We Are Moving!

We are moving to a new house tomorrow so here is our new address:

Januck & Joanna Polikaitis
1299-21 Okanomiya
Numazu-shi, Shizuoka-ken
JAPAN               410-0011

My Birthday Concert

On Friday I will officially be 18 years old. For my birthday this year my parents surprised me with tickets to an Avril Lavigne concert. My mom and I left right after school on Saturday to make it to the 5:00 concert in Tokyo. We made it with an hour to spare and found out since we had floor seats we had to stand and wait. Everyone was so excited but I noticed that mom was probably the oldest one on the floor, but I would not have wanted anyone else with me to see the concert. When Avril Lavigne came on stage there was a mad rush forward and we were caught in a mob. The first song was ridiculous with all the pushing and the whole time I was worrying about mom and if she was okay. She luckily was having a blast and I was so proud of her. We really enjoyed the concert and Avril Lavigne sounded great! I am so thankful to get such a wonderful birthday present and to be able to experience it with my mom :)

Rachel

Close But Not the Flu

On Monday night, my head was hurting and so was my throat but the next morning I woke up at 4 o'clock feeling really sick. I went downstairs and I just slept and told my parents. My dad and I went to the doctor and we waited in the waiting room. There was a little boy there throwing up in there and my dad tried to distract me by asking me,"Doesn't Temple Run really drain your battery?" I'm glad he was trying to distract me but it didn't really work. I threw up right outside. Then the doctor called me in and my nose was runny and stuff was almost coming out of my nose. Luckily, I had a mask on. The doctor was telling me about how he was going to test me for influenza but I wasn't listening because snot was just about to drip out of my mouth. He asked me if I had any questions and all I could ask was,"Can I have a tissue?" They laughed and gave me a pack. I was tested negative for influenza. I threw up more times but I felt better by the next day. I was out of school for three days but luckily I did not miss much. I am feeling better.
-Alex :)

Not one but TWO...

Well, on Monday night it started to rain and about four o'clock in the morning I woke up to the wind howling outside.  I could also hear the rain pounding on the windows and the combination made it very hard to sleep. At about 4:30 Rachel came downstairs and said it was impossible to sleep because it was so noisy and decided to sleep on the couch.  So not much sleep for anybody and six o'clock came quickly. As we were getting ready to walk to school and the kids walk to the bus, Dad got the brilliant idea of taking a taxi.  We waited to leave later than usual and finally decided to call a taxi but...because the weather was so bad out, everybody else was calling a taxi, too. Joanna tried calling different taxi companies but the lines were busy and she finally got hold of one but they said it would be a 30 minute wait.  Well, we didn't have the time and the kids had to make a mad dash to catch the second bus.  When we left the house, Joanna took my nice big umbrella and I took the older rusty one.  The wind and rain were so bad that is was hard to walk but luckily I was wearing my water resistant jacket with a hood so it helped me to stay somewhat dry.  I suddenly heard a yell and saw Joanna trying to keep her hood on while the umbrella blew inside out and she was struggling to hold onto it.  She told me it was broken so I offered her my umbrella since I was wearing my jacket.  We didn't walk for more than one minute when I looked back and see Joanna standing there with the other umbrella inside out.  She finally came over and informed me that it was broken, too, and couldn't close it.  She handed it to me saying that she didn't know what to do with it so I was left standing in the rain with the SECOND broken umbrella!

Luckily, the kids barely caught the bus and we made it to school pretty much drenched.

Alex trying to walk in the wind and rain.

¥¥¥Januck¥¥¥

Sticker Wars!

So in my class, some of us sit together at lunch because we have to eat in our own class. There is a food court place where you buy food and the ladies put stickers on the food so they know who has boughten it. So we take off the stickers at lunch time and put it on this one kid's back without him knowing. His name is Ichiro. It is so funny because he walks around the school with stickers on his back and a teacher has to tell him that they're on his back. He freaks out every time.. haha. Eventually, we got bored just putting it on Ichiro's back so everyone started putting them on each other's backs. It ended up starting a war where you never knew if you had a sticker on your back. I had to check like every five seconds to see if there was one on my back. It was really fun but our homeroom teacher told us to stop so we did. But now we still do things to Ichiro like putting pencils in his pocket so when he reaches into his pocket, there is a random pencil there. HAHA We will think of more things to do to him. ;)
-Alex :)

Japanese Cooking Class

Rachel has to do some Community Service hours in Creativity for her school and it is difficult not being able fulfill the hours not knowing the language.  One way we thought would be fun, was cooking classes.  So we signed up with two co-workers and went today from 10:30 to 1:30.  It was located at our local mall called Sun to Moon and the cooking class is sponsored by the gas company.  We had to pay $40 a piece for the instruction and the food we cooked.
There was a chef from a local restaurant that taught us four interesting Japanese dishes.  The first one was rice with crab meat, topped with greens and ginger.  Another was a sweet potato dish that we grated and then made into balls.  The soup over it had duck meat and soy sauce in it.  Very tasty!
We grilled a white fish marinated in a sake mixture that took a week to make- the chef brought it ready made.  The green leaves looked like spinach, but is part of a edible weed mixed with a mustard sauce.
The last was the pastry made from sweet potato and fried with a cream sauce on each side.
There were six people in our group and we made 6 portions of everything.  When everything was cooked, we sat down at a table and ate our lunch.  Of course, it was delicious!  The chef made us clear soup and we had green tea with our meal.

Now Rachel gets to try and think what she wants to make to complete her hours...right now she is thinking of ginger ice cream and rice cooked with chicken and vegetables.  I can't wait to try her dishes!
¥Joanna¥

Maiko Performance

Our school hosted a Maiko performance this week and it was very cool.  I guess there are only about 100 performers left.  They introduced them and then told us they were only 16 and 17 years old!  We were shocked.