Tuesday, April 24, 2007

International Children's Day at HJIS

Last week was pretty much a wasted one. The kids and I took turns getting sick, and Jeff was entertaining some visitors on the base all week, so we didn't see much of him. Our plans to go to the Yokohama Jug Band Festival (one of the 2 such festivals internationally, the other being in Sweden, or so I'm told) due to illness, and because M had to go to school on Saturday afternoon for rehearsal. I wasn't going to have him go, but them I found out he was one of only 6 kids doing this Turkish dance and he had missed Friday's rehearsal because he was home sick. By Saturday evening, I was stir-crazy, Jeff was exhausted, and the kids were crabby from the stupid week we'd had.

Anyway.

Sunday was the International Children's Day celebration at the kids' school. There was lots of good international food there. I brought homemade chili, which I was happy to see disappear (I even got asked for the recipe!), and I almost burned a hole in my cheek with the Thai pepper I accidentally ate (ever have one of those tiny peppers they call "mouse turd"? They are the hottest little things in the world).

There was a performance by the kids, and a guy from New Zealand taught the females and males traditional Maori dances.
















Have you noticed half the kids' eyes are glowing? Like Jason Curry is conducting a robot-alien-zombie choir. I don't know what kind of mind-control they are using on our kids.















M in his Turkish costume. The irony.







































Here's a medley of the international songs the kids performed, including a Bob Marley song, a Frere Jacques round, "We Will Rock You", a Turkish song, and the aforementioned Turkish dance (the whole Turkish element of the school still weirds me out a little):




The best part was seeing all the kids in their traditional costumes.








































































Determined to get out of the house more, especially since Jeff has to fly to Hawaii for a couple days to conduct an interview, I met Helen at the BC. It was a pretty dead night, so Takeshi let us DJ with our iPods. That was pretty fun. Monday was crappy, but everything seems to be back to normal today, so here's hoping the rest of the week is more pleasant than the last one.

1 Comments:

Blogger Kevin Ess said...

Tell those awesome little men hello for us. Thank you both so much for sponsoring my 3-day Breast Cancer Walk! I'll do you proud.

All of our love!

2:21 AM  

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