Engrish!

When I came into Fukuyama today to use the internet at an actual cafe I was confronted by perhaps the most amusing Engrish I have ever encountered;

What! The internet can be enjoyed on this table!

If the coin of 100yen is thrown in it will be easy!

The use screen which can be enjoyed variously is prepared.

I love Engrish. Nothing brightens up your day more than seeing the result of an internet translation job gone awry printed boldly on a company document or sign. There should be English police in Japan. Their job would be to seek out and destroy all incorrect usuage of English everywhere. Anyone who can speak another language knows what I am talking about when I say that internet translation services are absolute crap. They are fine if you want to just get the gist of something for your own personal knowledge, but if you want to actually use the result on any kind of document or sign representing your company, probably best to run it past a native speaker first! Even the most basic sentence gets tipped upside down and misconstrued by automatic translators with sidesplitting results such as the above.

Classroom chaos

Yesterday I taught the grade 3 class right before lunch. They were an absolute joke. Right from the start there have always been a couple of the boys who just seem to do whatever they like during class and everyone ignores them, including their homeroom teacher. Well yesterday they must have had something bizarre for brekkie because they were going cuuurazy! While we were singing the Hello Song they started tearing through the cupboards at the back of the classroom pulling stuff out and bending it, ripping it, throwing it. So Outani-sensei goes up the back to try and get a grip on them and leaves me to divert the rest of the class away from the fact that their teacher is chasing one of their classmates around the room.

I like Outani-sensei, but I have to say that she has very little control over her class. All through Aim Time she was yelling at this kid in the corridor and yelling at all the boys who go out to see what is happening to go back in the classroom and I am up the front attempting to silence everyone so we can all say "Hello, my name is OO. Nice to meet you." Eventually it all gets too much for Outani-sensei and she uses the class phone to call for back up which arrives in the form of the school nurse who takes the naughty child away for a "checkup". Come Game Time the class is back in some semblance of order, but they are still not listening and talking over the top of me so I told them no games until they shut up. So they shut up. It was kind of risky, because if they didn't shut up, what was I supposed to to with them? But thankfully it worked that time.

During Game Time the boys starting mucking around under the blackboard, one of them knocked the greeting times board and it started to fall. Instead of just putting his hand up and stopping it, he decided to run away and leave it to fall on his classmate's head. Nice. While it was obviously pretty painful for the boy whose noggin took the rap, it was a VERY effective way of silencing 29 ratbags. I should remember that...

So the nurse gets called again and takes another casualty away leaving 28 kids for Impression Time. This is where the kids get a chance to say something about the class. Usually they say something like "During game time Hiroko's pronunciation was very clear and I could understand him easily." or the very lazy but common, "I liked game time." and then the teachers get a turn. I am supposed to say something about the kids' pronunciation because technically I am the only one there qualified to judge that area, but yesterday I just gave them a lecture. It is so fun being a teacher, you get to talk to people like they are kids! For example, instead of saying "Don't talk when the teacher is talking." you get to be MEGA condescending and say, "What do you do when the teacher is talking? Do you face the back and talk to your friends? Do you run around? Do you hit people? No. Right? What do you do?" and then they all have to say "We listen quietly." And then just to rub it in and try and make them feel bad you say something like, "I didn't think Nishi children behaved this like. I am very disappointed." And remind them that they have a reputation to uphold (and they do, apparently Nishi has the most well-behaved kids of all the schools).

So, not sure if that is going to make them behave better next time. I think they don't tend to see the CIRs as real teachers, mostly because the previous CIRs couldn't speak Jap so couldn't tell them off even if they wanted to. Mostly they seemed fairly shocked to have been told off by me and were very quiet for the rest of the class. Much more of this though and I might start to feel like a teacher!

I boast about my Japanese abilities

Sometimes you do something that makes you just so proud you could almost seem like a complete wanker for announcing it to everyone. I'm going to take that chance because I am excited. I just managed to book a reservation on a bus on the internet entirely in Japanese! That might sound pretty ordinary to you, but that is a pretty big thing for me. To actually get over my fear of unreadable kanji and just have a stab at doing something actually quite important over the internet is HUGE. Of course, I could still rock up at the bus terminal tomorrow morning and realise that I have made a massive mistake and booked something for the wrong city, or better yet, not actually booked anything at all. But hey, at least I have a little print out that says I had a crack at it!

