Board Game Night

Last weekend I went with Sasha to Kavita's place in Yusuhara. Kavita was hosting a board game night. She brought a large selection of board games from Australia, so we had a special event to get a group together to play them. There were several zombie themed games, a Battlestar Galactica game, a storytelling card game, and a few others I can't remember right now. My favorite was the storytelling game. Each player is given cards with common elements from fairy tales ("orphan", "wolf", "a journey") and a card that specifies an ending to the story ("And the king was delighted with his new gift"). The goal is to tell a story using all of your element cards and leading to your particular ending. However, if you mention something that is on one of someone else's cards, that person can interrupt and take the story in an entirely different direction to reach their ending. It was kind of challenging for me in that I don't usually like to interrupt people when they're telling a story (or holding any kind of conversation), so jumping in and taking over the narrative felt somewhat uncomfortable.

We started playing games in the early afternoon and played until dinner time. Because we got hungry a bit early, none of the restaurants were open yet (Yusuhara is a very small town). Rather than wait around to see if any of them would open, we bought ingredients at the grocery store and Mark made gumbo for everyone. It was delicious. Since I mentioned that I don't know how to cook meat, Mark also gave me a brief lesson on cooking chicken and had me help with that part of the meal. Maybe I'll try it at home eventually.

After dinner we went back to playing games, and we played until pretty late at night. I don't remember exactly when we went to bed, but it was after midnight. A few people went home, but most of us stayed at Kavita and Greg's place. In the morning, most of the remaining people played a role playing game that they had started at the last game night. I didn't have a character sheet made and wasn't particularly interested in joining, so I lazed around and read on my Kindle. The RPG lasted several hours. After that we all headed back home. Sasha and I went to Yosakoi practice that evening. It was Sasha's first practice this year, but she picked up on the dance really fast. I doubt she'll need to go to very many practice sessions.

This week will actually be somewhat busy at work. Tomorrow the ALTs are helping out with a sort of day camp for elementary students. There was a meeting for it this morning where we prepared some of the materials. Unfortunately for me, the meeting was conducted entirely in Japanese, so I didn't understand all of what went on. But I think I got the important things, and I've been paired up with a language instructor who is fluent in Japanese, so I won't be alone tomorrow if I get confused. On Friday the Board of Education ALTs are holding a seminar for elementary teachers. We'll be going over how to make a series of lesson plans that build on each other. For some of the grammar points we teach, you need more than one class period to introduce all of the necessary elements. So the purpose of the workshop is to show the teachers how they can break one end goal into a series of smaller goals to be covered over three class periods. These teachers already know how to plan lessons, but they have a hard time applying their knowledge to planning English lessons. If the workshop is successful it could be very valuable, but we aren't sure how it'll go over.

This Saturday, Sasha, Julie and I will be headed to Osaka! We don't have specific plans laid out, but the general idea is to do some shopping and dancing. Thanks to Julie, we have our bus tickets now, and the hostel has been booked for a while. We're pretty much all set to go. Now all I have to do is survive the work week.