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Dec 12, 2011 07:00 PM English Practice with School Kids in Kyoto (1987)
I met Kikuko, a female Kyoto elementary school teacher perhaps in her mid-30’s that also teaches an extracurricular weekend English language class for children, through a bulletin board posting that I saw in the Kyoto TIC office. The posting was inviting any American or English-speaking western tourist to join Kikuko and her students during one of her weekend classes on the eastern fringes of Kyoto so that her students could both hear English as spoken by a native speakers and learn a bit about where the visiting speakers came from and what their hometown were like, and also get in a bit of one-on-one English practice with the visitors. The meeting with Kikuko’s students would later prove to be a very memorable experience, though I have to rely solely on memory, as I had forgotten to grab my camera before Kikuko picked me up in the family van that day. The students seemed to range from about ages five to perhaps twelve, and were quite curious about this tall, skinny ‘gai-jin’ (foreigner) with big glasses and a healthy tuff of chest hair visible through the open collar and a couple of undone shirt buttons. A British girl in-country for a year to teach English in Japan (I would meet many westerners who were in Japan to do just the same, and would later overhear two American gentlemen seated in front of me on the Bullet Train talking of how they are sometimes hit on by their middle-aged Japanese female students…) has also seen the posting at the TIC office and was also in attendance that day. I gave a brief presentation on who I was, what I was doing in Japan, and a bit about where I was from (aided by a roughly hand-drawn map of California annotated with some quickly-sketched illustrations representing a few of the state’s best-known landmarks for reference on a large dry marker board behind me) while Kikuko’s younger female teacher’s aid translated my English into Japanese…and occasional stopped me when I rambled on too long and too fast for her to be able to translate (much to the amusement and hearty laugher of the students). My presentation was then followed by a rather humorous demonstrated English language practice session, in which three of the kids were picked to read aloud part of one of the practice lessons, with each child playing the part of one of the three speakers in the lesson. The lesson demonstration was then followed by a game of ‘pass the 100 Yen coin with a chopstick’, with the kids broken into two groups forming long lines and seeing which team would be the first to pass the coin from one end of the line to the other and back, with the younger Japanese teacher’s aid encouraging them with chants of “Ichi-Ni…Ichi-Ni!!!” (“One-Two…One-Two!!!”), with two emphatic hand-claps in-between each ‘Ichi-Ni’ to keep the cadence. After the game, the kids had some free time to play amongst themselves or to come up to me and practice their English skills (“Hello. How are you? My name is so-and-so. I go to Honshu Primary. I am XX years old.”) So as to better break the ice, I sat on the floor so that I could interact with the kids on a face-to-face basis. One particular girl of perhaps five years old with big round glasses sat at a distance for quite some time just staring at me with a look of wide-eyed apprehension; my response was to give her a warm smile so as to encourage her to come over and practice her English. Slowly she began to inch towards me while still maintaining her look of apprehension and now adding a slightly-opened mouth as if to convey disbelief or trepidation mixed with extreme curiosity, until her face was within a foot of mine. Her gaze drifts down to fixate on my open shirt collar, and she slowly and cautiously extends her right hand as her thumb and index finger slightly part, until her finger and thumb tips penetrate my curly chest hairs and lightly come to rest on my chest. She then slowly brings the thumb and finger together and cautiously eases her hand back until I feel a tug as her hand comes to a very abrupt and brief stop, at which time she lets out a wider-eyed, jaw-dropping gasp and quickly releases her grasp on my chest hair and jumps back in the shock and surprise that the hair on my chest is, in fact, real. Trepidation now gone but curiosity still rampant, her hand quickly returns for a few more confirmatory tugs followed by a ‘curiosity satisfied’ smile, and the other kids who by this point have now taken notice of the exchange, begin to crowd around to have their turn as a growing chorus of excited giggles begins to arise. After a snack of seaweed-covered rice balls and a group thank you from the students and staff to me and my British counterpart, I would walk away from the experience with both a generous gift bag of Japanese snacks and nick-knacks, and a lot of fond memories.
