Hyogo - Month 6

Sorry I have not posted in a while. I hope this makes up for it!

I have been here in Hyogo teaching, for 6 entire months,

(Above) The textbook I have to use to teach English here.

though people have still not gotten used to me being here. I am constantly an outsider, though people have always been respectful and nice to me. Today I was invited to go to a baseball game in the Hanshin Koshein Stadium. I was very excited, though I had to politely decline, because I still had to figure out a lesson plan for tomorrow, and if I went I would be the talk of the town. I feel so famous here.

The Hanshin Koshein Statudium looks very much like an American stadium.

If you didn't know, Hyogo is in the bottom of the main island, a medium sized state. The people here love nature, and so they always relate whatever I say to something flora or fauna. It is quite interesting to be here, though I still do not understand the Japanese fully. I especially do not understand my students, for they are constantly asking me if I know about Awaji Island, part of Hyogo, or some sort of TV show or movie that came out. They never seem to get used to me, even though I have been teaching English with them for about 5 months and 3 weeks now.

Today I saw their school lunches. Instead of having lunch ladies in a cafeteria, they ate lunch in their classrooms, as many American schools do, but they had the students serving the food. I think this is a great idea, it really helps the students to gain responsibility.

Here are the students serving lunch.

I also learned about a new way to eat food, the sankaku-shiki tabekata, or triangle eating style. To do this, you first take some rice, then some meat, and then some salad, and then chew it together. The students taught me this. It was very interesting.

I took a picture of the school lunch, which the students thought was quite

weird, but it was all for this blog. So here is a picture of my lunch today.

Today I also learned that some parts of their textbooks were censored. I was very alarmed by this. Their textbooks talked a lot about our bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but nothing about the Japanese killing of 1 million people in China. We would never have anything like this in America, I thought, but then I heard in a letter after I told my parents, about the censoring of textbooks in Texas.

Coming from you homesick,

Fiona

How The Maya Collapsed

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I believe the Maya died out by malnutrition and anemia. I believe this because they have found many skulls with spongy areas at the back, which showed that the person who that skull belonged to had anemia. Some evidence shows that the Maya probably were overfarming, I believe the Maya overfarmed, and ran out of food slowly, until people were malnurished and developed anemia. And, showing the unfinished altar and these abandoned houses, the Maya may have abandoned their cities to live in the forest, and as they overfarmed the forest, they ran out of food, etc. Also, as it says the obsidian blades were not in the houses, the Mayas would have brought the obsidian blades and many things with them.