What next?

The last day of the year I am spending wandering Hiroshima with my bag (quite heavy) and my books (reason the bag is heavy) and myself (heavier than I look). Last night I caught up with some friends and we ended up in Gs Bar singing karaoke and dishing out love advice left and right. I didn't even really drink that much, just stuffed from lack of sleep I reckon. Had a slight snooze in one bar... can't remember the name of it. It was so small that only 6 people could fit along the bar so I was sitting on the couch behind (literally right behind) the bar stools blocking the path to the loo. At 5am ish I stumbled into this here internet cafe where I am free to rest until 2pm ish. I'm starving hungry, but when I went to the loo before I looked outside and it was raining so I might just wait until 2 to brave the elements. My bus leaves Hiroshima at 8pm tonight and arrives in Tokyo at about 7am I think. So it'll be a happy new year for me if the bloke next to me isn't the snoring type! Once, on a bus back to Hiroshima from Tokyo I was sitting in front of a bloke who just would NOT stop snoring until evenutally a young guy leaned over, shook him and told him to shut the hell up or get off the bus. YAY! He shut up. It seems to me that the Japanese have a lot of snorers in their midst since every internet cafe I stay in you can usually hear a few of them buzzing away like a demented choir. Not today though, I think I am the only one here today. The Japanese spent the New Year with their families so it will be pretty quiet out and about today. Tomorrow everyone will do the temple thing (except me) and eat heaps of food. On the 2nd the shops open up again with New Years sales and everyone goes out with their purse full of New Years money and elbows people out of the way so they don't miss the best bargains. I will be joining them this year, much as I dread it, because I have heard of a place that may sell boots in my gargantuan size. We'll see.

Well, I wish everyone a fun and safe New Year's Eve celebration. 2006 brought many new things for me. Well, it was my first year being a real adult worker bee rather than a student. Just like the year 1s pine for their kindy years, I do miss my student lifestyle. I do NOT miss the study, or the working various jobs at all kinds of odd hours making just enough to cover myself, but I do miss having free time during the day, having time to read more often and student discounts! And the unibar of course, slightly dodgy as it may be. Hopefully 2007 will bring me a better job, a better location, a new language (I reckon Spanish needs looking at), more sport and fitness (touch, I have missed you so), piano lessons, a motorbike license, good times with good friends and a certain amount of domestic felicity... How about that for a start at least? Bring on 2007 I say!

Is is STILL December?

I've noticed that whenever I am workng I want to be holidaying, and whenever I am holidaying I want to be working... Next week I have plans to go skiing and meet up with a friend in Tokyo, but this week I have no plans and I simpy cannot motivate myself to leave the house. On the upside, my house is now so very tidy that should the Queen deign to stop by she would not be unimpressed. Or even my cleanliness obsessed friend, she knows who she is. Well, clearly I am out of the house today. I slept in quite late, (how sad that 9am constitutes a sleep in for me now) and in the sudden burst of energy that follows realising one is a complete lazy arse, did my washing, put all the crap away from the Christmas party (well, more like a gathering than a party) and left the house for the station with little idea of where I was going or why. I wandered about in Kurashiki for an hour and then continued on to Okayama where I drifted into this internet cafe. I also ate a scone along the way. Hmm, scones.

Did I talk about Christmas? I was a very lucky girl and received many great gifts. I even managed to get a chat on over the phone in with some people I haven't spoken to for a long time which was lovely. I think talking on the phone makes homesickness worse somehow. Probably because the person's voice is right in your ear, just like it is when you are calling from only the other side of Adelaide. Somehow I am always disappointed when I hangup and realise I am in fact in Japan and miles away from everything. Well, New Years isn't far off now. Hope you all have more exciting plans for the evening than me... I might be on the bus to Tokyo I think!

The end of the middle has come at last

Ah, the sweet scent of vacation time fills the air; the prospect of lazing about the house without guilt and mornings devoid of the urgent screams of an alarm clock stretch ahead. Smile.

I hope everyone had a tops Christmas day chocablock full of yummy food and drink and general merry making. I'm gonna be on holidays from school until January 9th. I'm sure I'll find myself staying in an internet cafe during that time though so I'll keep up the posts if I'm not too tired.

Never happier to see the end of a year.

Yuletide Greeting

Merry Christmas! Well, it is certainly Christmas, not so much of the Merry happening yet... Hopefully that will change later. Although this morning I did talk to a little blonde thing from Australia whose voice it was tops to hear. And also opened the lonely Christmas present sent to me by a very very organised friend a month ago. A book to read! YAY :) Today we have 2 looooong meetings on the board. The first one starts at 9, the second at 1. They will go all day, make no mistake. It's weird how no one here even gives a shit about Christmas. There are decorations up everywhere, Christmas shit all over the shops but that's as far as it goes. It's just about the presents here. I mean, at home it seems to be just about the presents these days, but when you compare it to Japan you can see that it's about more than that at home for most people. Like, at least most people actually sit down and eat with their family or friends, and be merry and have fun and all that good stuff. Here, it's just another day at work.

