hi again

Hey, where were we, honey?

Some people are wondering if our love didn’t last……..

Don’t worry, kido, we are still happy and sound.

It’s not that we have nothing to write, or too much to write.

Neither, we are lazy nor too busy.

We just didn’t. That’s it.

So, everyone. Hi again.

We found this site,  http://www.eyeon.jp/cuisine.html

You can read about Kanazawa in English. It made me smile when I saw those beautiful pictures of my hometown……ah… it’s been a year now since I arrived here.

Kyle is working  back stage for U2 concert tonight.  Yep, they are here in Vancouver. We missed the concert,  but I am sure it’s a really great one.

OK….we’ll promise to come back more often!

Wedding Weekend

It was an incredible sunny day, and everything worked out just as Yuko and I dreamed it would.  Thank you very much to everyone who made it possible.  Our wonderful photographer took lots of wonderful photos of the ceremony, and it will be a while before she has the prints ready.  But we have lots of other photos from the numerous digital cameras on hand.  I will update this page soon.

The Woman Beside Me

My lovely Sweetie has come to Canada, and It has been such a wonderful and long-awaited reunion.  One of the reasons why she came here, also why I am here with her, happened early this morning.  She woke up suddenly, crying and shaking because of some dark, bad dream.  It was late, and nothing that I could do – no store I could rush out to buy something – except listen to what was troubling her.  I understood how difficult it was for her to leave Japan, and especially her family.  She also explained that it could be so easy for people to start blaming the other person: “you took me away from them!”  But that wasn’t what she was feeling just then.  I guess the closest way to describe it is an awareness of an emptiness, and no matter which way you go, you have to lose something.

I heard everything that was troubling her, and even thought the hour was late, I needed to hear what was on her mind, and find ways to relate information with my own experiences.  I began to talk more and more, and find answers to these deep and dark problems, and she began to get more calm, even a couple of laughs.  But we didn’t stop sharing, we had to talk some more, and each new idea gave us confidence that her coming to Canada, and my being here for her, was the best and only solution for both of us.  Not that either of us needed much convincing, but still the need to elaborate kept us going.  In a while Yuko was calm, my throat still a bit sore (there is the flu that targets students at the start of the school year that I just caught) and Yuko got up to make me some tea.  She also told me one important lesson, something which I had discovered, too, a short while ago; when you have something important on your mind, you have got to write it down, or you will not find the right words when you try to remember the feeling of the night, or week, before.

I love that she has started this blog, and that it is one of the many blogs she keeps about her life in Canada.  I especially love that this is our blog, and we can share our feelings and our writing.  My final assignment at university, kind of a year-long assignment, is to write an e-portfolio, using the same blog site (wordpress) as the one she used to create this site.  Thanks to her, I know I will succeed in my studies, and we’ll be on the right path for the rest of our lives.  I often dream about being an author, having my books published and in the bookstores, but I never seemed to find the right way of realizing this dream.  Of course, if you want to be a writer, most importantly you have to write, and her advice to me so early in the morning was to get the ideas down in print.

One night in Kanazawa, similar to the late night worries that hit us tonight, Yuko started writing a poem with the opening line “the man next to me” and gave me the honour of writing the last verse.  Once again she inspires me to write.  I really need her in my life, and I am so thankful that she is here in Canada with me.  Here is the poem we wrote a few months ago:

the man next to me
he takes my sadness away
I don’t know how he does it
but he does it quickly.
Once I’m in his arms,
the sadness melt into his heart
then warm feeling returns to me

the man next to me
he talks to me with his heart
I don’t know how he does it
but he does it naturally.
Once I hear his voice
the power of love pours into my heart
then fullfill feeling refill in me

the woman next to me
she sees the best in me
I don’t know how she does it
but she does it clearly.
Once her tears have run
the gratefulness returns to me
then in love forever we’ll be.

Thanks and see you somewhere in the world

I had the last get together with KIT and KTC friends! Thanks all for coming out tonight and I had a wonderful time with you guys!!! Now I think that I should have taken a picture!!! I always forget to do that. 🙂

I really love hanging out with them because we always have very interesting topic to share! I will miss having house parties or dinner get together….ah…big pink, such a cozy-fun place to hang out with fantastic music!

Everyone seems to be really happy there. Some got married last year and had another wedding party this year, some will get married soon, some are really happy with their lives….I will miss all of you so much!

Now we are going to have to find a chance or place to meet up again and have a re-union! I think that would be really really exciting!

