Rubbish is a serious business

This month with the grade 6 class we are practicing English they can use to "interview" foreign travellers when they go on their school trip to Kyoto and Nara in June. The interview process involves running up to people who look like they might be tourists (read: anyone who isn't Japanese) and bombarding them with odd questions like, "What animal do you like?" and "What subject do you like?". I'm trying to get them to cut this last question as it is strange to ask someone who went to school 15 years ago what subject they like, I think. But then again, the whole thing is strange. I am also pushing to teach them how to ask "Do you speak English?" before launching into the Inquisition since I know it annoys travellers who aren't native English speakers that the Japanese assume they are. I am just glad I won't be there to watch this display of overexuberant language practice.

Meanwhile, on the home front, I have finally rid my apartment of dani and am now contending with the multitude of mosquitoes that have taken up residence in my loungeroom and are keeping me up at all hours by buzzing around in my ears. Last night I caved in and purchased some insecticide stuff that is supposed to sit in the corner and exhude anti-mosquito fumes for the next 60 days. We'll see how that goes. I also had an infestation of funny little fruit fly thingies. In Japan you don't just have rubbish and recycling, you have to divide everything up and it all gets collected on different days. So PET bottles, drink cans and plastic gets taken on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of every month, burnable rubbish (like green waste, kitchen scraps etc) is taken every week on Tuesday and Friday and non-burnable rubbish... well I am not yet sure when that is taken but I don't have much of that anyway. Also you can put out cardboard separately, not sure when, I just tend to leave it there and at some point in the month it disappears. I am yet to figure out what to do with my cans from stuff like tuna... I don't think they are burnable, but I can't put them in the glass bag and they aren't collected with the recyclables. It is a very complicated business. Anyway, as a result of this, I had a bag of kitchen scraps sitting around for a while, clearly too long, and a small ecosystem developed in there. Japan is the bug capital of the world. When it heats up they just come out from everywhere. Big ones, little ones, creepy ones, cute ones, dangerous ones, harmless ones, flying ones, crawling ones... And the fucking cockroaches are unspeakably prolific. No matter what you do your house is bound to be infested with one or the other at all times, especially in the summer humidity. Thankfully their spiders keep to the outside mostly and aren't nearly as dangerous as the Aussie ones...

Kimiko and co. gave me an entire watermelon on Sunday after the welcome party. I still have half left, it is so big is fills up my entire fridge. It is a nice one though, I looked at one a similar size inthe supermarket yesterday; $40! I am eating my entire week's shopping budget in watermelon! You'd think for $40 they'd take the pips out for you though.