Last Friday I did a special Halloween party for my elementary school students. I dressed up the stuffed animals I always take to class with me, and had them do a little skit to explain trick-or-treating. I think the students got it, but you never really know. I think they were very surprised that we really did it.

At night, we went to a Halloween party in the nearby city of Uozu. It was fun, but a little expensive, since it was all-you-can-drink. We had a best costume competition (Wolverine won, followed by a nun and an old lady). The boobie prizes (a pair of plastic breasts) went to Colin, who dressed up as a cardboard box. It was pretty funny. We took the midnight train home and collapsed.

On Saturday, I helped out at a "juku" Halloween party. "Juku" is cram school. Cram school is highly recommended for students to help them get the edge on other students when applying for high school or university. Some students go to juku all the time, but many only go once or twice a week. One of my student's mother runs an English cram school, and she got me and another ALT to help out with her Halloween party. I helped out last year, too. This year there weren't as many students overall, but there were more students from my school who came. It was pretty fun, but took longer than I thought it would. Afterwards, they gave us sushi for dinner.

On Sunday, Victoria and I went to Kanazawa, a nearby large city. We visited Kenrokuen, which I've been to several times. It's a beautiful garden. This time, the leaves were changing color on some of the trees, so it was very pretty. Afterwards we went to the Garlic-garlic restaurant that we really like. We ended up in the worst possible seats though, jutting out into a place a lot of people walked by. It was a nice dinner, but at the end a giant engagement party came and they were pretty festive. That evening, we went to a bar I had seen that I thought looked neat. It was a really mellow place, with a pub sort of feeling. They even had cool non-alcoholic cocktails. A bar like that is a rare find in Japan.

Monday was a national holiday, so we just stayed in Kanazawa on Sunday night. We went to a temple that is nicknamed the Ninja Temple, because it has tons of traps and secret rooms and staircases to hide troops and spy on people from. It was really neat, and good practice for our Japanese since we had to go on a tour in Japanese to see it.