I wish all of you the best and hopefully to see you all in thefuture with lovely smiles!

Till then, see ya!

First Week as a Teacher Candidate

 

The Purple River of Dreams

Starting on September 2nd, I became a Teacher Candidate, the new way of saying Student Teacher at UBC, and most likely for many of the school boards I will applying to next summer.  I like the new designation, as it implies that we have achieved something already by being selected into the Education Program.  Also, asides from the oxymoron of being both a student and a teacher at the same time, the old term suggests a never-ending attempt to be something else.  While teachers of course never stop learning, there comes a point when being a student stops – in Japanese, the word sensei means “one who lived before” and covers a lot of different areas.  I like the notion of students learning from someone already accustomed to the path they will take through school.

UBC is a huge campus, and the Education building is not too far from the centre – a short walk from the buses, which I now have unlimited access to until next August, and a block away from the bookstore.  With 35 students in my cohort, I am surprised how quickly it feels each of us have adapted to each other and our instructors (still a few we haven’t met yet, but will next week).  Perhaps this camaraderie has something to do with the cohort I chose: all of us have some speciality in Fine Arts and Media Education, and are the FAME class.  One of the Famers told the class she was a fan of David Bowie, and I told her about how Bowie’s song Fame ran though my head when I was applying for the program.  Another classmate then mentioned Flight of the Conchord’s song Bowie – wonderful how each of us can pick up from another’s good taste!

Our first week was many orientations guided by a few of our instructors.  We start off these classes by singing songs with plenty of activity in them.  This dive-right-in approach works best for us, as we want to do things first, create, and then hear about how this will be applied in the elementary classrooms in which we will soon be teaching.  It is like being in elementary school again, with a discussion of how it all works at the end.  The Purple River of Dreams is one of our first group projects, using found items from around the campus and from the pages of fashion magazines.  My group had purple items (lucky for me, my favourite colour), and we created this river that represents the year we will be at UBC.  Lots of eddies, rapids and turbulent water, but at the river’s mouth are the plants and berries that represent the growth in others, or future students.  Not bad for a group who were strangers less than a week ago.

On Friday, we took a trip to North Vancouver, where all of us Famers will be doing our practica.  After taking care of some business at the NVSD Curriculum Centre, all of us drove to the Capilano Fish Hatchery.  There, with our water-themed collages, all of sang a song about the life cycle of salmon (a song composed by elementary students somewhere in North Van).  Our instructor filmed us, and told us he will post this on-line, maybe YouTube or our own Facebook page.  Wherever it ends up, I will post a link for it here.  We ended our week with Educational Psychology, and a thick chapter on Behaviorism to read over the weekend.  Not all fun and games, but a wonderful start to my Teacher Candidacy.

East meets Western

 While I was unpacking books (after their three years in storage) and putting them back on the shelves, I found this curious self-help book by Robin Skynner and John Cleese.  I had it for a long time, but never read it – what, me… self-help? – and must have got it when I was collecting anything vaguely connected to Monty Python.  At any rate, yesterday I opened it up, and found myself in the middle of discussion about Japanese culture.  I stayed up late last night reading as much as I could, and was very intrigued by what the British comic and his therapist co-writer had to say about the country that was so recently my home.

Their discussion continues from their analysis of the United States of America, and particularly good ol’ individualism that defines the American culture – I skipped over these parts, but will definitely return to them soon.  Robin brings up Japan as contrast to this individuality, and dissects Japanese culture as extremely communal where the group and conformity have greater importance than personal matters.  They mention Japan’s history, the hundreds of years the country was shut off from the rest of the world, and geography, a small group of islands with a dense population and frequent natural disasters, as some of the forces at work to create this national near-paranoia.  Yet despite how alarming it may seem to Westerners, like Robin and John, this system is as close to flawless as any might be.

The two also discuss Japan’s lack of innovation and invention, its notoriously corrupt politicians, the lenient legal and uncritical education systems, an absolute respect of hierarchical order, and the amazing way Japanese culture has adapted to include all these aspects into society.  Many foreigners continue to be bewildered by Japan as they can’t understand how the system, all the wheels within wheels, works.  And likewise, Japanese people seem hesitant to adapt to any foreign way of doing things, since for a very long time, there was truly one and only one way of doing thing.  I really wish I would have read this book three or four years ago!

