last. The last couple of groups had some pretty strong tea!

They seemed to enjoy it well enough, though.

 After lunch my base group had to listen to me "lecture" them for ten minutes and then make a presentation based on my talk. I told them all about the history of the words "Britain", "England", "Great Britain" and "the UK", and then about hte origins of the British flag. Surprisingly none of them fell asleep.

 Here they are discussing what to talk about.

And here's my group doing their presentation. They did it completely ad-lib without writing a script like all the other groups did, and while it was interesting, and one point there was a two-minute period of giggling and whispering. Slightly un-pro but they did a good job anyway!

Overall, lots of fun was had by all and the kids really enjoyed it. I caught the direct bus back to Nagano (three long hours) and found it rather surprising that it was still snowing up in the highland areas. It's late April!

Chris Ward
20th April 2013

Where I live

Nagano City is located in the middle of the Japanese Alps, two hours by train / four hours by bus from Tokyo. It's a relatively small city by Japanese standards, about 380,000 people, and is famous for the 1998 Winter Olympics. I remember nothing of that, of course, because in 1998 I was at university and spent most of my time drinking and watching crap horror movies. Oh well.

I live right on the edge of the city, not far from the river you can see in the above picture. I work at a high school called Nagano Shogyo, which means Commerical High School. My students are pretty good but they generally don't like English and don't speak it very well. They're quite good at sports, though, and you can see the edge of my school's baseball ground in the foreground.

Of course, it's currently spring time, and Nagano, like everywhere else in Japan, is famous for cherry blossom viewing, what is called "hana-mi", literally "flower-viewing".

The cherry, or "sakura" flower is the most popular, and is a light pink colour.

Here's some at the end of my street.

Generally, what people do is sit underneath them and get drunk, which is all well and good but in early April it can be freezing cold in the evenings. Still, it's a national pasttime, so it has to be done!

This is Zenkoji, the Buddhist temple near my house and Nagano's number one tourist attraction.

This is my old car, in the snow last winter. We get some pretty huge dumps and this was one of the biggest, probably about 30cm overnight. On the right is my house. That's about all you need to see of it. It's pretty small and is owned by my school. Still, it does the job.

Not far from my house we have views like this. That line of mountains in the distance is the northern part of the Japanese Alps. Lots of great skiing and hiking.

This is my new car, a 2004 Honda Fit, which I just bought a month ago. It was dead cheap because it has high mileage, but it's been really well looked after and compared to my old car it's a Rolls Royce. In the background you can see the Alps again.

And this of course is my cat, Miffy, the reason I'm not as productive as I'd like and why I get up at 4 a.m. every day. She turned four this month.

As well as an English teacher I write books in my free time, and have been doing so since I was eight or nine years old. Yes, that's them you can see in the side bar, and if you've come here from my writing blog then welcome. This blog isn't to sell my books but of course I won't mind if you buy fifty copies or so for every single person you know. They're actually quite good.

Anyway, that's all for now. Be sure to stop in again soon.

Chris Ward
April 18th 2013