March 1

It's been really freakin snowy recently. Here's a picture of the snow, as it piles above my window!

March 5 - 7
HAJET Winter Meeting in Obihiro

The winter meeting of the Hokkaido Association of JET was held in Obihiro this year. Obihiro is located in southeastern Hokkaido. The meeting went fairly well. The new HAJET officers were installed for the year (including me as the Webmaster - again). I hadn't intended on staying longer than Saturday afternoon, but I was persuaded and ended up staying the whole weekend.
Deb and Jonathan at the meeting	Julianna, posing in pink
Havin fun at the enkai	They were having fun, too
The Obihiro train station was new and fairly modern	One of Obihiro's specialties is butadon, seasoned pork over rice

March 14
Soba Making

The Asahikawa International Committee holds workshops from time to time to help train their volunteer translators and give them some practice. Today was one of those events. A few of us foreigners, accompanied by volunteers translators, headed out to Etambetsu, a small rural community on the edge of Asahikawa. Etambtesu is famus for soba, a Japanese style of buckwheat-flour noodles. We went out there to learn how to make the soba noodles from scratch.
Making soba invloves mixing the buckwheat flour with a little bit of regular flour (to help it hold together) with water in three parts. You make a crumbly mix at first, but at the end you need to make a big ball of dough with no wrinkles or cracks in it. It was actually pretty fun.
The tools of the trade	It took some work to get rid of all the wrinkles in the dough
Our teacher was the guy in the middle	Our finished dough ball
Cutting the soba requires a big cleaver-like knife	Me, cutting the soba
My group's finished batch	I'm not sure what Kumagai-san is doing...
Soba, ready to eat	Everyone enjoying the fruits of their labors
Ali, full from his meal	Sandra showing how to dip the noodles in the sauce before eating

March 23
Shibetsu Shogyo Class Match

For their last two days of school this school year, Shibetsu Shogyo High School students had their class match, where classes compete against each other in a variety of sports and physical activities. I got to attend today, and it was a lot of fun.
One of the games they played was Minna de Jump (Everyone Jump), which was just jumping rope, but the entire class had to jump rope together. Some groups were able to get up to about 15 times before messing up.
After the jumping came a game called Tamaire. In this game, the groups tried to get as many balls (bean bags) into a really high basket in a short period of time. It's often played here at chidren's sports festivals and such. Wassamu, a town north of Asahikawa and south of Shibetsu, is famous for being exceptionally good at this game, and some of the students at this school are from Wassamu.
The next game was pretty fun to watch. There were about 6 ropes layed out in the middle of the gym floor. Each team was on opposite sides of the gym. When the whistle blows, each teams has to run into the center and try to get as many of the ropes to their side as possible.
If you're fast, you can run in, grab a rope, and yank to your side before the other team has a chance.	However, it turns into a massive tug-of-war for the last few ropes.
The next event was an obstacle course relay race. This picture is of the first part, where the runners have to crawl under a net that students not playing are holding down to make their passage difficult. After the obstacle course, the female students played mini-volleyball with the women teachers and the boys played basketball against the male teachers. I joined in the basketball game as well. Needless to say, we got our butts kicked, but it was still fun.
Clowning around...