英語学習にも役立つ、札幌の外国人英語教師の英語日記 札幌 英会話 [ステップアップ]

Toyohira

2013年10月5日 (土)

I took a short ride along the Toyohira River during my lunchbreak.

Go hiking!

2013年10月5日 (土)

Hey everyone, this is a short message from me. It’s now October. The leaves are just entering their beautiful cycle of death. It’s still warm and sunny in the middle of the day. If spring was too wet and summer too hot, now is your chance to go hiking.
So do it – pack a little lunch, put on your boots, grab a walking stick and point yourself towards a mountain. It doesn’t have to be big. Maruyama or Moiwa is fine. Or go out to Mt. Tarumae like I did last Sunday. It was great! Just go out there and enjoy the outdoors this season.
You’ll be glad you did.

Gaming

2013年9月5日 (木)

Hello everyone! FINALLY today was a nice day. It feels like it has rained EVERY weekend for the whole summer. I really want to ride my bike but because of the terrible weather, I have been forced to find other past times. Recently I have started playing games on my iphone. I have become addicted to one game. If you ever see me in a coffee shop looking feverish, it`s because I am playing that game. I never thought of myself as a “gamer” before. What are you addicted to?

By the way, the recent weather is a little similar to the UK in autumn, although it is much heavier here. The grey gloomy sky reminds me of back home and that makes me smile. If you are feeling depressed by the weather just imagine being in England and eating fish and chips, that will soon cheer you up!!!

It's been a while!

2013年8月29日 (木)

Hey folks, happy almost September. Another summer in Hokkaido is winding down and i suspect it won’t be long before the fall fashions hit the streets of Sapporo. I’d like to think that I had a productive summer. During the Obon holiday I went camping in both Shikotsuko and in Rishiri/ Rebun. My band (the indefatiguable 3 Skins) played our first beach concert in Zenibako – a success, I like to think. And my humble little balcony garden was fairly productive, supplying fresh tomatoes and chilis for good summer salsas. Oh yeah, I’ve been spending a lot of time at a farm in Ebetsu, as well. I’m learning to ride horses…much harder than I thought!

And you? Is there anything you can look back on that brings a smile when thinking about this short summer of 2013?

Family Dinner

2013年8月27日 (火)

On Sunday I went to a family celebration with my husband. It was the 20th birthday of his niece (the daughter of my husband’s brother). In France the 20th birthday is a special birthday to celebrate a kind of “coming of age”: when a young person enters into adulthood. My husband comes from Aveyron, a very rural region of France where maintaing tradition is still very important.

One of these traditions is the family dinner. On Sundays and on important holidays and events, families get together and have a big, lavish meal with traditional French food, and more importantly the traditional food of Aveyron, which is different from food in other regions of France.

At the birthday party on Sunday, we had six courses, all prepared by the wife of my husband’s brother: the first course was a salad with homemade foie gras and cantaloupe; the second course was white fish and scallops with mangoes in a cream sauce; the third course was steak and a special potato dish called aligot; then there was the cheese plate (in France they eat cheese at the end of a meal). And of course every dish was served with a different kind of wine!

After all that we had two kinds of dessert: first a sponge cake with pears and cream and a raspberry sauce; and FINALLY we had a very special traditional cake called gâteau à la broche. This is a tall cake in a cone shape cooked slowly by an open fire. Everything was really delicious! But after all that food and wine I was really tired! We started eating at around 1 o’clock in the afternoon and we didn’t leave the table until about 7 in the evening – that’s six hours eating! And my husband told me that when he was a child, the dinners were twice as big – sometimes about 13 or 14 courses!