Parachutes and Wolverines

Monkey bars parachuting through the summer’s sun setting sky
Starts fires full of cold flames blowing through willows hair, brings her to open her great lidless eyes
And sends her running through the forest, through flurries of leaves
Jumping over hills and valleys and trees and things
Then exhausted she falls through rainbow corals reefs of snow
Wraps herself in dragon clouds of cotton candy to help soften her blows
Then exhaustion bids her sleep through the frost, and ice ridden streams
Wakes to find the morning and the embrace of sun’s warm beams
Live oh willow, and sing songs of sorrows that will surely die
Sing of monkey bars, cotton candy, and warm summer skies.

Derrick

Derrick's "Complicated"

So… how’s Japan? It’s complicated, really complicated, and it’s complicated on more than one level, so you know it’s extra complicated. First of all they have many different numbering systems, for example lets say I want two hot dogs, two packets of catsup, two cans of pop, two straws, two paper plates, and two chopsticks; there are probably six different ways to say the word “two” in that sentence… someone prease help me. I guess we do the same thing in English… well sort of… ok not really.

Second of all, the alphabet… English has only one set of 26 characters, Dutch is the same, French is also the same, Greek has 24, and Spanish has 29. Japanese on the other hand has three different alphabets; two sets have 46 characters each, and the third has… well no one seems to know an exact number, somewhere around five thousand characters, so I guess you could say that it’s complicated.

Thirdly, there’s the paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork which is never in English and usually includes all three alphabets. Sometimes it even feels like I have to do paperwork just to use the restroom or to sit down at my desk.

Fourthly, everything here is complicated.

Through all of what I’ve said thus far I’m not saying that the last six months here in Japan have been a big mistake, far from it. The last six months have really been a blessing from God, one that I would not be willing to trade. The people here are so kind, hospitable, hard-working, funny, and complicated. I really do love it here. I guess I should say that we love it here even if it is really complicated.

~Written by Derrick Thomas Logwood~

What happened to Derrick's hand?

This is the question that has been asked and will now, after much waiting, be answered.


The story of the hand starts on our paradise island Langkawi. This was our first destination in Malaysia. It was so wonderful it felt like we were on our real honeymoon (since we didn't have enough money or time to have the honeymoon we wanted when we got married). The day after we arrived was awesome....and the worst day of the trip. The first 3/4ths of the day was our awesome snorkeling trip. Seriously, if you ever have the chance to do this....do it.....

After we got back, we went walking down the street from our hotel. On our walk, we decided to rent scooters/motorcycles for 24 hours so we could ride around the island the next day.

They were very cheap and we enjoyed having slightly bigger and more powerfull engines (150 cc instead of 50cc) than we are used to, without needing a motorcycle license.

So, after renting them, we took off on a practice run before we headed back to our hotel for dinner. About 10-20 minutes into our ride, we turned off onto this side road that went along field. It was quite an empty road with no traffic. Luck had it that we were on this road at the perfect time to see a beautiful sunset over the field to our right. Unfortunately, Derrick and I both had different reactions to the beauty of the sunset.

I turned my head slightly to take a look at the beautiful sunset, debating in my head whether it was worth stopping for.

As soon as I turned my head back... (really it went much faster than you reading this, but it was slow enough for something bad to happen....)...I noticed that Derrick had stopped right in front of me and I had no time to break before I hit him.

We were going quite fast, because I hit him hard enough to where even he flew over the front of his scooter and landed on the ground in front of it. I landed on the ground in between the scooters and the impact was so hard that the scooters fell to the ground with about 5 meters of space between the two.



For as fast as we were going and as hard as the impact must have been, we are two lucky birds. God had is hand on us AND a couple of guardian angels or something, because we got away with just minor scrapes. My knee and shoulder were scraped up and all down my arm was slightly scratched up, but nothing serious. Both of my hands landed on the road, so my palms were pretty scratched up, but it was only as deep as one layer of skin. Derrick actually got the worst of it because his palm was scratched up worse than mine....but again, nothing too serious. Just annoying because its the palm of the hand....an area of the body much used, very prone to dirtiness and difficult to put bandaids on. So we had to use some serious wrappings for our hands.



I carried a medical kit to Malaysia and that is what we used to fix ourselves up at the hotel before going to dinner. The next few days were quite painful...and the days after that were just annoying as we waited for our wounds to heal before we could fully enjoy the trip. But we made the most of it and did not let this ruin our awesome trip!