Not to be outdone by a dusty self-help book, a film has finally come to Vancouver that shows how Japanese and American cultures are not completely incompatable.  Sukiyaki Western Django is a film that I got to see in Kanazawa, and would recommend it to everyone in North America, seeing as how it opens in theatres today.  The film plays with the long tradition of spaghetti westerns like Fistful of Dollar and Magnificent Seven which were based upon Japanese films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai.  SWD is very post-modern, and gory too, but has a very twisted sense of humour.  Another important east/west connection it brings up is the similarity between Japan’s Genpei Wars and England’s War of the Roses (famous in literature as the Tale of the Heike and Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, respectively).  This film can easily be forgiven the always dubious casting choice of Quentin Tarantino as the mythical narrator Bringo, while it is also a rare opportunity for Western audiences to see some of Japan’s finest actors without subtitles –  they all speak English to varying effect.  Not for everyone, but for those who would enjoy it, please go see it and let me know what you think.

Post-Yardsale

Hey hey,

We have been busy here in Canada, getting everything ready for Yuko’s long-anticipated return.  On Saturday we had our yardsale. and very nice weather for it too.  We took everything to our family friend Hazel’s house, and she let us set up in her garage.  She wanted to get rid of some of her office furniture, and one of her neighbours also had some things to get rid of, so it was actually three sales in one.  I had a tonne of books that I won’t be reading anytime soon (most textbooks when I did my Arts and Cultural Studies degree).  Fortunately, I kept all of my books in great condition, and I enjoyed watching potential buyers flipping through the pages.  One guy who came in must have been a dealer or serious collector, as he picked up a big stack of books, and a few CDs, and meticulously looked through each one of them.  He finally bought a bunch of them, and I helped him put them into his car truck, which was nearly full already with other yardsale purchases, no doubt.

Today is Monday, and my Dad and I are picking up the few remaining unsold items.  Of course, I still have about five boxes of books left over.  I will be taking them to the public library, and donating them for their book sale early next month.  The Vancouver Public Library does a good job taking other people’s books, and if they are less than five years old, some of them might even end up on their shelves.  Older books go to their book sale, and the money raised from them goes towards improving the library.  It is kind of sad letting go of so many books, especially as I remember how excited I was when I bought them (at full price naturally).  But after selling most of them off this weekend for less than $2.00, it is a relief that someone else will be looking after them, and the money will be going towards something important.

Still plenty of space on my bookshelves for the books you will be bringing from Japan, Sweetie.  It will be a long time before we have another yardsale, as my Mom kept telling everyone, this is the last yardsale she hope will happen for the Stooshnov family.  At least the apartment is a little more organized.  Can’t wait to see you, Sweetie.

Lots of love, Kyle

Yuko’s nephew and Kyle

He made the best smile for his favourite uncle.

My nephew is in love with Kyle. He has left Japan for almost a month now, the little boy is STILL looking for Kyle.

The other day, we were leaving our house to go out to dinner. Everyone was getting ready, and getting into a car. My nephew asked me, “Are you alone today? Is anyone coming with you?”

I don’t know why but he didn’t want to ask me straight any more….like he used to ask me.

“Where is Ky-san?”

rainy days in Kanazawa

Dearie,

So happy that you like the idea!!!! Ok…great. Until I get to Canada, we can also communicate here! Super!

It has been rainy here in Kanazawa, so the temperature dropped a bit. It’s very cool at night time. It was actually a gorgeous day with a nice summer breeze. Katya and I sat ouside,  Starbucks had a great time! Cool drink with cool woman on a cool day….mmmmmmm….perfect.

I’m watching a softball game tonight. Jap vs USA……2-1  Japan is winning. If we win, we will get a gold medal! It’s a very interesting game.  One more inning to go!!!

Let’s go a-blogging

Sweetie,

Thank you very much for starting up cat’s nap, and I will be happy to contribute as much as I can.  Here are some interesting things I have been telling people in Vancouver about Kanazawa, my second hometown.  It is one of the first places in Japan to start teaching English to elementary students (at public schools), it is a very nice size for a capitol, there are plenty of canals and waterways throughout the city, and it has a really great marketplace with the best and freshest sushi.  Kanazawa Station still is my favourite place in Kanazawa, as well as favoutrite station in all of Japan.  I really miss the city, but I am glad that you get to stay a couple more weeks there.

Once I get my laptop hooked up to the internet, I will upload some of the wedding pictures onto this blog, and write something about Vicky and Damien’s wedding.

Miss you so much, and I look forward to reading more from you.

Lots of love,

Kyle