On Saturday I went for dinner with Hirai, the bloke from the BOE. He took me to his parent's house and we sat in front of an actual feast. There were only 5 adults, but there was food enough for about 20! I was a bit hungover from my efforts at the staff party on Friday so didn't drink too much wine which could only be described as a smart move. Hirai's family is SO quiet. Well, for a start it wasn't really a family, just him and his parents so that probably didn't help. The conversation was basically limited to discussion of every facial movement, every gesture, every noise the child made, sprinkled with the occasional comment or question about Adelaide or Australia. Hirai's daughter Sa-chan is probably 20 months old, so she's all walking and saying random words and stuff - yeah ok she was amusing and stuff for a while, but after half an hour I was ready to move onto another topic of conversation. How is it possible thta the smallest person in the room could dominate so much? We would finally get talking about something interesting when Sa-chan would trip over and knock a chopstick flying into the air and OH, all the attention was back on her again for the next 10 minutes. Really, I appreciate that to the parents of a child everything that kid does is amazing - but can't they remember what it was like to have their converstaion interrupted every 2 minutes by someone cooing over the every move of a toddler? Here's a tip for people with kids - if you are entertaining adults, do NOT allow your kids to become the focal point of the evening, it will just make everyone hate them. Besides, doesn't it make them feel depressed, that the only thing they have to talk about now is this one little person? I'm not saying that the kids should be locked in their rooms, just that they shouldn't be the centre of attention for 4 straight hours, it's sure to go to their head and bore the hell out of everyone in the room who doesn't find conversation conducted with a 5 word vocabulary stimulating.

Anyway, it was nice of them to have me over, I ate myself silly. They gave me a present too, a little vase. I gave them some fruit cake and Christmas cookies I found in town. They seemed happy with the trade off. Yesterday I lolled around reading all morning before finally braving the elements in order to get some shopping done for tonight. I decided to make trifle and so needed to find jelly, custard and a bowl to put it all in. I couldn't find custard, but the rest is happening. Although I just realised that I don't have a whisk so the cream may not eventuate, unless I just pour it over the top... Actually I realised that I don't have much of anything. Approximately 8 people are coming to my house to be fed and I have only 2 forks, 2 spoons and 4 plates. Ummm... Might have to borrow from my neighbours. It's a tough gig, hosting a party. Especially when your house is devoid of furnishings and simple things like cutlery and crockery!

4:24pm. Not long to go now. I am STARVING, having forgone lunch in order to maximise stuffing space for this evening. I have spent the day searching for and reading poetry I always meant to look at but never did. Reading reading reading, that's all I do these days and my eyes are bugging out of my head. I've had a bevvy of e-mails from one person I invited to the Christmas thingo tonight who is very concerned about what he should bring and what time we'll be winding up and so on... It's hard for me to answer such questions without showing my impatience. It's cultural differences I know, but since when do parties have a finish time? OK, I know when you're in primary school the birthday parties go from 2-4 or something, but this is not a children's party. I know some of us have to work tomorrow, btu I am still hoping for a modicum of late night. I really don't mind being hungover at work tomorrow, it is my last day here and I wont be teaching or anything, just sitting at my desk reading poetry - much like today!

The kids have left the building

The kids are gone!! Yipee!! Now if I can just survive the staff meeting and party tonight and Monday, Tuesday next week I'll have lasted out the year! This is very exciting news. I figure Monday I can spend my time making posters and fixing the greeting time hand, Tuesday I can skip out "to Higashi" and go home early and sort out stuff. Still not sure what I am doing with my time off. Various vague ideas but nothing particularly appealing or solid. What I'd like to do is sit in a warm place and read for a week straight. But I don't want to do this in my own house cos that's boring and I can do that on any weekend. Hmmm. Clearly I need to spend some more time pondering things.

I received a few letters and pictures from some of the students. The spelling in them is hilarious. Thankyou - Tenkyuu, Goodbye - Gutto Bai. The year 6 girls wrote a message on the board and when I went up to the English room for cleaning just before there were 2 other teachers there trying to decide if what was written there constituted graffiti! I jumped in and said "No, it's fine, just a farewell message" and they looked very relieved. Sometimes the kids leave nasty messages for each other on the blackboard and I think they assumed this was another occurence. It had a love heart in it, how nasty could it have been?

Year 1s

I taught my year 1s for the last time yesterday and even managed to get them to stand still long enough to take a photo! Amazing. Today is the last day for the kids. I will be at work until Wednesday next week. Doing nothing. I'm really looking forward to it... This morning I made my farewell speech to the kids and tonight is the end of year party with the teachers. Actually I forgot that I am supposed to bring a small gift to exchange... Oh crap. Better go sort something out.

Lunchtime at school involves...

Milk and greens, curry and rice and pudding today!
The peace sign apparently...

And a huge game of janken to decide who shall eat the extra puddings...

The winners!

And even the losers are grinners today...

This class is my favourite one. I'm gonna eat with them tomoz as well, and play volleyball with them in PE. They are all very smart kids and actually have manners. A couple of them are heaps quirky, always doing funny things to keep us teachers entertained.

It really is chilly!

"Chilblains are less common in countries where the cold is more extreme because the air is drier and people have specially designed living conditions and clothing. "

Yeah right! In every developed country except Japan it would appear. I have been self diagnosing with my friend Google and I reckon that my fingers are not suffering from dani bites, but from chilblains. I have never had this issue at home, and the weather here at the moment is not that much colder than Adelaide gets in the depths of winter. The only explanation can be the poor heating and insulating of houses and schools, and the massive overheating of trains and department stores. Apparently chilblains are encouraged by rapidly heating yourself up after being very cold, although it isn't helped by poor circulation in the extremities. And you do get that often in Japan, where you are shivering your arse off on the train platform, and then sweating inside your clothes once you board the train because the seats are heated and you've got 6 layers of thermals on. The solution; wear gloves all the time and try to avoid warming my fingers up too quickly when they are cold.

