any miny miney mo!

i use that to decided which student will have to start the line of questions in english class and they love it! they always try to repeat after me, but can't get past the mo.

so it's been over a month since i've blogged (sorry about that!) and in that month i:
-participated in a bug and fire festival
-helped with the aomori trivia weekend for the Everest of Apples charity group
-won first prize with my group in the Tsugaru-ben (local dialect) competition
-was on national news for about 20 seconds because of the competition
-was called by Danny Habuki who told me President Ikeda mentioned me in a speech he gave in -front of Soka representatives (talk about being extremely pleasantly surprised) along with other SUA alumni
-gave an experience in Japanese in front about 300 young women's division members in Aomori (talk about being nervous!)
-started playing taiko again
-finished reading The Alchemist and Love in the Time of Cholera ~ both amazing books that I highly recommend
-watched 2 seasons of 24 (that show is addictive!)
-bought a plant :)
and
-have decided that i'm only 23 and don't need to know all of the answers yet, even though i want to, and as long as i keep chanting it will be all good!

so yeah, it was a busy month, but all in all a good month. here are some photo's to highlight and you can see more on my pictures site :)




this is the dialect competition. i played a mother who in america would be considered scary, but in japan, they just say "strong" ... hehe, but i got to whack my "husband" (eric, the other guy in the picture) with a newspaper, so that should give you an idea :-P




this was the cool get-up i got to wear for the bug and fire festival. it was actually quite scary though, our group had to balance this totel pole of dry hay on fire with two horizontal poles and poke it with bamboo poles from the side to help.



me and greg serving up the meet at the charity event. the meet was given to us by AUSSIE meat company, thus the very cool aprons :)




mel, the lady in light blue in the middle is our Prefectural Advisor but will be leaving next month, so erin, lady in dark blue shirt, prepared an album for her and she was very very happy, thus all the smiles :)

and this is just a special treat. schools have sports days here where the kids have to do all sorts of activities, one of which is sticking their face in flour to find candy and this is the result. don't worry, there were no injuries or tears, just extreme laughter :D