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?