It's slightly chilly

I thought that humans build buildings because we no longer want to live in caves. I thought we lived in caves because they provided us with a modicum of protection from the elements. Being less furred up than our fellow animals 4 walls and a roof doesn't go astray during the winter months. Even dogs have a kennel to sleep in when outside gets too much for them (except those spoilt dogs who are lucky enough to live inside a house too), so why why why have the Japanese not cottoned onto this? Why are their buildings simply for taking your shoes off in, not for escaping the elements? It is SO cold in here. The staffroom had all its windows open this morning, there was a vast amount of chilly breeze blowing through and there was nothing refreshing about it let me tell you. My toes have been numb for the entire of December. I am actually warmer walking to and from school than I am at school. They just love being cold it would seem. One of the CIRs here used to go to school and live in New York which is known for being bitterly cold in winter, snow combined with a strong wind chill factor, and she has never been as cold there as she is here. And the Canadians who live here say the same thing, and Canada is bloody cold, if you don't rug up outside you could get frostbite. They reckon the difference is that the Japanese do not insulate or heat their houses and buildings. Apparently in Canada everything is double glazed and central heated so you can be walking around in your T-shirt and shorts inside even though it is well below zero outside. No such luck in Japan. Even if I put my little heater on I can't get away without 4 layers of clothing and a beanie on my head in my own house. The warm air created by the heater just seems to escape as quickly as it's made. On windy nights my house is a cavern of competing drafts making the doors and windows rattle and papers blow around. It takes a great deal of psyching myself up to turn the hot water off and get out of the shower I tell you what. And according to everyone February is the worst by far, still gotta get through January yet! BOO.

Grrr

OK, so no photos from the orphange since for some reason blogger is having an issue with uploading them. Maybe they can sort that out sometime soon??

Today is another round of parent/teacher interviews at school so my arvo classes are cancelled and this morning's are shorter than usual. I'm very relieved because frankly I'm beginning to wear out a bit after 17 straight weeks of teaching. Semester 2 is the longest in the year at 4 months and it's a bit much I reckon. I'm at the point now where I don't even particularly care about not being at school, I just want there to be no kids to teach! Tomorrow it will be a week until my holidays start so I'll just take some comfort in that...

Yesterday I went to the post office to get off some Christmas pressies and cards (still half unposted so all those reading, expect something in time for new years...) and had the most frustrating time of it. They were training a new lady up and she was useless. She was there by herself so I assume they had at least given her a basic run down of what she was supposed to be doing, but I reckon I could have done a better job back there. I think she panicked upon seeing me for a start and then just didn't know what to do with all my packages and ended up weighing them each about 3 times. Generally if you don't know what you are doing, you at least pretend that you do, especially in front of someone who is waiting for your service, but this woman was clearly out of control. Someone finally came to help her and then she was even more nervous because a fellow worker was watching her. The best bit was when she counted my change out about 15 times. She didn't even have to think about how much it was because the register does all that, she had the receipt in front of her telling her how much to give me, but she just couldn't figure it out. She had the notes in her hand and kept doing that very very annoying thing, flicking them between her fingers to make sure there wasn't any stuck together. Well, I find that particularly annoying because when I was working at Target I had a supervisor who would insist that we all flick the notes like that when we were taking people's money and giving change and I could never understand why you had to make a big show about it by flicking the notes when you could just kinda rub the plastic with your fingers quietly and get the same effect. Anyway, this woman stands there frowning at the receipt, flicking the notes, back to check the reciept again, flick the notes, check the receipt, pick up one coin, check the receipt, flick the notes, pick up another coin, check the receipt, flick the notes, check the coins, check the receipt... Oh my GOD, enough already, I'm on my bloody lunch break here! Is there anything more infuriating than an inept cashier who doesn't understand their own currency?

The thing is, I suspect that rather than being shit at maths, rather she just has such low self confidence that she can't believe she could possibly have got the amount right the first time. Or the second time, or the third time... The kids are like that too. Sometimes when they stand up to give me an answer in class I can't hear them cos the other kids are talking, or the bells is ringing so I ask them to repeat themselves and they assume it's because they have the wrong answer and about 90% of them will simply refuse to repeat what they said and immediately sit down with an extremely embarassed look on their face. And the number of kids, especially girls, who refuse to speak any louder than a whisper is infuriatingly high too. I get them up to the front to do greeting time and I can hardly hear what they are saying and my ear is right under their mouth. There is one girl in year 3 who I swear just moves her mouth like a mime cos I can never hear a single thing from her. The humiliation of being wrong is so strong here that the kids don't want to have a go. We English teachers here have decided that that is possibly a major reason why the Japanese are so bad at English, despite the many resources they have for learning it. The Japanese spend millions and millions on learning our langauge, there are private schools everywhere, and yet very few Japanese can speak English as well as their Asian neighbours. English is a difficult langauge to learn coming from Japanese, just as the reverse is true, but there are other languages in the same position and that doesn't stop their speakers learning English well. It must come down to cultural differences. The fact is that the Japanese are too shy to learn languages. To learn a language properly you have to make a dick of yourself occasionally. You have to make mistakes, and you have to expect to be laughed at. For the vast majority of Japanese there is no way to deal with such humiliation, self-inflicted humiliation at that. Mostly they struggle with pronunciation and speaking in general and that's because that is where having a crack is most important. When the kids actually try and imitate me speaking English, and they do what they think is an exaggerated version of my intonation and stresses, that's when they are speaking English the best. I try and tell them this, but to them what they have been doing is way over the top and just a joke. Ah, will they ever learn?

