I must say, March has been a pretty uneventful month. I've been working quite a lot at Earth 8, and also just enjoying my time off. I didn't travel anywhere big this month, but as Sakura season is starting, my friends and I have some Hanami plans! This past weekend, my friends and I decided to ride 15km through Kibiji, not far from Okayama city. We took the train to Bizen-Ichinomiya, and rented bikes to ride all the way to Soja station. Kibiji is a road that takes you through Kibi Planes, the countryside part of Okayama that passes by a lot of temples, shrines, and even burial mounds. Within five minutes of biking, my friends and I stopped by a temple that was an incredibly steep climb up a hill. There were also a couple of paths leading up through the forest, so we decided to climb one of them. At the end of our short but tiring hike, it let us to a monument (as it was all in calligraphy, we couldn't understand what it was) but it was quite beautiful. After this, we went on our way through the rest of Kibi planes.
One of the most surprising things was to see that Okayama had burial mounds. I didn't know that this existed in Japan, so it was really interesting to read the signs that described them. Looking at things like this always makes me wonder what it was like in historical Japan. I'd love to be a fly on a wall for a day in that time. Aside from Kibi planes, as I mentioned, I've been working at a preschool a couple of days a week. Coming to Japan, I thought I'd just stay inside of school and learn a lot about student interaction, but having this job and working with 3-4 year olds has taught me so much. Being able to work full days interacting with them has taught me a lot in how to interact with kids, how to use my English in a manner they can learn, and unleash that childish spirit we're all taught to tuck away once we get into middle school. I never thought I'd want to work with kids, but having this job has proven to me the exact opposite: perhaps I'd love to be some kind of assistant or caretaker of kids. I'll definitely be thinking about this in the next year that I graduate!
0 Comments
|
AuthorMarissa Armstrong Archives
June 2016
Categories |