My friend is coming over from South Korea today and will be in Osaka all weekend so I am going to meet her. How foolish was I when I brashly determined that this weekend couldn't possibly top last weekend's mayhem? Just when I was preparing for hours of amusing myself quietly at home, life pulls another rabbit out of its vast and clearly good humoured hat. Not that I have ever been a huge fan of Osaka, but if Hyomin is there what can go wrong??

More duct tape, less time outs

L & L time is where I sacrifice my warm lunch every Thursday in the name of saturating the kids with English while they are eating. This week I wrote my own picture book with a quiz in it. We have to help Mr Kiwi find out where he lives. I am sure the grade 6s will be suitably unimpressed, but the grade 1s will love it and we can't please everyone now can we? I wouldn't mind doing it so much if I didn't know that my lunch was sitting upstairs on a desk getting cold while kids stick their various grotty body parts into it.

It is really quite fantastic the way the teachers can treat the kids here. Up in the classroom earlier one of the kids was being bloody noisy and the teacher just decided to tape his mouth shut with duct tape. He even went so far as to draw a mouth on the tape, along with a moustache and related finery. It was hilarious! That kid needed shutting up though, he is seriously loud. He is also the fat kid who eats any leftovers at lunch time before anyone else has a chance. In all the other grades the kids play paper, scissors, rock to decided who gets extras, but in this class it is just first in best dressed. In fact everything here is decided by that game, they called in janken and I reckon this country would still be in the dark ages if it weren't used to decide everything from who gets leftovers to who speaks first at important meetings. Without janken they would still all be standing around saying "what do we do? Who goes first??"

Old folks fight here too

I went to pay my rent last night for the first time. The landlord is an elderly couple who live only across the road in a massive old house. The woman clearly runs the show because when I went over to pay it the other day the man was there and wouldn't take any money off me because he wasn't certain how much the rent even was. This time though he had clearly been briefed by his wife and had me wait outside while he got my receipt. The woman rocked up while I was waiting and invited me to stand inside the doorway and proceeded on to see what the hubby was up to. They then had a massive elderly couple argument that was just hilarious. She comes in;
"What are you doing there?"
Him: "Getting the thing."
Her: "what thing?"
Him: "You know, the THING"
Her: "Give it to me."
Him: "The receipt! I am writing the receipt."
Her: "It's for April not May."
Him: "Hmm..."
Her: "APRIL!!" (voices getting quite loud clearly they are both irritated)
Him: "I wrote April. There, see, APRIL."
Her: "Where's the contract."
Him: "What? What contract?"
Her: "The rental agreement... the lease papers."
Him: "Oh, that. I gave it to her the other day."
Her: "What? Why?"
Him: "The guy from the board of education told me to."
She groans and there are sounds like a piece of paper is being tussled over before she re-appears in the end of the hallway and is all smiles, "Here you go, have good night!" while I try to contain my mirth at overhearing their quarrel. I hope they have an argument every time I pay the rent, that would just make parting with the money worthwhile!

Paper-waster extraordinaire

This week the teachers have the old parent-teacher meeting thing happening. Here the teachers actually go to all the kids' houses individally. I almost feel sorry for them. Imagine all the bowing and "please excuse the mess" (said by a housewife standing in a spotless kitchen) crap they will have to deal with! But it is good for me because it eliminates half the staff population and leaves me free to do as I like. Well, except for the masses of posters I have been asked to re-make because the old ones are starting to look slightly faded. As good a way to waste paper, time and my brain cells as any I guess. Plus it means that lunch is brought forward 20 minutes so I only have to be starving hungry in the late afternoons now! This week I am eating lunch with the grade 6 class and they are too cool to talk to me, but they get more food so I am happy.

Jo and Hiroshima; reunited at last

Weekend activities;

• Eat delicious okonomiyaki with old friends
• Sing karaoke
• Drink copious amounts of alcohol
• Wear cow hat
• Dance until the sun comes up in a rather dangerous and unco-ordinated fashion.

