A blog is born!!!

There are too many things to update like facebook, myspace, xanga, and probably something else I forgot. So I decided to get a blog too!!! Don't worry I'll still check the other stuff, but i'll actually try to keep this one up to date...unlike xanga.

Okay, as you might have noticed, my address is bananasensei (and so is my cell email). One guy told me that the name was decieving because he thought that I would be yellow (politcally correct term: East Asian). I must say that would be a pretty lame reason to choose bananasensei. twinkiesensei would be more suiting. Believe it or not, every time I tell my students that my name is Shivana, they say "banana! banana!" and this has only happened around a hundred times and in every school i've ever taught. So I am known as BANANASENSEI here in japan-o-land.

Now on to actual news.

I did my first homestay ever, with total strangers this weekend. I stayed at an old Japanese couple's place. They were so cute and nice. When they found out that I could speak Japanese they said that God answered their prayers. Now I know why my Japanese suddenly got significantly better. They own a miso factory and so they had humongous buckets full of miso in their garage. Their house is pretty big. Definitely bigger than my house in America. They had an evil dog. It would have been cute if it didn't look like it wanted to rip my flesh off. They had a chubby son who was around 26 and he refused to acknowledge my existence. He wouldn't even say hi. What a jerk. I thought everybody loved Shivana!

After my lovely dinner with the family, I woke up the next day and participated in one of the local festivals. It was awesome! I "carried" a mikoshi (um it's like those things you carried royalty on, but this on just had sake). It was really easy for me since the tallest people were at the ends and they were all at least a foot taller than me. So i kinda just pretended like i was holding it up.

I was interviewed by some people which i knew would happen, because i am a rare breed even among foreigners. I also had lots of pictures taken of me by old men =D. They eventually chopped open one of the bottles of sake we were carrying, and we all dug in. I had a circle of people around me taking pictures of me drinking sake. They even told me not take wussy sips and to just chug the whole thing. So I did. Then we trecked to a sake factory where we sampled some more sake and then off to recieve blessings from a local shrine that is guarded by the four guardians of the Earth: Seiryuu the dragon in the east, Suzaku the phoenix of the south, Genbu the tortoise of the north, and Byakko, the white tiger that guards the west. Why do I know all that? Because I am a genius, or at least that's what Japanese people think. I'm not actually going to tell you why I know that. Anyways...here's a picture of the legendary phoenix in rock form!


...well i thought it was awesome.

On the way back a drunk old man started talking to us. He was asking people where they were from. Two of the people were from Iran which he thought was wonderful. The next guy said he was from England and the old man reacted by slapping him across the face (haha take that Lau)! He grunted when i said i was American. Apparently he doesn't like America and England. When he decided to leave he shook our hands, but after he shook my hand he wrapped his arms around me and lifted me into the air. He was then forcibly taken away (see pic below). He's the one with the white armband and wearing a suit.


By the way, besides the last picture, all of these pictures were taken with my camera phone. I have videos too but i haven't figured out how to get them off my phone yet. Stay tuned for my updates. I'm pacing myself just for Dylan!