Just for the record....we are extra careful on our scooters in Japan now....and very greatful that they are only 50 cc and not huge 150cc!



For those of you who read through this whole story, I will now add the picture of the moneky stealing my waterbottle that I tried to post last time, but couldnt because the internet and/or laptop starting messing up:

Malaysia!!

Well, first of all, I am sorry it took me a whole month to give you an update on our awesome Malaysia trip. I really have no excuse, so I wont use up space trying to give you one.

We flew into Kuala Lumpur (aka KL) with Kristin and our friend Mark Tock picked us up at the trainstation and took us to our hotel. We had fun hanging out with Mark and some of his friends, like one of his best friends named Bom. Lol, Bom was awesome!

The next day we left Kristin in KL with Mark and Bom as we set out on our own adventure up to the North. We got in a bus to go to Kuala Perlis where we planned to take the ferry to the island Langkawi. We already had hotel reservations so we pretty much had to get there that night if we didnt want to to waste one-nights worth of money. When we were about an hour from Kuala Perlis, the busdriver stopped for a few minutes....one of many random stops where someone was randomly dropped off. We asked how long it would be to Kuala Perlis and told him we needed to catch a ferry. He said, you wont be able to cath a ferry from there tonight, so you should get off here and take a taxi to Kuala Kedah. So thats what we did.....and we eventually made it to our island paradise.

The next day was probably the best day of our whole trip!! We went snorkeling! This was so fun! I have never been a big water person and Derrick for some reason feels like he belongs to the ocean. Sometimes he seems to feel like he should have been born a fish or something....or maybe at least a surfer, lol. We left early morning, took a 40 minute bus ride to the ferry and a 1, 1/2 hour ferry trip to the marine park island.....so it took up the whole day, but we got to snorkel for at least 3 or 4 hours! It was so cool to be able to see awesome fish in their own habitat and to take pctures of them with our new underwater camera! I think the highlight of the day was finding NEMO! Yes! We have our own picture of Nemo and his anenome home!

Feeding the fish:

Me swimming with the fish:

Scooters we rented to tour the island before heading on to the next:

AFter the island Langkawi, we went to the island Penang (aka Pinang). The ferry ride was long and sea-sicky, but up on the deck we felt better and got nice and wet. On Penand we trecked across a national park from one side of the island to the other. There we found a forgotten beach to take a rest before we trecked back. I think we drank 10 bottles of water that day, lol!

Beautiful view of boats docked on the shore of Penang:

The view from our youth hostel on Penang (the beach is just past that car in the middle of the picture....):

After Penang we went back to KL to spend time with Kristin, Mark and Bom. We also met Joanna and Joy and had fun hanging out with the whole group. We saw the Petronas towers, but didnt go up them. These are the towers that are featured in the movie "Entrapment" with Sean Connery and Katherine Zeta-Jones. We got a cool picture of our small group with the towers at night:

We went to Singapore with Kristin and Mark. Singapore is fun because it is extremely clean (you get majorly fined for littering) and everyone spoke english but hardly anyone was what you would consider an English speaking westerner. It soooo multicultural! Lovely! Course, Singapore is quite expensive, so don't go there unless you are willing to spend some money. OH, also, Singapore is the country where it is illegal to chew gum, period. And it has the best underground subway system in the world....that I know of!

Standing in front of our Chinese styled harbour cruise boat:

We took a short break on Tortuise Island during the harbour cruise and found this lovely house:
We hoped to find giant turles on Tortoise Island....this is what we found: (But we had fun feeding them and Mark enjoyed pushing Derrick in the turtle water....just kidding)

After Singapore we had a few more days in KL. We tried to go to the Batu Caves, which is a Cave with Hindu temples all in it......not worth it. The best part is the 272 steps you go up and all the monkeys. Other than that its a touristy cave with a small gift shop inside and some hindu temples. There are big spot lights everywhere and metal bar gates of some sort that look like the gates you see in an amusement park to keep people in a line or out of a certain area....pretty ugly. The cave has been robbed of its nature.

But, the monkeys were fun and I got a funny picture of a monkey trying to steal my waterbottle!

All in all, Malaysia was awesome! We were not ready to return to Japan, and to work, but that's life eh.

Oh, BTW, in case you havent heard....I'm on facebook now. Isn't that weird! I think it is, lol.

Last day's of school and off to Malaysia!

Well, summer vacation (in japanese: natsu yasumi) has finally come. We had our "closing ceremony" at school this past Tuesday and spent the rest of the week going to AET training.