Yes I managed to squeeze all these things into my weekend in Hiroshima. Seeing old friends was the best thing ever. One friend dedicated her whole day to me! It felt so good to just talk to someone in Japanese who wasn't a stranger, so I could be informal and just struggle through telling a story in crap japanese and they didnt mind because they got the gist and worked with it. Really the only way to learn to speak the language well is to just keep struggling through even if you don't think you have the ability to properly explain, because you usually find out that you can do it, plus your friends will tell you the words to use next time to explain your drunken stories fluently!

It was fantastic to see Hiroshima again, it kind of feels like my home away from home. The Japanese have a word they use to describe the feeling you get when you experience something great that you haven't experienced for a long time (well, that's part of what it means) natsukashii. I said that a lot. I "accidentally" (by which I mean I deliberately did all-you-can-drink but I accidentally drank 3 extraordinarily potent cocktails crafted by an Englishman thereafter) ended up being quite positively drunk and went dancing at a bar called Mac. I was rather ambitiously thrown around the dance floor by an evidently equally drunk friend and ended up with several rather nasty bruises (and may have given some innocent fellow-dancers some too) as a result, but it sure was fun at the time! In fact, as far as the barometer for measuring a good night out goes, oddly placed and fequent bruises are a high score. I have a lot of bruises. I recall at one point playing samurai with umbrellas, so perhaps that may have contributed...

Sunday morning was rather messy but by the evening, even after the arduous train journey home during which I hopped on the wrong train and ended up having to double back, I was feeling good. I think I needed that big night out to be hypoactive with, since that kind of overactivity is usually frowned upon here at work. Next weekend will be dull indeed by comparison.

Gardening should be quieter

This morning I was woken up by the sound of a ridiculously early rising gardener starting up her whipper snipper and hacking away at some weedy looking things less than 2 metres from my window. It was bloody 6:00 in the morning, why was cutting those weeds back so important that it could't wait until after my alarm had gone off? I thought the one good thing about getting up at 6:30 every morning was the notion of undisturbed sleep (besides the alarm clock of course), but it seems even this previously unfathomably early hour isn't enough to avoid being woken by industrious neighbours. I tell you what, whoever invented those little whipper snipper/blower machines has a lot to answer for. What happended to a rake? Using the old heldge trimmers, you know where you don't need petrol or a motor, the good old days were quieter for a reason. Not that I am saying this obsession with noisy garden equipment is limited to Japan, at home there was a neighbour of dad's who'd get up on his roof with the leaf blower every Sunday as though vacuuming the roof was something that should be done with greater regularity than never.

Now the pineapple makes sense...

Here is the a picture of what I have at one time eaten in Japan but featuring the most delicious pineapple in the right hand corner. Yummmm. I noticed that I have started doing the Jap thing of using five million plates for the one meal. One plate for each food group or something. I like it. It is like having my own personal banquet every night. If only I could get someone else to cook it for me too...

Last night walking around aimlessly I noticed that the Namba home centre on the main drag leaves its stock out all night. They have all these pot plants and gardening stuff out the front and at night they just put a single chain strung on poles up in front of it all and that seems to be security enough for their tomato seedlings. What a wonderful place, where simply the faintest act of defining one's property is enough to fend off opportunistic passerbys. It turns out the psychological lock works both ways in Japan. I should tell those Jehovah's Witnesses who came to my door once about this place. They noticed my dad's bike chained up and decided to segue into their spiel about god by remarking that it would be lovely to live in a place where you didn't have to lock up your valuables. Well here it is!! The promised land where locks and chains are unnecessary. Spread the word people.

How fruit can make you happy

Last night I had the best pineapple in the world. I bought it from the supermarket at Happy Town (don't ask) and thought it smelled great, but when I got it home and ate some for dessert I almost DIED! It was juicy and sweet and few of those little prickly things stuck in the side that make eating fresh pineapple annoying. I could have eaten the whole thing if I weren't distracted a phone call which brought me back to my senses and made me realise that no one should be so bold as to eat an entire scrumptious pineapple in one sitting. Clearly pineapple such as this doesn't come along everyday and should be savoured. So I ate the rest for breakfast this morning.

COFFEE has no leader bean!!

