Last Day of School - for the kids

This morning we had an assembly for the last day of school. The principal gave a little speech about looking after yourself during the break and not getting run over by cars and stuff. At the end of his speech he was supposed to say a few words about me and that was my cue to walk up on stage to give my speech. But he completelyl forgot about me! He just finished up on his flu talk and walked off, the head teacher had to make him go back up on stage and introduce me. I made a short speech thanking the kids for all the letters they wrote me last week and goodbye and goodluck. Then a year 5 kid came up as a representative of the school and read out a farewell letter to me and handed it over. As far as I can see the assembly is the only thing on the agenda for school today, they all go home at 11:40am. Until then they just stuff around I guess, get their reports. I'd forgotten all about grades, report day used to be my favourite day at school. That's just because I was a bit of a swot in high school though. It soon wore off after I started uni though!

So today is the 1 year anniversary of my arrival in Japan... This time a year ago I was probably struggling up any one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs installed in train stations specifically to annoy baggage ladden foreigners. In 5 days time I am facing the exact same struggle in reverse. It will come as no surprise to you all that I am very eager to be out of here. But there are some things I will miss about this place. The first thing that jumps to mind is the lack of spiders and creepy crawlies here. I have not seen a single spider inside my house since I arrived! I have had tiny flying insects and the occasional alarmingly huge cockroach and have had one Jesus Bug living in my bath. But on the whole, a very peaceful existence on the unwanted house guests front. Another thing would be the cheap and abundant ice cream - seriously I will not be able to pay $3.50 for an ice cream at home after paying only 70c here! I will miss the clean, prompt train service (although not paying for it), the most extensive recycling system I've ever encountered and the 100yen Shop - Daiso. Man, we really need Daiso in Oz. You can buy just about anything you need from there, for only a dollar. All my towels, crockery, cutlery, toiletries, cleaning products, everything that usually costs way more than you think necessary, you can get for cheap at the Daiso. The $2 shop is like a beggar's garage sale compared to the Daiso.

I will miss my mates down in Hiroshima. Perhaps if I had lived a little closer it would have been a funner year. I always have a good time with them and especially now that my Japanese is good we can actually have real conversations now. I will miss speaking Japanese, and being surrounded by it. Although sometimes it annoys me with it's fussy rules, there are many times when the first word that pops into my head for a situation is Japanese, because it's simply more economical than English. For example rather than saying "Did you eat?" I can just say "Tabeta?" Three words in one, easy :) Having said that it will be nice to get back to an English speaking environment and stymie the first language attrition that has reduced my speech to garbled sentences full of hesitations and gaping holes where a very good word I used to know would ordinarily go. Seems a bit of a waste to become so proficient and then just put it all on the shelf, but short of becoming a high school Japanese teacher (yuck), or spending more time in Japan (yuck) there's not much I can do about that. Plenty of other langauges to learn anyway!