December 8 - 10
Hokkaido Mid-Year Conference

It's time once again for the Hokkaido Mid-Year ALT conference in Sapporo. I really enjoyed this year's conferece, I feel that I got more out of the sessions this year than last. I included pictures of the conference and places I went in Sapporo. If you want to see pictures of the party at Booty, please look on the HAJET website.
A group of us at the Taj Mahal, a pretty popular Indian food restaurant chain in Hokkaido.	Me, in front of a huge Christmas tree at the Sapporo Factory mall.
At Sapporo Factory (Matt, Quinton, Anita, and John, with Lavonda in the front)	The Tokeidai, a clock tower that has become one of the symbols of Sapporo.
We went to a batting cage one night. I sucked, but John (pictured here) did pretty good.	The elusive Quinton...
For the culture day on the 10th, I visited Heiwa Kindergarten.	We were making Christmas cards with the children.
Hello!	Me, with the kids. (For more pictures of cute kids, visit the page for last year's Mid-Year Conference)

December 14

The Asahikawa International Committee organizes Japanese cultural workshops from time to time. Today they organized a tofu making day. Now, to be perfectly honest, I don't care much for tofu. I find that it is basically a flavorless blob of mush with the consistency of potted meat (if you don't know what that is, you're a very lucky person). However, I was very interested in seeing how it was made since it's doubtful I would ever get the opportunity to in the future. It proved to be very interesting.
First, using a little water and a grinder, we ground the soybeans down into a pulpy paste.	This is the paste from the first part.
Then, we slowly added the paste to this huge vat of boiling water for about 20 minutes.	We had to keep stirring the paste from the outer edge of the vat to the middle.
After it was done boiling, we poured it into these mesh bags to seperate the liquid from the chunky stuff.	Pouring it in...
This press squeezed out the remaining juice from the solid stuff. This juice can be used as soy milk.	The solid, crumbly part left can be used to cook with.
Here we made some kind of a soy sauce/vegetable/tofu mixture with it.	This contains the juice that was drained out from the mesh bags. We added a magnesium mixture to it, and monitored it for the right temperature.
These containers will allow our tofu to slowly drain and form a solid.	After the liquid sortof "curdled" a bit, and when it was the right temperature, we added it to the containers.
You can see the clear liquid draining out through the holes in the side.	When it was full, the edges of the cloth were lifted up and over to cover the tofu.
Then cover it with this thing...	...and that thing...
...and then a weight to slowly help it drain out.	When we returned from lunch, the tofu had shrunk to less that half the original size.
We dumped the solid tofu into a vat of cold water, cut it into blocks,	and volia - you're finished!
Hmm... not my best side...	Natsuko and Bob joined in on the fun.

December 24

For my last school visit this year, I went to Wassamu High School. Wassamu was having a sortof "Culture Day" where they held various games and activities for the students in the morning followed by a movie after lunch. I helped by organizing some of the morning activities. The first game we played is called "Fruit Basket," where a student in the middle of the circle calls out a word (in this case Christmas vocabulary) and every student who has that word taped to them must change seats. The person who remains in the middle then starts the next round.

The next game we played was a Christmas Relay. Each team was given a paper Christmas tree with one ornament on it. On the back of the ornament was a teacher's name. The group would then go to that teacher and receive a question. Answering the question correctly got them another ornament with another name on it. Their last ornament contained a picture of how they should decorate their tree. The first team to collect all of their ornaments and decorate their tree correctly won.

Students answered questions relevant to the teacher. Math teachers gave math questions, the English teachers gave English questions, etc. When students came to me, they had to answer an English question about Christmas. The students actually did pretty good.

The next game played was karuta. Karuta is a Japanese card game where a card is called out and students try to be the first to slap the card and take it away. It's very popular and all students know how to play it, so it's often used by ALTs to practice letters, vocabulary, etc.

Of course, this was not an English karuta game. In today's game, the cards contained certain phrases and expressions, mostly about Wassamu High School and it's teachers. There were even a few about me! The person calling out the cards reads the entire card, but it's the first character of the card that the students are usually looking for. If you look at the picture at left, you will see that the first character of each card is circled, making it easier to see.

The student crouching over in this picture was particularly fun to watch. He was all over the place trying to get as many cards as possible.

December 25

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!