As if to make us for yesterdays various awful and horrific misunderstandings today at work has been superb. My classes all went well, I had meeting with the teachers to discuss the content of their classes and they all thought my ideas were fine, and I just helped Sadou sensei print out some massive words announcing the sports day in RAINBOW colours using word art (something he would have spent most of his overtime tonight trying to do). It seems as though I am the most computer literate person in this office, a scary thought.

I do have to go over yesterday's events though because they highlight some key problems westerners in general find when they work in Japan. Every Monday morning we have a CIR meeting which we organise the location and time of on the day. So the trouble started at 8am when Iishi sensei asked me when and where the meeting was and I couldn't tell her. So I got a lecture about deciding the place and etc permanently. Then she started telling me that 7 people were coming when I was only expecting the CIRs from Kamogata and Konko. So at 2m this guy from Yoroshima rocks up and I am expected to get him coffee (which he thankfully didn't want). Then she asked me who the leader of the CIRs was. We don't have one, we are all minions the same as each other and puppets for the board of education to play with. Iishi sensei couldn't handle that. You must have a leader, who runs the meeting? Who tells you when to meet? Who tells you what to teach and when? Who decides when you start drinking the coffee? Who craps on about nothing for hours before deciding when others can crap on about nothing for hours? Who decides when the meeting is over??? Panic stations!! The foreigners are conducting meetings without a leader bean!!

It was almost amusing how freaked out she was by the concept of no leader. At least I found it terrribly amusing when I was telling the other CIRs about how we have to elect a leader. We decided to elect not only a leader, but a secretary, a deputy, a treasurer and a social co-ordinator. We would like to have elected an international dignatory but we ran out of people. Anyway, as the newly formed Committee Of Foreigners For Every Event (COFFEE) we have decided we are poorly lacking in funding for such items as stationery, stamps, gavels and snacks so will petition the school board for said funding. If they want us to form a committee they can't expect it to be done properly out of our own pockets.

In all seriousness it was decided that if they pursue this issue I will be the "leader" because I have enough Japanese to deal with any correspondance and bullshit that may involve. Again... why did I bother studying this language? It just seems to make more work for me.

Kamogata visual

Here's a picture of what it is mostly like in Kamogata. Half houses and half rice fields and random scrubby area with mountains in the background that are perpetually shrouded in mist for some reason. Sometime I will get up a picture of the cherry blossoms that they so love for you all to gaze in wonder upon.

Kids on the weekend too; just 'cause I like 'em so much

For 3 hours yesterday I was at an orphanage in Kasaoka with a bunch of other foreigners trying to entertain 70 kids with stupid games and in a very small room indeed. Mario (bloke from Peru) had organised the trip up there and since we would get a free lunch he got a fair few of us to go. We played a whole bunch of games, had lunch and then played some more games which mainly consisted of running around and screaming a lot. The kids love it when you are violent with them so I ended up dragging them around by their feet and pretending to throw them out windows and was completely astonished that none of them threw up in the excitement. We left at about 2pm and went straight to the nearest drinking hole to recuperate. Five courses of Italian food and three bottles of wine later we were all very much recovered, although probably starting to head down the other side of the hill.

I met some more of the foreigners in the area one of whom said I didn't have an Australian accent at all. Weird. I also found out that the little lumps that have been turning up on my hands are from mites in my tatami mats! Yuck. Apparently you have to spray the mats with this stuff to stop the mites living in there because my landlord is too tight to replace the tatami mats everytime someone leaves. I am thinking I should sleep in the kitchen tonight since my bed is right on the bloody floor. Well, at least I have yet to see a spider here....

Went and had a haircut today and the hairdresser was so gentle it seemed as though he thought my hair had feelings or something. He was using his whole body to comb the hair rather than just bend his elbow and everytime he hit a knot (which was a lot) he would spend five minutes untangling it strand by strand even though he was just about to cut it off anyway! He did a good job though I think. They cut the hair when it is dry here so you can really see what it looks like while they are doing it. It was quite cheap too, only about $30 for a wash, cut and blowdry. Well, cheap for the amount of time and care he took over it. You don't walk out of the salon here with telltale pieces of wet hair clinging to your neck and shoulders like you do at home.

Woodpeckers

Everytime someone important comes into the staff room here everyone stands up and bows to them, and also when they leave too. The result is that I find myself suddenly the only person sitting down and have to belatedly rise to begin a five minute ritual of bowing and smiling and saying osewaninarimashita until said VIP leaves the room. But they invariably (and rather rudely I think) take so long to leave the room the whole thing becomes a ludicrous display of bobbing heads and repeated salutations until it resembles a conversation between two kids saying 'you are' 'you are' (and all the never ending repetition this entails). At the end of one such occurance today one of the teachers turne to me and said

Japanese are like woodpecker, always bow

It cracked me up. He said it's because Japan is a samurai country. I replied that Australia is a kangaroo country so therefore we really couldn't care less when a random leaves the room. It was an enjoyable conversation, a rare occurance around here, and made my day a little better.

Porn and salmon of an evening?

Last night I cooked a delightfully delicious meal straight out of my new cookbook. I kind of followed the directions and in the end it looked somewhat like the picture but tasted better. I am currently looking forward to lunch with a hardly containable delight surpassing that of even the kids so I can eat the left overs. It was salmon and egg and lettuce and stuff in a frypan. Yummy. I had a bit of a read of some manga (comics), I thought maybe it was time to check out this phenomenon that Japan is famous for. Turns out the one I chose was quite pornographic (by which I mean very) although supported by the kind of soppy love stories you would expect a highschool girl to dream up. And I did think I was in the school kids section too... I hope I was wrong.

Work itself continues to be dull in the extreme. This morning I busied myself actually reading the mountains of paper that stealthily make their way onto my desk every morning. Usually a 2 minute perusal convinces me they are about nothing at all and after wasting 2 hours I have determined that they are indeed useless crap, although I did increase my vocabulary markedly. I found the handbook to go with the previously mentioned lecture on How to Cross the Road which seems to be in even more detail than the oral version.

On the upside though it has stopped raining and I can see the outline of the sun through the clouds for the first time in a week! I managed to walk to work today much to everyone's horror. "You have a car, why don't you drive?" Nobody here walks unless they must. In one of my first days here when Hirai was taking me around the place he suggested we take the car across the carpark just to avoid walking to the next shop. It was seriously 50metres. AND it wasn't even raining!

School lunch

The kids in my grade 3 class today were so noisy they exceeded the volume of the CD player. I cranked it right up and we still couldn't hear anything so I had to beat the tamborine until they shut up a bit. There are about 30 of them and they are genki as all hell. The boys were all trying to kill each other and the girls were standing around gossiping and occasionally looking marginally interested in learning something. During game time I dragged two boys off of another one they had pinned to the floor in "fun". They kinda listened to me because I can have a big Foreigner Voice when I want to. The teacher really took over the class and I had to basically interrupt her monologue to get some of my own in. Apparently I am just to press play on the CD player. Yeah right. I will set about changing this role of the gaijin (westerner) so that whenI pass this school on to Mario next semester he won't be bored like I am currently! The girl who was here before couldn't speak Jap very well so I think the homeroom teachers got a little too used to being in charge.

At lunch I eat with grade 4 this week. The girls jumped on me immediately and asked me every question they could think of. When they found out I wasn't married yet they almost died in astonishment and one of them took my hand in hers and said "Please look for a boyfriend so you can get married. Otherwise it will be a waste (of me, or of time I don't know), so do your best to find a man by next year." She was so earnest about it I didn't feel like I should laugh so I took it seriously and now it is a yakusoko (promise).

The kids all eat the school lunch which the monitors go and pick up and bring back to the classroom and then serve totheir classmates who get a tray each. It seems to be a bowl of rice or udon and miso soup with some random vegies. It seems very yummy. They get a glass bottle of milk which is just so quaint. After they have eaten they all brush their teeth when the Teethbrushing Music comes on over the PA. Then they go and play. It is constantly noisy and slightly overwhelming, a little bit of organised chaos really. It never seems like anything is happening, or that the kids are doing anything, but things just appear, tables are moved aside, dishes are cleared up and before you know it the class is over. Kind of creepy really.

Quiet please!