Orphanage trip

The visit yesterday to play Christmas games with the kids at the Orphanage in Kasaoka was great fun. The kids there are heaps better behaved than the ones at my school! We ran around outside for a while with them, then had curry and rice for lunch and finally sang some carols and more running around like crazy. The ages ranged from 2 years to 17. Most of the kids have been taken from abusive family environments, but some of them are really orphans. They seemed to have a great time, making us say when we'd be back again.
I've got a big group picture on my other computer, let me just go and get that happening...

The Cretin Returns

Saturday evening I'm all tucked up in bed snoozing my way along when I am awoken by outside noises. I must be a very light sleeper indeed to have woken up for this reason, but I could suddenly hear the traffic noise from Route 2 down the hill a lot clearer. Almost as if a window were open... I look down to my left (sleeping on my tummy so it is the right hand side of the window) and the curtain is open a little bit. Odd. Then torch light flashes into the room, through the curtain, but certainly directed at my room. I sit up a little bit and peer over to the left hand side of the window and there is someone standing, their foot on my tatami mat, holding the curtain aside and having a good gander at what's happening in my room. This pisses me off for two reasons; 1) I am certain I locked that window in the morning after I hung my washing out and, 2) That the creep had the balls to come back after I scared him away once. So I jump at towards the window and scream Fuck off! at him again, just in case he didn't hear it the first time. He runs off, not quite as quickly as last time, leaving me to a very sleepless morning. This all happened at 2:48 - I stayed up until 6am reading. What freaked me out the most was that I was so certain I had locked that window that I thought he had managed to unlock it somehow. At 6ish I managed to nod off for a couple of hours before I had to be up for the orphanage trip but ended up having this awful dream that he was in my house and lying on top of my back so I couldn't get up. When I did wake up eventually I discovered that I had been sleeping on my arms and they were numb, probably why I dreamt I couldn't get up.

The next morning I told my upstairs neighbours about it and M told me that he had been woken by a loud scream in the early hours of the morning, raced out on his balcony to see what was going on, but saw nothing. He was so freaked about about it that he couldn't sleep, put it down to a nightmare and stayed up for a while watching TV. So two people scared out of their wits within metres of each other, feeling all alone - almost funny except that the memory of it is still a bit fresh. In the late arvo I went to the local police box and told them about the visitor. They didn't appear very conerned at all. In fact, as I suspected they might, I simply got a lecture about locking my windows and that women living alone were "naturally going to expect this kind of thing" ??? Naturally? Oh yes I am the criminal for not protecting myself adequately against lunatics. Then, rather than try and reassure me by telling me they'll at least patrol the area more frequently or something, he proceeds to give me a list of all the things that have previously happened in this apartment, including a woman coming home to find a bloke waiting for her in the bathroom. Thanks guys, way to put my mind at ease. They really were very useless, despite me asking him a couple of times to speak a bit more slowly he kept spewing sentences out at me as though he had a time limit or something. I have never heard anyone who wasn't calling a horse race talk so fast. And then his buddy jumps in and starts asking me completely irrelevant questions about what country I come from and "oh, you must be very lonely" all in the gruff old man voice that is virtually a whole other dialect in these parts.

I certainly won't be expecting too much from the local constabulatory in an emegency. My upstairs neighbours have offered to lend a hand if it happens again. Everyone was thinking of ways to catch the bloke and stuff which was nice. At least someone was acting a little concerned that this kind of shit should happen. I wonder how often he comes past to check that the window is locked. That must be the first night since the first incident that I have left the window unlocked and he just happens to come back? Coincidence? Either way, I might ask my landlord if I can move into the apartment above me, at least that way, if he does still persist and climb up the window, when I push him off it he'll probably break his neck in the fall!

Say it louder, that'll make me believe you

Ah - it is SO lovely to have a whole day to myself. I've been Christmas shopping (somewhat unsuccessfully) and borrowing library books today. I did actually buy myself a few warm things for winter, skivvies and the like. Now that it's winter I have felt the desire to purchase a pair of boots resurface again. Every winter it crops up, and every winter I go searching for the perfect pair, find them, and then realise that there's no way I can afford them if I also plan on paying my rent. This year I am bootless for a different reason - my giant feet. Women's sizes only go to 25cm in Japan. My feet are 27cm. BOO. And what makes it worse is that the Japanese are crazy about boots and so have heaps of different styles and colours that you just don't see at home. Maybe it's a good thing that I can't fit into them cos otherwise I would surely have at least 5 pairs by now... So at this stage it seems I will be tramping around the snow in my running shoes. Well, I did use them to squish around on the touch field all last year too so no reason why they shouldn't get to see some snow action. Hmm, my Asics are very versatile indeed and I do love them, but I feel sure I have space in my shoe heart for some black boots too...

Today while walking along in the shopping district my ear drums were assaulted from all angles by a woman's voice yelling over a loudspeaker which was mounted atop a van parked in the street. In addition to this there were about 10 people standing in front of the pedestrian crossing yelling - although without any electronic assistance - and trying to force pieces of paper into the hands of all those who walked by. It was so loud, and there were so many people assualting me from all angles, I felt very disorientated and overwhelmed by it all. I wonder why, in this first world country, it isn't possible to simply walk down the street without being affronted as such, you end up feeling as though you have survived a violent ordeal. I couldn't even tell you what it was all about because it was just so noisy that I couldn't hear properly.

Another school lunch

Mochi - iranai!

Last night I was considering going to see the doctor about my swollen fingers, but it turns out that the place is closed on Thursdays. I think my finger is better today anyway. Well, it's now not only 1 finger, but just about all over them. Trying to tie my shoelaces, or anything that requires a modicum of fine motor skills is quite tough. Like typing for instance. But I will persist because I know that you, my avid readers, will be distraught without a Friday blog posting to read ;)

Of course I actually persist because I have nothing to do here today. This week the kindy kids are out pummeling a bunch of rice with big wooden mallets in order to create the rather dubious tasting and stomach-busting traditional New Years "sweet" that is mochi. How can it qualify as a sweet? It is mushed rice, mushed white rice at that. Anyone who has ever had to eat a rather large bowl of the sticky white rice can tell you that having a tummy full of the stuff is not nice. It's a bit like what I imagine small children feel like after consuming a good portion of a bottle of Clag in art class. And since mochi is simply condensed white rice, it only makes you feel worse. And the taste! The best way I can describe it; it tastes like your Gastronomical Doom. Before you have even swallowed it the flavour alone makes you feel as if you've eaten too much. Most of us would have had that feeling, mostly as kids (I hope), that you've eaten so much that even the most delicious food in the world is about as tempting as deepfried cockroaches... that's what it is like when you are faced with a pile of this white stuff. But don't the Japanese just love it! The only way I have been able to get this horrid stuff into me is in cooperation with some icecream. They have this arrangement where icecream is wrapped in a thin layer of mochi - that is a sweet.

This weekend I have a few activities planned. So first of all is the speech by some bloke from Puerto Rico at the BOE, followed by a Christmas party. This is organised by Japanese people so it won't be a real Christmas party - there's not even gonna be a sniff of alcohol around. I have to take a small present. I am of course taking something I would like to receive; chocolate. Someone mentioned that there would be turkey. Maybe it was just a little bit of hyperbole to get everyone to come, but I am still hoping for some gobblegobble action. Saturday will see me traipsing all over the prefecture trying to find postable Christmas gifts. By Sunday I will no doubt be well fed up with Christmas and everything to do with it, but I have dobbed myself in to go up to an orphanage in the hills somewhere with the other foreginers of the area. We just play games with the kids and hang out in the arvo for a while. Perhaps afterwards there will be some karaoke action. We'll see what happens... Finally, a weekend where I am not stressing about a speech, or procrastinating about study! Hope everyone out there manages to have a good one too :)

Thursday things

Here's a picture of one of my lunches. The little bottle of milk we get everyday, the rest changes. That wasn't such a yummy day, today we had fish burgers and a better salad and vegie soup. I get mine dished out in the staffroom and have to take it up to the classrooms to eat with the kids. Now that it's winter my food is pretty much stone cold by the time I get to eat it. The staffroom get their lunch organised really early and the kids are usually pretty slow soI have to wait for them to eat. Even though they take longer to get organised I like eating with the youngre kids more because they talk to me and ask questions and so on. A few weeks ago I ate with the year 1s and they were asking me all about war. "Has Australia ever been in a war?" "How long ago?" "How many people died?" "Was there lots of blood?" It was quite amusing.

Speaking of war; there is often talk about how the Japanese continue to deny their involvement in war crimes and so on, but they do teach the kids about what Japan did in Manchuria and Korea and so on in the primary schools. I had lunch in a class last week and on the board there was notes about Japan's invasion of Korea and Manchuria mentioning that they did "many bad thing" over there and so on. While in the past they didn't mention it in textbooks, it seems that that is changing at least for this generation. If only the old stooges in politics now would play catch up.

Here's a picture of my year 2 kids playing Fruit Market. They love this game, probably because I give them toy money to play with. Some of the kids use it to buy a whole bunch of fruit in one go, and others save their money up and just sit their counting it until I force them to part with in for a bunch of bananas or something.

Oh, my die was returned. The science teacher found it in the fridge in his prep room! Strange place for a fluffy die to be, but at least it came back. Little buggers.

Yesterday's firefighter thing was a trap. The local fire fighting people wanted to ask 3 of the foreigners in town to come along and just sit in on their ceremony and be eye candy for all the firies. Rather than ask us through e-mail they dragged me and 2 other female teachers to the BOE and sat us down with the bloke from the firestation and the BOE people and presented us with an itinerary of what's going to happen and what we have to do (nothing except sit there and stand up occasionally when everyone else does while wearing a ridiculous Japanese fire fighting costume and hat), and said "it would be fantastic if you could help us out, but it's entirely voluntary of course..." and then sat back to stare at us waiting for an immediate response. Cunning bastards. So we had to say yes of course, even though it sounds extremely dull AND even though it only starts at 9am, we have to be there at 7:40 on a Sunday. What is the matter with these people? Way to ruin our weekend. It goes until bloody 11:30 as well. I do't understand what purpose we are serving. They say it's to get a bit of cultural exchange happening - but I don't see how. What I do see is that we three are going to be the only women in a room full of 500 men, foreign women at that, placed up on a stage purely for decorative purposes. I'm not sure I entirely feel ok with being used as a novelty item like that. Everyone knows that Japanese blokes have a thing for foreign women and they all know that they are just going to be checking us out the whole time. Maybe I can break my leg skiing and that will get me out of it?

Yes, yes we have a new photo of the Jo happening up top in the blog. Well, you have seen it before but I only just figured out how to get a photo permanently up there. Might try and find one of me that isn't blurry too and change it later!

Today I have been the victim of youth crime. My big fluffy dice that I have been using for the legendary baseball game has been stolen from the English room. Shock horror. It was bound to happen eventually. But I reported it anyway, it wouldn't do any of them any harm to hear a lecture about respecting other people's property! I'm off for a volunteer firefighter arrangement today. Not sure what it's all about - if it's interesting I'll tell you about it tomoz.

The weather is SO miserable today that it is practically already dark - it's 3:44pm. Wrong wrong wrong.

