hangin' out with miori sensei

On Thursday evenings from 6:00pm-8:00pm I spend my time hanging out at the Ueta household with Miori sensei, my Japanese teacher. The night usually starts out with exchanging a small gift or food item if one of us ventured out of Naruto the weekend before. In Japan it's very common to bring back some kind of treat for your friends or coworkers when you visit a place of significance. I was in Tokyo the weekend before our last lesson so I brought her some cheese and wasabi snacks and told her "これは おもしろい です" ("Kore wa omoshiroi desu." or, "This is interesting...").

Miori sensei is a good friend to have here because she's very open-minded and interested in the world as a whole. This week she'll be going to Spain with her lunch group to see some of the sights in Madrid. I told her about my experiences in Barcelona a few years back and she said that one day she hopes to get there. We often talk about the places that we want to see and, though our lists of potential trips are extensive, we're both slowly crossing off each destination.


Miori sensei's husband is an elementary school principal and he does some really fantastic artwork in his spare time. The picture above is a depiction of the Kazurabashi Vine Bridge in western Tokushima. He creates this art by meticulously cutting one sheet of black paper with a very small knife and placing the paper on a white background so that the forms exist due to the negative space. All of the black that you see in the picture above is cut from a solid piece of paper and no marker or glue is used at all. Miori sensei tells me that his work is at the national gallery in Tokyo as well as some other major cities in Japan. When seeing his work in person, it's easy to believe this to be true.