I used the last few weeks of school to video some of my kids at school and to show you the English they are learning.

This first video is of some 6th grade kids at Kaminakazuma elementary. They just learned the question "What are you doing?" and a bunch of answers.

This second video is a group of 4th grade girls at Kaminakazuma. They learned the days of the week.

This last video is at Tsumasato elementary. The boy to the left is a first grader. His name is Ryo. As you can see, first graders still struggle with the question "What is your name?" and the answer "My name is ....". The others are 5th graders. Their recent lesson was "When is your birthday?" and of course the answer to that question. The boy in the middle is Shougo, the wild one running around is Kazuki and the one in the blue shirt who only makes a short appearance is Keichiro.

Well.....all that's over for about a month now. Summer has started and , as the post title suggests, we are heading for Malaysia tomorrow. But, not after a relaxing weekend with nothing to do. On Saturday, we went to some friends' wedding: Kristi Batten and Donni Thornton got married at Ikaraki Christian University. That was a very good day. We loved seeing Kristi and Donni and Benji and others that we knew, and it was great to get to meet the Batten and Thornton families.

Today we also went to Harris and Eloise Yves' house to celebrate Amy's belated birthday and just to have a good time with Amy. It was so fun to see her and spend time with her. (The picture of Derrick and me at the top of this post was taken at Amy's house.)

We will post the wedding pics and pics of Amy's party when we get back from Malaysia.....along with some awesome pictures of Malaysia!

Hiking with Waterfalls and going to Tokyo

This past weekend was a busy one. On Saturday we went to a place called Iwaki. In Iwaki, we hiked along waterfalls up a mountain for a few hours. Here and there we stopped to swim in the pools on our way up. It was so beautiful and a ton of fun. At the places where we stopped to swim, we would find places from which to jump into the water.

Here is a beautiful picture of one of the many waterfalls we passed.

You can see how tall this next waterfall is by finding Kendon standing at the top:

Here is Melody Powell, who came to visit her brother Austin on her way back from the Philippines. She is climbing up one of the many ladders we had to climb where it was too dangerous to climb without (with Nicah and Jon Nossaman behind her).
Here I am standing in the freezing cold pool debating whether or not I want to go in farther....
Here's Melody jumping in! She was crazy!!
And me!


After climbing up and down the mountain with the many waterfalls, we got home, got on the train to Mito station and then the bus to Tokyo! We were so tired, but we were very happy when we finally got to our hotel....our feet were very happy.
When we went out to explore Tokyo the next morning we found this "junk market". It was awesome! We love garage sales, so this was like heaven to us to be able to walk around in a bunch of old Japanese junk for sale. Derrick bought a ukulele, so if you have pointers on how to play a ukulele, please let us know.We met up with our good friend Masashi who goes to Oklahoma Christian and is now home for the summer. It was extremely hot that day....because it gets really really hot and humid here in Japan. Hence the waterfall on Masashi's head...We went to the Meiji-jingu shrine in the Shibuya part of the city.

Here is the wash-basin where you are supposed to cleanse yourself before entering the shrine...

Inside the shrine...

Here are many many prayers that people have written in many different languages:

Here we are by the entrance of the shrine:


Hiking the trail along the Iwaki waterfalls and walking around in Tokyo made the weekend very awesome. We have so many more pictures of this weekend adventure, so if you would like to see them, please klick on the link for our pictures and enjoy.

A bit of the sea, a bit of the beach, some of Mexico and some of Japan

We had fun testing out our new underwater camera when we went to the beach for a little bit of bodyboarding.
Unfortunately, the waves were horrible (almost non-existant) and the water was very dirty...so no good clear underwater pics! But we had fun playing around. We also enjoyed a little bit of beach volleyball. We first played with just our group who came to the beach, but later we played with what seemed to be a semi-professional team who was just out there also playing on the beach's volleyball courts. Zane Schwab is the one making this awesome jump!
We had an AET Mexican night. It was the first time we had had homemade Mexican food since we've been here (and before that we had only been to one Mexican restaurant so far), so it was really nice. We had some good fun talking, eating and playing sports and karaoke on Jon and Nicah Nossaman's Wii.
Derrick and I were invited to this lovely lady's house for dinner. She and her husband also have a home in Victoria, Canada, so their English is pretty good. She made us a lovely Japanese meal and also had other Japanese visitors and one American visitor (Todd) who we enjoyed getting to know.
This is Saiko and me: