Puzzle Hunt, just for 8-year-olds

The other day I mentioned I did a Santa scavenger hunt for my 11-year-old, right? Well, I wanted to do something similar for my 8-year-olds, except that I couldn't hide little notes all over the place because their habit is basically to come into my room and start looking through everything on every table and desk and whatnot.

So instead, I did a Puzzle Hunt, of sorts. I bought 4 "special santa" bags of snacks for 100 yen each, and put them in a nondescript blue bag that I'd bought as a prop for a class a few weeks ago, and then just put the bag on top of my jacket on a chair in the corner of the room before class. They go through things a lot, but tend to avoid the chair I keep my jacket on, and this time was no different.

Halfway through class I gave them a paper that had 12 pictures from their workbook, and boxes to say how many letters were in each word, and I had one red box in each word as well. If you filled in all the right words into the boxes, the red letters would spell out "In the blue bag". They've learned all of these words at one point or another, but I wondered if they'd manage to put it all together properly.

Amazingly, they did, and it only took a LITTLE bit of prompting. ( Puzzle Hunt for 8-year-olds who don't really speak English )

After work I finally DID meet up with rjmccall and catlyons, although not exactly as planned. They were going to come to Akabane at 10:15pm but got sidetracked by a random set of bizarre coincidences (including meeting up with another CMU guy completely randomly in Ueno Park). So instead, they called me at 10:20 to say "Er, we're still in Nippori, whoops." So I said "Ok, meet me at Nippori station in 15 minutes," and I hopped on a train and went to Nippori, and met them just as they got there, and we ended up at the Gusto diner/restaurant/whatever by the station which is apparently open until 5am. John had beer, Cat had plum wine, and I had a salad and a strawberry parfait, because you know, that's exactly what people should eat after a long day at work... or something. We only really had about an hour and a half before I had to leave to catch my last train home, but tomorrow night we should be able to do stuff for real.

I should probably mention that I have received several cards from people who I jokingly added my address to their Christmas Card LJ posts. That is super-cool and I will be bringing all of them to my English class to show everyone. I suck and haven't sent anyone cards in America or Japan. In theory New Year's is the big card-sending holiday here, but you know, I think I'd rather just declare a random personal postcard-sending holiday sometime when I'm not all busy with work.

Also, I got a Christmas present from Jason Lucas this morning, kind of -- he called me from Redmond, where he and Drew and Zach were all having dinner before getting together with the Fords and such, and I got to talk to them all for like half an hour. It was Thursday night at 6:30pm there and Friday morning 11:30am here. Funny how that works. Anyway, between that and hanging out with John and Cat tonight I am suddenly all homesick for smart geeky CMU people. Good thing Oren and Carl show up in a week, I suppose.