I forgot about the noise here. Not just traffic noise and general city stuff, but the actual effort the Japanese go to to make more noise. Yesterday while cooking lunch I was inundated with a catalogue of improvements the prospective mayor would make to Kamogata should I elect him. His electoral van stopped in front of my house, pressed play and released a pre-recorded message via 3 massive megaphones to all in the area and possibly some not in the area at all. This is not an uncommon way to spread messages in Japan. In the bigger cities lobby groups will stop near the front of mall entries and just shout stilted messages through megaphones at all and sundry in hopes that someone will listen to them and sign their petition. To me it is noise pollution and they ought to be dragged away by the cops, but it seems part and parcel of living here.

Topic of discussion today: Hanami (flower viewing)

This is the Japanese practice of laying bright blue tarps on the ground underneath a bunch of cherry blossom trees, sakura, (preferably ones that are actaully blooming) so that one may sit close enough to said trees to admire their beauty while eating, drinking and generally being very loud indeed. So it is a night time picnic in winter basically. The reason why the drinking got involved was because nothing keeps you warmer than a beer blanket when your arse is protected from the cold earth by only a tarp. Sure according to the dudes down at BS-1 weather it is spring, and the trees certainly think it is warm enough to start popping out flowers, but it is still about 20 degrees too cold for outside events in my book.

The cute thing about hanami is that everyone has to take their shoes off to walk on the tarp. So when you see the real Japs doing it (not a herd of blundering foreigners who have no respect for tarps as floor covering), they are all sitting, usually crosslegged, in suits with their shoes all lined up behind them like sentries guarding the flower viewing arena. Usually you would bring your own bento (boxed lunch) and sit around starving, saliva literally dripping out of the corner of your mouth waiting for some random who may or may not be in charge to give the OK to start eating by saying itadakimasu!

Of course, the good thing about doing hanami with other foreigners is that you don't have to follow the I won't eat until you do rule. There is usually heaps of junk food thrown around and sometimes poeple will just throw all their food in the middle and eat some of everything like a shared lunch day at school! And of course the drinking...

The hanami I attended last night was a little odd because we went against the grain and set up our tarps (some of them yellow) no where near any cherry blossoms. They were someheere around, but the trouble was, so were all the other hanami-doing people. Basically we drank a whole lot and the food was kinda abandoned. It meant I came home with more food than what I took though, so can't argue with that. Plus I was gifted a bottle of aussie red which I am sure will be consumed with some glee after a particularly depressing day at work any time soon...

Cross cultural twins

Sometimes you meet a person over here who is just a Japanese version of an Aussie. Even though they obviously look asian, they just have this uncanny similarity to a westerner. The grade 5 teacher here doesn't so much look like someone I know, but her voice is almost exactly the same as one of the aunts from the TV show Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Not that I have watched this show a lot, but the few times that I did, I immediately noticed the interesting tone of this woman's voice, the kind of voice you could listen to all day I think. Not the fat aunt who currently hosts Biggest Loser, the other one. Anyway, Kushino-sensei's voice has the same qualities so I often find myself just listening to the melody of her speech, rather than the content of it.

Eigo kyousitu

This is my classroom! It is jam packed full of things for kids to break and hit each other with. Perfect! I think it is a bit harsh making them sit on a wooden floor though, especially in this weather... But we will be doing heaps of jumping around and silly games so hopefully they won't be sitting around too much.

199 blue bears

I met the whole school today! 199 kids. They are pretty cute, really small and noisy. After the entrance ceremony rehearsal they had to clean the school again. At recess some of the kids came to the staffroom and asked if I could come out and play with them! Silly sods. I was a bit busy (read: typing e-mails), so I declined but promised to go out tomorrow and play dodge ball (their favourite schoolyard activity it seems) with them all. I had to make a speech with the other new teachers by way of intoduction. Afterwards all the teachers were crapping on about how brilliant my Japanese is. I take it with a pinch of salt of course, the Japanese are always inclined to give praise when they don't know what else to say... but a little part of me is encouraged.

Yesterday one of the foreigners here took me to a town 2 stops down called Kasaoka where there is a gargantuan 100yen shop. It had absolutely everything a person could need to furnish a home. Even curtains! I ended up buying some bowls and glasses so if I ever have anyone over we won't have to share a plate! On the way home we accidentally jumped on the express train which took us 3 stops past Kamogata and had to ride all the way back again. oops.

