I’m now back at school for my second year of teaching English in Japanese primary school. I’ll write something about this and my whole last year teaching when I get around to it. Anyway here are some of the things I did during the spring holiday. In case you were wondering the Japanese school year starts in April as opposed to September. The Japanese don’t celebrate Easter either so there weren’t any chocolate eggs going around this year. It also transpires that because I didn’t get any Easter eggs even from Granddad this year as I am “too old and far away” that my last Easter egg I would have eaten would have been last year. When I only received one egg from Granddad. But since I was in Japan, Joseph ate it. Joseph ate my only Easter egg in 2 years. There will be vengeance.
Anyway here’s what I did.
Snowboarding in Fukushima with my housemates. Don’t you think my chic ‘90s styled snow gear is great? I definitely stand out.
A trip to Odawara castle on one of the only nice days of spring this year. Odawara castle was originally built in the mid-15th century and passed through various families as they kept having battles to take control of it. As you can see in the first picture this ‘historic’ castle is looking rather good for its age. This might be because the original castle keep was actually destroyed in 1703 by an earthquake and so had to be rebuilt. After which the keep and other structures were taken down and sold. After which a villa was built on the site in 1901. Which was they destroyed by an earthquake in 1923 along with other remaining reconstructed walls and original ruins. Then the castle was built again in 1960 with the various gates only being finished in 2009. This is a rather common theme among Japanese castles in that they are not actually that old at all and yet are still hailed as historic monuments.
Here are some cute fish I saw at the aquarium!
