May 6: Bowling Tournament
After class on Friday afternoon, we held our annual HTC Edmonds-Shoreline Joint Bowling Tournament at Robin Hood Lanes, which is just on the border between the Edmonds and Shoreline neighborhoods.HTC students were joined by six of the conversation partners from the Edmonds ESL classes. In 4-person teams we bowled three games, and prizes were awarded to the top three teams, and also to the top three individual male and female scorers, based on total points for the three games. The male winner was Yuto Imazeki, and the female winner was Ai Tsunaki (both from Japan Hotel School).
May 6: Edmonds students visit junior high
Right after the bowling tournament, the Edmonds students went straight to Eckstein Middle School for some interaction with American students preparing to visit Japan in June. The middle school students were having a study-abroad preparation overnight at their school. The HTC students helped them cook a Japanese dinner (curry, yakisoba, oyakodon), and offered advice about some of the do's and don'ts of Japanese home and school life. They wrapped up the evening with some fun activities - teaching and playing some Japanese children's games like hana-ichi-mon-me (something like "red rover") and atchi-muite-hoi ("point-and-look" combined with rock-scissors-paper).
May 20: Hiking in forest at Shoreline
There is a forest behind Shoreline Community College with a hiking course that I had wanted to show the students for a while. Although we don't have classes Friday afternoons, school events and bad weather had prevented me from taking the students on a walk through the woods until now. But today was a perfectly clear, warm day, and 13 students took me up on my invitation for a hike. We walked for about an hour and a half, working our way past a small lake, a stream with a dam and waterfall, and fallen trees. It seems like the kind of place you might run into Tottoro.
May 21: Volunteers for tsunami victims
The Rock of Ages Church in North Seattle held a fund-raising event for the victims of the Tohoku/Kanto tsunami. About 20 HTC students participated, helping with advertising, cooking, and sales of used goods. The event raised a few thousand dollars.
May 26: SCC students visit kindergarten
As part of the ESL program, HTC Shoreline students visited the kindergarten/1st grade class at the local elementary school and introduced various elements of Japanese culture to the children - children's songs, origami, the "face game", calligraphy, and 'darumasan ga koronda" (a game like "red light/green light"). Kana Uchiyama, Makoto Yamaguchi, and Ami Iwata demonstrated karate and judo techniques. But what the little kids enjoyed most of all was having the big college students join them in the school yard at recess in playing basketball, soccer, jump rope, hula hoop, monkey bars, etc.
May 29: Northwest Folklife Festival
Monday May 30 was Memorial Day, so we had a 3-day weekend. Some students had barbecues or visited cemeteries with their host families. Others took a short trip to Vancouver, Canada for the weekend. Still others headed to Seattle Center (the park around the Space Needle) for the annual Folklife Festival.The festival features folk music and dancing from around the world performed on various stages throughout the park, as well as various ethnic foods and all sorts of spontaneous street performances. The cool, cloudy/partly sunny weather persisted through the 3-day weekend, but it should improve by next week - just on time for Quarter Break! But before that we still have to get through final exams...
Neal Colodner (Seattle)