MY LARGE FINGER

Yeah so here's a picture of my swollen up fingers, at first it was just the ring finger but now the middle finger has started swelling up too. And just the last few days the index finger on my other hand. I reckon it's probably the dani back in my tatami mats again. They seem to thrive in the colder weather. Probably because it is warmer inside the house for em or something. I sprayed my mats last night and will do it again tonight and hopefully that should take care of it...

Last night I was watching a show about medical horror stories. How people get ripped off and led astray by their doctors. They were focussing a lot on things to do with pregnancy and birthing stories and they showed a graph which plotted the average number of births for each day of the week over a few months and the numbers dramatically dropped over the weekend. On Mondays the numbers would spike right back up again. They reckon that this is caused by doctors who are using drugs to either slow down or speed up labour so that they don't have to work on the weekend! Apparently the number of births during office hours are also strangely high. There were stories of doctors giving their patients drugs, telling them they were just a painkiller but it was really to induce labour and things like that. Seems to me that Japan isn't a place you'd wanna be stuck in if you were pregnant. The doctors seem to have an attitude that whatever they say goes and the patient has in choice in the matter. Then again, that is probably produced by the patient trusting them too much and not asking questions about drugs and so on. Still, not a show you would want to be watching if you had a bun in the oven I reckon.

Turkeyyyy

Yesterday at the CIR meeting we heard all about what happens when you get the chicken pox in Japan. P was out of work all last week with it. Obviously it's not too flash to get this one when you are an adult, but he seems to have survived alright. He had little scabs on his face which are quite funny. Apparently when the kids get it hte parents have Chicken Pox Parties so their kids all get it at the same time and are then safe from getting it as an adult! Nice one. We spent a while discussing the logistics of cookig a turkey for Christmas and decided that it is basically impossible. Those of us who do have ovens wouldn't be able to fit a turkey in them and then there's the fact that we will all be at work all day so can't be watching the oven too. So no turkey. BOO>_<

I went shopping last night in Kurashiki. It was supposed to be me getting all my Christmas presents sorted out but really I didn't do much. I did find a few things, but it's hard to think of what to get everyone really. There are heaps of cute scarves and things going on, but it's hardly likely to be useful for those who are living in 40 degree heat at the moment!

Only 3 more weeks of school!! Well, 2 and a half really.

The Last Subtitle

Here's a thing; I was watching The Last Samurai on TV last night and it was dubbed. What the hell? If there are any amusing moments in this film it is the times when alco-mo-holic Tom I'm-bigger-than-you Cruise struggles to learn Japanese during his stay in the samurai village, the hilarity of which is extremely reduced when Tom Don't-you-ask-me-why Cruise has been speaking in fluent Japanese since the start of the film! And even more bizarre is that the Japanese actors who speak mostly in Japanese, but sometimes in English when communicating with Tom can-you-tell-I'm-excited Cruise have been dubbed over too by someone else! So they have 2 voices each. I cannot believe that at no point while they were working on dubbing this film did someone sit back and think, "Hmm, perhaps subtitles are the way to go here?". Dubbing has a place - B-grade films and tv shows about ninjas who jump backwards into trees. Any film that wishes to be taken seriously must be subtitled, especially if that film involves a 50-50 split over the foreign lagnauge and the audience's language. People, PLEASE stop with the dubbing!!

Speecherooni

This weekend was all about the speech. Saturday B and I spent a good 5 or so hours sorting stuff out. I had my speech written and checked by a Japanese person, I just had to sort out the slides on powerpoint. That was kind of fun really. Then I had to practice saying my speech over and over again so it would seem like I am fluent. My part went for a good 25 minutes or so and it took a long time to rehearse. Sunday morning I spent doing the same and in the arvo it was all on. First everyone watched Rabbit Proof Fence, which I have never seen while B and I had a run through in the room with the projector and so on. It was a long wait. At 3 o'clock we were all on. I think it went pretty well, although the quiz was quiet dull. We would ask a question and they would sit in silence. That, or whisper the answers under their breath but be too scared to put their hand up and say it out loud. And then when someone finally did answer the question correctly she refused to pick out a prize! We practically had to drag her up the front to collect something. And they were good prizes too, bottles of wine, honey, jams, lanolin soaps and so on. Some of the questions no one could answer so there were heaps of prizes left at the end which B and I managed to get hold of so we had a chocolate wind down fest. We showed the Where the bloody hell are you? video at the end and then it was question time. Only one question, one bloke wanted to know why the NT and ACT are not states. I just made up something about their population not being big enough to warrant it or something and he seemed happy with that.

Afterwards a few people came up and said that my speech was really interesting and easy to understand and that my Japanese is really good which is nice to hear even if you know that they hand out compliments like we hand out greetings. All except one old bloke who came up and shoved a piece of paper with notes on it under my nose and said "You made a mistake". OH? Apparently I used the wrong kanji for the "sen" part of "sensuikei" (submarine). He went on and explained why it was the wrong kanji and then just walked off without saying a single nice thing about the rest of the speech without any mistakes in it. What a wanker. Luckily I was too busy basking in the relief of having the whole thing over and done with to ask him to repeat himself in English so I could pick on everything he did wrong despite the fact that I understand his meaning perfectly.

I have noticed that with the Japanese are either annoyingly relectant to help you with your Japanese, or completely hardarsed about it. It is very rare that my Japanese friends will correct my Japanese grammar, if I say something with the wrong particle or use an odd verb they will just let it go because they get my drift. In those cases I wouldn't mind if they just repeated the sentence correctly so I wouldn't go on thinking I was saying it right and compound the mistake. And then in the opposite end there are people like this old guy who will pick on every tiny little mistake that even native speakers make and never say anything nice about your Japanese. Someone makes a speech in their second langauge, you gotta expect a few mishaps.

