2011 Special Olympics

 

Misawa Air Base holds a Special Olympics event every year in hangar 949. There’s a lot of music, dancing, food and of course, games! Looks like the everyone had a great time this year!

 

You can volunteer for Special Olympics as a chaperone for an Olympian or a Japanese/English interpreter.

Jasmine

 

Jasmine restaurant is located on base in the JSDF area building 145.  When you walk into the building, the cleaners are to your right and to your left is a shop for military clothing. If you keep going straight (toward your left) there is Jasmine restaurant.

They have several dishes here (all Chinese cuisine.) There are pictures of all the dishes on the wall with numbers. You order from the machine (yen only) and take your ticket to the counter. They give you a number and you sit down and wait for it to be called (usually in Japanese).

The prices are very reasonable and it is a great place to get lunch (especially if you don’t feel like going off base or just tired of food from the food court). The restaurant is open from 11-4 and 4:30-7pm.

 

The atmosphere is like a small cafeteria with restaurant seating.

I had the ginger pork, it was really delicious!

Halloween

Halloween is not celebrated in Japan, but because we live in Misawa a lot of children have an opportunity to celebrate it with us! On October 30th I hosted a Halloween party for the children at Tohoku Academy. It was a lot of fun. We ate hot dogs, played “trick or treat”, Twister, had an eyeball relay and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. Most of the children were dressed up. Unfortunately, the amount of costumes available in Japan are slim to none so we had a lot of witches. I dressed up as Dorothy but everyone thought I was Alice from Alice in Wonderland. (She is really popular here!)



After the party I went to the Halloween Ball. It was pretty fun. A lot of neat costumes. I didn’t take many pictures because well… it was really dark.

On Halloween I worked the Haunted House on base from 3-9. Haunted house is kind  of a misnomer since it was more of a slaughter house than anything. I was an escort so I brought people through the last half of the house. (This house is getting ready for demolition so they decorated however they wanted…mostly with “blood”) There was a PG show and a rated R show. I didn’t see too much difference between the two but a lot of people brought small children to the rated R show! I was shocked!
Edit: As promised, here are pictures of me with my makeup for the haunted house!BOO!

Misawa Air Show 2010

Technorati Tags: Misawa,Air Show,Misawa Air Base,Japanese American Friendship Club

September 19, 2010 was the Misawa Air Show and 100,000 people showed up!  I volunteered for a few things here so it was a busy time for  me! I baked 12 plain devil’s food cakes for some organization that I cannot remember. Cakes and pizza are two of the biggest sellers at the Air Show. It is one of the only times the Japanese citizens have an opportunity to go on base and eat American food.
I also made a poster for 35MOS. They were selling turkey legs! They looked delicious!


I also volunteered at the JAFC booth. (Japanese International Friendship Club). We sold cakes, doughnuts, candy bars and drinks. They had made 100 cakes and we sold out! And one man bought 30 Hershey’s bars! And  how could he not with salespeople like us!
Around 3pm it started raining pretty hard and everyone left. All in all, I had a great time at the Air Show even though I didn’t have a chance to walk around.