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Dec 12, 2011 07:00 PM Sunrise over Angkor Wat (2009)
My guide and I arrived at the main (west) entrance at around 5 AM and made our way through the darkness by flashlight along the sandstone causeway to the passage through the outer wall, which in the vicinity of the main entrance takes the form of an enclosed 235m-wide sandstone porch decorated with carvings and sculptures. We paused briefly to look down the hallway that runs the length of the right (south) side of the porch; having taken in the same view earlier the previous day under ambient reflected sunlight, the visual impression and mood of the hall was entirely different when viewed in installments under the pool of limited illumination from the flashlight’s beam as it slowly scans the interior of the structure and creates an eerie play of shadows off the interior’s columns and archways. Once inside the outer wall, we left the sandstone causeway that leads to Angkor Wat’s temple and flanking central structure, and stood at the base of the steps to give the pre-dawn sky a chance to lighten before continuing to the reflecting pool. There appeared to be some clouds, overcast or perhaps morning fog on the horizon, but the sky was clear overhead and, given the still near-complete darkness at that hour, full of myriad bright stars. The pleasantly-cool early morning air was filled with the sounds of chirping crickets mixed with the morning chants of Buddhist monks from the monastery in the distance, occasionally interrupted by the slap and scrape of a pair of sandal or sneaker soles against sandstone or the muted conversations of other tourists and their guides making their way to the reflecting pool. As the sky in the east began to lighten and reveal the temple’s presence like a dark apparition in the distance, we climbed the steps back on to the causeway and continued our eastward walk. As we advanced, the once dull gray dawn sky ahead soon evolved into an array of colors that transitioned from the violet and blue-gray of low fog and haze on the distant horizon and streaks of clouds that hovered above the dark outline of the temple bracketed by palm trees, to swaths of pale salmon and mauve tones that dramatically backlit the upper reaches of the temple’s prang-styled ‘mountain peak’ central and lower flanking northwest and southwest corner towers in addition to the silhouettes of palm trees in the foreground, then blended back into gradations of light periwinkle and blue-gray farther above the horizon, with the bottoms of the dawn sky’s higher clouds gilded in pale pink of the approaching morning sun. With eyes accustomed to the darkness, the dim reflected ambient light began to illuminate our environs; with the causeway’s paving stones and naga (a deity of both the Hindu & Buddhist religions in the form of a large cobra) -lined balustrades and surrounding features within the temple compound, such as the two graceful library buildings that flank the causeway halfway to the temple, thus visible, the flashlights of the guides were switch off and tourist began to attempt photos of the temple at dawn, with occasional strobe flashes and the brief appearance of the whitish glow of small backlit digital camera screens seen ahead of us. As we approached the library building, the chirping of crickets began to be replaced by the croaking of frogs and the morning calls of birds. We walked to a location near the northwest corner of the reflecting pool that’s located to the left of the causeway, and looked for a break in the line of people standing along the bank so as to take some unobstructed pre-sunrise shots of the Angkor Wat temple with the pool in the foreground. Given the number of tourist in attendance, our section of the north reflecting pool was thrumming with myriad murmured conversations as people occupied their time while waiting in anticipation of the coming sunrise that would no doubt rank highly on their list of ‘once in a lifetime’ travel experiences, at a location that is considered to be one of the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia. In the moments that lead up to sunrise, the morning sky, which was streaked with fairly thin clouds, was dramatically set ablaze in a brilliant and breath-taking display of colors sufficient to lower the level and density of background conversations, as visitors from all over the world collectively paused to savor the experience. From our vantage point, the rising sun cleared the Angkor Wat temple structure just to the left of the northeast corner prang tower, with a hushed silence briefly falling over the crowd at that very moment as the sound of camera shutters clicking and electronic beeps, chirps and any number of creative .mp3 notification tones filled the air. Witnessing sunrise was a very memorable and, most definitely, a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience.
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