Well, I am just very very relieved to have it all over and done with now. Now what am I going ot do with all my time? Christmas shopping I guess! Tonight B and I are heading out to the AEON mall in Kurashiki to do some of that. And sometime this week I am going to go to the doctor to sort out my finger. I'll post a picture of it later on, it's all swollen and stuff for no reason. Weird. Hmm, it's 10 already and I haven't done any work, better get on to that!

Blurk

Yeah so the bloody speech is tomorrow. Gonna spend all of tonight reading the thing aloud over and over so I can say it fluently when I get up there tomoz. I wanna say I'm all over it, but frankly that would be a LIE.

Eek.

Summersummer

38 degrees in Adelaide today. I wanna go home!!

Lala Land

Last night I watched Million Dollar Baby in Japanese. Not the whole thing because it didn't start until late and I didn't want to watch the sad bit and then go to bed, might make sad dreams. So I switched it off at about 10:30 and thought up my own ending to the film. Might as well do it with a movie if you can't in real life. Like if today were a movie I would turn it off right now, just before I have to go over to the kindy, and instead I would be leaving for Kansai airport from where I would fly anywhere warm and all my friends would be there and we'd be down on the beach mucking around all day.

It's all very dull over here

Last night I went with the woman from the BOE who is organising my speech to buy prizes for the quiz. We went to a shop called Trend which sells imported goods. Oh, it was like being in food heaven in there. Real cheese, real meat (they even had turkey!), HEAPS of Aussie wines, chocolate, Berri fruit juice and all sorts of lollies and things that just made me feel SO homesick. They didn't have Coopers though or I would have come home with a lot more than what I did. I managed to limit myself to one bottle of red and some dried apricots (first time I've seen them in Japan) - although I ate the apricots last night, I didn't drink the bottle of red... Maybe tomorrow night. It was bloody long drive though. The shop is near Kurashiki which really isn't that far from here, but it took us over 2 hours to make the trip. We had a bit of a chat in the car about various things and I managed to dob everyone in who is teaching extra private English classes on the side... oops. Well, it's not as though the're going to do anything about it when the Mayor's wife is the one who is providing the classrooms and encouraging everyone to teach, she still gets on my case about it.

That's about the only excitement this week. Things are really very dull over here. Maybe sometime in about 3 weeks I'll have some real happening to report...

School stuff

I'm just sitting through another meeting. This one's about the year 2 demonstration class. Every now and then each year level will have to do a demo class and the other teachers come and watch and take notes and afterwards they have a meeting like today to discuss it. The teachers give feedback and impressions about what they saw, the teacher who was running the class answers questions they have and explains what they are trying to acheive with the activity they were teaching and so on. Generally all the meetings are a pain in the arse for me because I really just don't care what happens with the kids. But I do reckon it's a good idea for the teachers to see what each other are getting up to and how they are teaching various things. In Japan primary school teachers can be teaching year 1 one year and then year 6 the next year so it's good that they get a chance to see what's going on in other grades regularly I think. I've never taught in Australia but I did do work experience at a primary school when I was in year 10 and I don't remember the teachers having so much dialogue about what they were teaching and how and so on, they seemed to be very much left to their own devices. Perhaps it would be better if teachers had more opportunity at home to watch each others classes. I had some pretty awful teachers in primary school and if they had been observed by other teachers in the school maybe they might have been discovered and kicked out earlier. Of course it probably works the other way too and teachers get criticised too much by their workmates. I remember when I had to do a demo English class with the year 5 teacher at Nishi, in the meeting afterwards they got fully stuck into it. They asked me for my opinion at one stage right out of the blue, I wasnt even listening to them really. I said that I didn't think it was too great that the Japanese teacher did most of the teaching because they cant speak English and they got quite upset about that. Nishi is the only school that insists on having the Jap teacher running the English classes - it just makes no sense at all but they won't be budged on it. So I can see how some teachers might take the opportunity to just get stuck into those they don't like, as Iishi did with me.

I get an A for fun games.

It's report writing time for all the teachers here so classes have been shortened by 5 minutes each so they have more spare time at the end of the day. It makes a surprisingly big difference to the time we have in class. Usually the kids, especially the younger ones don't arrive until 5 minutes into a period and then they take time to sit down and shut up between each activity so now we are only really getting about 15 minutes worth of game time in. I'm just doing revision classes anyway so it's not a big deal - especially for the bigger kids who I am only too glad to be seeing the back of ;)

Ok, really going to work on my speech now. Gonna send it off to the woman at the BOE who asked me to make the stupid thing so she can check my grammar and stuff and see exactly what kind of absymal this whole event is going to be. If she cries I take no responsibility for it.

The EXAM

It all went as expected mostly. There were a few questions that I know I got wrong because afterwards I remembered the right answer - invariably it was something really stupid that I know very well and just stuffed up for fun. The kanji questions can be like that because it's multiple choice and the question will be asking you fill in the appropriate kanji for a word and the choices will all be extremely similar, maybe only 1 or 2 strokes different which can make you think twice. And think twice I did. But the listening part was so easy. There was only one question that I wasn't absolutely positive about so that gave me a bit of a boost heading into the grammar and reading section. That is the last and worst portion of the exam. It goes for an hour or so and I always run out of time. This time I went to the back and did the short sentence questions first and left the big reading comprehension ones for last. It really was just speed reading by the end. Actually the content of the comprehension passage was heaps interesting and I spent too long trying to understand every work because I was enjoying reading it! Oops. It was all about how to nap effectively. Apparently if you are going to nap and wake up feeling refreshed you should either take short 20 minute naps so you wake before you fall into heavy sleep, or you should sleep for just under 2 hours so you go through the first 90 minute sleep stage where your brain is shutting down and then give it 20 minutes or so of just resting so you wake up feeling better rather than more sleepy. But if you don't have time to nap you can just close your eyes for a few minutes because using your eyes works your brain very hard so just closing them gives your noggin a bit of a rest! Who wouldn't be interested in how to get more rest?