One more thing; I noticed that on the back of the piece of paper I was given at immigration there is an English translation. When I read the Japanese I translated the title as "To foreigner entering Japan". The old immigration department have translated it as "To alien entering Japan." Not sure about you, but I think I enjoy my translation more - less intergalactic.

Crazy cleaning kids

This school certainly loves a meeting. Today we had one in the middle of the day that conveniently ran into lunch time. There were all these items on the agenda such as;
1. Crossing the Road and,
2. Balls for the Kids at Lunchtime.

There is nothing too mundane to bring up in front of the entire staff body it seems. One teacher managed to crap on about helping the kids cross the road for about 10 minutes. He even went so far as to detail what action should be taken during wet and dry weather, in busy and quiet times and this all depended upon how many kids you were dealing with in each situation of course... After hearing him say "sometimes a car will stop and let the kids cross, but a car from behind, an impatient driver, will sometimes pull around to overtake. So please be careful of this situation", I decided to tune out. Sometimes I think the CIR who can't understand Japanese are far better off.

There were actually some kid here today. The grades 5 and 6 came in to help us set up the gym for the opening ceremony on Friday. April is actually the start of the school year here, so it is a pretty big deal. All the grade 1s will be starting school for the first time! The kids today rocked up in shorts and skirts and one of the teachers told me that this is their uniform all year round! Their skin had a slightly purple hue.

They were set to work cleaning everything. They polished the gym floor by pushing flannel clothes up and down, bent over running like bears (noisy blue bears) before heading (with an alarming enthusiasm) off to clean the loos. Weirdos. Granted, they do seem to make it as fun as possible. The things they get away with in front of the teachers I am sure wouldn't swing in a school in Australia. The teachers too, seem to have a complete lack of interest in securing the safety of their students. The kids jump off the top of a massive flight of stairs, push and shove, pull hair, swing spades around, whip each other in the face with wet flannels... exactly the kind of behaviour that would have Aussie teachers freaking out about injury and consequential litigation. But here it is just what kids do. I kind of like it. I can watch them be dicks and hurt themselves and then say, "well, DUH!", and that is fine!

Boku-chan

OK, here is my little car. I would put something more interesting up for my first photo but the computers here won't believe me when I say I have plugged my camera in. Isn't it cute!!

How to waste time 1A

In my capacity as a foreign language teacher I have just spent 5 hours searching the net for suitable photos to represent my life on a poster. So far we have chocolate and sports highly represented (I can't really fill the WHOLE thing up with beer considering it is a primary school). When I have finished doing this I will have nothing to do until Monday. I never though I would say this but, when are the kids gonna be here??

And one more thing... the place is freeeeezing. The little guage in my classroom says it is 12 degrees. Apparently last week they removed the heaters from the rooms because it was getting warm and they didn't need them any more. Clearly they need to fiddle with their interpretation of warm because my toes are still numb.

And someone just opened a window! Oh my god.

Don't touch TV knobs

Yesterday I spent a good part of the day with Hirai-san visiting second hand shops in the Okayama area. I ended up with a stove, a heater and a toaster all for under $70. Not bad. On the way home we stopped at Tanushi-san's house to get the fitting for my washing machine and she produced a TV which she said I could borrow!! I was so excited, now my little house would have a distraction in it, yay! A friend of mine from Hiroshima was going to come up with weekend so I was all excited about that, but ended up not coming so I was facing a whole 3 days in my own company, which I am not very practiced at these days so the TV would provide a very welcome distraction from my own thoughts.

An hour later though, things (by which I mean my mood) had quite changed owning to the fact that Hirai had completely stuffed the TV. I can't really be too pissed off becasue he did give up basically his entire Saturday just to help me out, and a good deal of that time was spent cutting up antennae cords trying to get reception on the TV. But when we finally did get a decent picture (albeit for only one channel) he decided to try and "fix" the screen by fiddling with some knobs on the front and the whole thing descended into snow and nothing has been seen of anything remotely resembling reception ever since.

"ARGH!" was what I thought.

"Oh well, no worries." was what I said.

I blame this whole incident on the Japanese obsession with perfection. I had, for two minutes, a totally watchable TV reception. Sure, everyone had a second self 2cm to their left, but I could hear it, it was colour, I could see the gist... Why touch the knobs if you don't understand what they do???