From the journal of Christopher Sanford Beck on October 26 2012
Today I slept in until 8:30, I was so tired from yesterday! By the time I woke up, Ayana was already on her way to school so I played with Atsushi and had breakfast while Catherine had a shower. I love taking showers in Japan. Instead of having to stand in a bathtub, they have a whole wet room that is separated from the rest of the bathroom. I love it! After we had all gotten ready, we headed to one of Catherine’s English classes. Ayako and Maseko had prepared questions for me about Canada, my life, what I thought of Japan, etc as an exercise. I loved answering their questions, and Catherine decided to do the same exercise with her other (adult) students. After the lesson was over, we came back home and took it easy for the remainder of the afternoon until we picked Ayana up from the bus stop. From there, Catherine dropped the three of us off at Sioko’s house because she (Catherine) had a lesson to teach. Sioko has two young girls who Ayana and Atsushi are friends with. Atsushi and the younger girl always get into mischief together at English lessons, so I helped keep an eye on them. Sioko speaks amazing english but her girls are still learning it, so I got a great opportunity to practice using conversational Japanese with them, and to my delight, they understood! While I was there, I wrote an English draft of the letter that I wanted to send to Yuta’s school and Sioko translated it into Japanese for me to copy out and I started work on that.
Once Catherine returned from teaching, the seven of us dressed up in costumes and went trick or treating! As with carving pumpkins, trick or treating is not a usual activity in Japan, but Catherine made an effort to let her kids and her friends kids have that experience.
Anyways, Catherine had talked to several of her friends in the neighbourhood and they had agreed to answer the door and give us candy (that Catherine had bought) when we came knocking. I dressed up as a bandit. With all black clothes and bandanas. We went to about four houses and all of them said how cute we were and not only gave us the candy that Catherine had bought them, but also treat bags that they had made up. They were all so kind and the candy was delicious! After going back to Sioko’s house and checking (and eating a bit of!) our loot we went home. Later in the evening I hung out with Yatchan and we watched TV and ate candy until after midnight, an activity which became our usual “hang out time” over the next weeks I was here.
It was such a great day and I was sure happy that I got to go trick or treating!
Thanks for reading I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Doing these blog postings always makes me miss Japan and I hope that I can go back sometime!
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