There were many people there, hundreds. I was surprised because the test in Adelaide had only about 30 people rock up. There were 60 people per room and about 20 or so rooms full up. Mostly they were Chinese, but a few westerners like me. After the first section, kanji and vocab, the staff who were in our room were mucking around for ages and couldn't add up the answer sheets properly so we couldn't leave the room until it was already too late to go out and get any fresh air which was a bit shit. A lot of people were complaining loudly about this. Personally I think they gave us too much time between the sections anyway. The exam started at 9:15, but the first 15 minutes of each section was spent listening to the same thing over and over about the warning system, what constitutes cheating and what to do if this, or if that... I didn't get out until 3pm! They gave us an hour break for lunch too. I would have preferred to just keep going until it was all over and then I could have had the rest of the day to myself. As it was I didn't get home until after 5 and that was the end of my weekend. Results don't come out until late February so I am in for a long wait to see how I went. Hopefully the good listening marks will make up for the bad kanji and vocab marks and I can make the 60% I need to pass!

Thanks to those who sent me goodluck for the big event!

Umitobukabutomushi to South Korea

Raaaart. Here I am in Hiroshima on the evening before my big exam studying my little heart out. Haha, yes of course I am joking. I haven't done a skerrick of study in the last week. Unless you count pulling out my kanji book and resting it on my lap while I stared out the window and imagined myself in a time in the near future where I won't have either an exam or a speech looming as study that is. My eye may have caught a glimpse of some grammar drills on Tuesday, but I don't think I even bothered to check whether I had them right or wrong. At this stage I'd rather not know. Let's just do the freaking exam, get back to Okayama and think about the much more pressing issue; talking about my country in the foreign language I seem to have given everyone the impression that I can speak.

But I already feel heaps better just because of the fact that I have just decided to not care about my exam anymore. If I do fail, well I can just take it again next year. If I don't then Yipee! Meanwhile I am thinking about a South Korea trip during my time off. Be bloody cold but anywhere that's not cold is too far to consider for the small amount of time I have off. Plus I have a friend in Seoul who has been waiting for me to fulfill my promise to come and visit for about 8 months now... Time to expand my Korean as well, so far I can only say "I'm hungry", "I'm full" and "me too". Anyway, I shot her an e-mail yesterday asking what the chances are of her having time to hang out with me are and we'll see what happens from there. You can catch a ferry called the Umitobukabutomushi from Fukuoka straight to Pusan, only 3 hours and about $250 return. Not bad aye. The name of the boat is funny cos kabutomushi means "stag beetle" which are those big black beetles with horns on their head and giant pincer arms that the kids at school are obsessed with and keep in plastic boxes filled with dirt and get them out to dangle in my face. And umitobu means kinda "to fly over the sea", it's a hydrofoil so I guess it makes sense but to me it's just funny because of the way I was introduced to the kabutomushi beetle.

Seiza; a crime against humanity

Right-o. So today was the big kindy concert. All the parents rocked up and fought each other in a wonderful display of passive aggressive conversation in order to win the best spot from which to take 2000 photos of their little darling. The trouble with filming concerts and taking photos is that you don't get to enjoy it as much cos you always have a half a mind on the camera. I'm now on about 100 family videos making a little speech about how much fun the kids have learning English (all lies). The principal told me afterwards that I had two white spots on my arse the whole time, which is great beacuse when I was directing the kid sI of cousre had my back to the audience. We figured out it was from sitting down seiza style (when you fold your legs underneath you) and the bottom of the slippers had dust on them which rubbed into the back of my black pants. Nice one. Another reason to just wear your own shoes wherever you like and not to sit in seiza. Hey, another reason not to sit in seiza would be that it is bloody uncomfortble. You all try it tonight. Fold your legs under and sit on your feet - see how long you can do it for before your ankles start hurting from being pressed into the floor by the weight of your upper body, or your knees start feeling like they might split in two. When I was in high school I came over here and had to participate in a traditional tea ceremony. There is little more tedious and mind numbing than this ceremony, a situation which is compounded by the fact that you get very little gratification for participation since real green tea is a foul green broth and as for the "sweets" they serve with it, I'd rather eat brussel sprouts for dessert. We had to sit in seiza the whole time and by the end of it my legs had gone completely numb. I couldn't stand. I had to kind of fall over sideways and push my legs out with my hands until the bloody could get back in, endure the agony of pin and needles five times worse than any I've ever experienced before, and eventually I could walk again. These days I am much better at seiza. I could do it for a half hour and be fine, a little sore, but able to walk. I thank my ground dwelling lifestyle at home for this. When you don't have anywhere to sit but on the floor while you are watching tv and eating tea your flexibility tends to increase.

Well, the kids did OK today. They were very quiet during the first song but managed to get some genki going for the second one. So now I am just back at school trying to figure out what to do with my kids for next week's classes. Revision time. That's good cos it means I can reuse old games, but I have to remember which ones they liked. Only 3 weeks of classes left at this school!