Week 4 in Japan: Teaching English and the Akita University Festival

 This last week has really been a blast, got to start teaching English as a part time job at various locations, and my colleges annual festival was both on Saturday and Sunday. First off on Monday I met with Kazuko a nice lady who contacted me about teaching English to her and a few of her friends on an every other week basis. It was fun to chat with her and three others, drink tea, and have some snacks. I also officially started teaching English as an employee of ALL Rooms (Autonomous Language Learning). Students can come in for help with English and I help them however I can. Many students go to the group to study for English exams or if they are going to be making a trip to an English speaking country. For example this last week I helped a graduate student who is now in France making a speech in English, she came to ALL Rooms to prepare. A third place I teach now is in a city about an hour south of Akita City called Yurihonjo. It is a beautiful small town of about 85,000 people right on the west coast of Japan. On Fridays i'll be teaching a class of 33 kindergarteners English. The kids are so cute and have so much energy. Its a great job and my favorite place to teach English, the kids love to learn. I teach some vocab, one letter of the alphabet, and we sang the itsy-bitsy-spider :). They were amused when I told them that I sang that song in school in America. I got the opportunity to teach there through knowing Kazuko who I mentioned earlier. Kazukos friend teaches at the school and liked the idea of me coming to teach. I wasn't really planning on working a part time job when I got to Japan, but I enjoy teaching so it's cool.
        The Akita University festival was this last weekend and that was a great time. Various clubs around campus set up tents and sell food and her stuff like clothes or whatever. There was Korean, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Chinese, American Burgers? or I guess German.. idk, and of course Japanese food. There were also live bands playing throughout the day. Lots of people from the City came and it was a lot of fun. There were things like dance and singing and something similar to a beauty pagent going on throughout the two days. They are very into the arts here in Akita City. Lots of different dance teams performed ranging from traditional Japanese dancing to hip hop. One of my favorite things going on was the Jazz Cafe. There was a large room where coffee was sold and a great jazz band played all day. The jazz band had various members who would fill in so nobody was playing for 7 straight hours (the festival went from 10-5 both Sat. and Sun.). A friend of mine is actually a member of the club and because of that I ended up playing bass for a song. It had been a long time since I had played and even longer since I had to read music so it was rough but it was a lot of fun. I'm considering joining the jazz club because they could use another bass player. As I said earlier I'm part of ALL Rooms a language teaching club/group. We sold hamburgurs so I helped setting up the tent, cooking, advertising for that. A lot of work but it was fun. We sold out of hamburgers by three in the afternoon, our good reputation from selling hamburgers the year before helped us a lot. Sunday night I also went to a work party for ALL Rooms at a cool traditional Japanese restraunt. We got our own private room and sat on the floor, lots of good raw fish and had octopus for the first time too. It was a great week. Thanks for reading! Here are some pictures I got over the weekend. Also if you like my pictures you can follow me on instagram @goodspeedluke I post about once a week on there as well :)

 I took a picture with somebody cosplaying Attack on Titan a new anime that just finished its 1st (and very successful) season. 

 It's hard to tell but there are a ton of people dancing. They had so much energy it was fun to watch. Also the second day of the festival was rainy but nobody minded too much and it actually added a cool effect to this dance.

 Lastly heres a picture of the jazz band. This was the last song they played so all the members went up and played together. Fantastic musicians. (also you can't really see it but theres an upright bass player, a guitarist, and a piano player.