I ate Bert's leg

You know you have a big piece of chocolate when you have to cut it up with a knife because it's too hard for your teeth to get through. This was my main preoccupation last night. I put the big choccie frog that a friend sent me in the fridge and when I tried to eat him (just a little bit), it was too hard to get my teeth through, they just left little knawing marks on the edge, like the mice had been at it. So I had to get the big kitchen knife out and cut his leg off. Even that took a while. I really felt like I earned that chocolate.

KFC takes a religious turn

Last night the "Hee!" show was on and there were a couple of interesting things on there. The first hilarious one was the revelation that KFC in Japan holds a memorial service at a temple once a year to pay tribute to the millions of chickens that it kills and serves up secret recipe style! They even showed the ceremony, all these grey hairs in black suits rocked up and were greeted at the entrance by a life-size plastic Colonel with that benign grin on his face. They placed a big KFC bucket on the shrine altar and prayed and stuff!! It was hilarious. And afterwards there was a group photo, of course, and the Colonel was in it too!!

Another interesting thing was someone has discovered that if you speed up the tape of a certain sumo wrestler of foreign origin talking by 1.3 times, it is easier to understand. Personally I didn't see the difference, but all the Japs were saying it was heaps easier to hear him when they sped him up, like a chipmunk. They had the explanation from the "expert" at the end, usually some weedy looking man in a white lab coat from Kyoto or Tokyo University who said that the average Japanese voice is 115htz, while this mans normal speaking voice was about 80htz. So when they sped him up and his voice went up a few octaves, it reached the level that Japs are used to listening to, which is why they found it easier to understand.

I think the KFC trivia won with about 75 Heee!s. This show is about the only one on all week that I actually do find interesting. There is one guy called Minomonta, who hosts about 6 different shows, all on different networks and also appears on others. All up he does about 35 hours a week on air! That has to be worse than our Eddie Maguire, although, he does host Who Wants to be a Millionaire like Ed! I have no idea why he is so popular, he looks like he hasn't slept for about 5 years, which wouldn't surprise me if it were true considering he is on when I wake up and when I go to bed.

Tyhoon day!

Outani sensei just told me that if there is a typhoon here the kids get the day off of school but the teachers don't!! What the hell? So it's too dangerous for the kids to come to school, but the teachers? Oh, they'll be fine, besides, who is going to guard the school against destruction if they aren't there?? Besides the obvious question; what is the point in our being at school if the kids aren't? Apparently there will be a typhoon next Monday or Tuesday. Personally I am taking it all with a pinch of salt. It doesn't usually get very typhoony in this area. We had a few when I was living in Hiroshima, but not very bad, just blew a few umbrellas around and cancelled uni for a few days. She did say that if my house gets blown over, or a tree is blocking all of the roads to school then I don't have to come in... I wonder if they find many trees have "fallen over" after a very straight crack has appeared near a scattering of sawdust... But that wouldn't happen because now that I think about it, there actually aren't that many tall trees around the roads, you would have to line up a few small ones. Better option is to flood my house...

Flat tyres and stuff constitute excitement

What a bit of excitement today! Last night I went to the servo wanting to put some air in my tyres, I noticed that one of the rear ones was looking a little deflated recently. Most servos here will do everything for you and you just sit in your car and wait. But since I didn't need any petrol it was a little bit dodgy because they had to run around my car filling it with air, a service for which I wasn't going to pay. Lucky for them they discovered that the valve on the flat tyre in question was dodgy and they couldn't pump it up. So I had them fix it for me. While I was waiting the the older guy who was in charge was making coversation with me, all quite pleasant and when I left he said, "come back and play sometime." It was heaps cute, like I had stopped there just to have a chat rather than to fix my car. But this morning I WAS back! My neighbour's car had a flat this morning! He asked me to drive him to the servo to organise them to fix it and then I drove him to school.

I rang the school from my car and told the vice principal I would likely be a few minutes late and he said no worries. But obviously he didn't tell my immediate superior because she said good morning and then made a point of looking at her watch, as though I was terribly late. I was 3 minutes late. And considering that I usually come to work before 8 when I don't even have to be here until 8:15 I think she was over reacting a bit. This is how I know that she isn't really as friendly as she makes out, because as soon as there is any tiny opportunity for her to tell me off, she will. It was tough, but I didn't say anything. What is the point anyway, I know there was a legitimate reason for my tardiness, and so does the big boss.

Engrish engrish

2 of my classes have been cancelled today so I am doing nothing all morning! It's great. I wish there was some way I could sneak into town and post off my passport to get my visa fixed up for my holiday. Maybe I could build a scarecrow likeness of myself and sit it at the desk in the English room... the chances of someone actually wanting to talk to me in person are slim to none. I really think I spend more time doing nothing than something at work here. I have drawn up a list of things I could do during the summer holidays while the kids are all away. I am going to send it to Hirai at the Board of Education and hopefully something will come of it, although I doubt it. They don't take kindly to suggestions because it hints that perhaps you know better than they do - and that's never a thing you should bring to the attention of your employer. These things include making a correct English translation of the curriculum here and fixing the many spelling and grammatical errors on the English version of the town website. They have 7 native English speakers (well, 5 technicallly since Mario and Phillipe are native Spanish speakers) here and yet they still manage to publish a website advertising their town with text that seems to have been translated by Yahoo.com

They keep talking about how they want the new Asaguchi City to be ahead of its neighbours in English teaching and international relations but don't seem to think that idea is negated at all by advertising themselves in broken English. You'd think for the amount of money they pay us they'd be working us to the bone over issues like this, but they seem to have this attitude that they know best, even in matters of English grammar.

Toothfairy

I told the year 1s about the toothfairy today. They flipped out. I guess it does sound kind of strange when you explain it to someone who has never heard about it before. You take your tooth, put it in a glass of water and in the morning it has turned into a $1 coin! Magic! Of course I left out the important bit about mum or dad sneaking in and doing the swap, which possibly made the story sound quite a lot more interesting than it would be otherwise. Even though they were saying "I can't believe it.", they did believe it. They think we have a God of Teeth in Australia and are wondering why they don't have one here. Clearly they are missing out. Apparently in Japan you just throw your tooth away. If it came out of the top jaw you throw it down, if it came out of the bottom jaw you throw it up (whereupon it goes down eventually anyway so it seems like a waste of time to me), but it doesn't magically turn into anything else, you just get a hole in your mouth!

When I said "Oh, so you just throw it away!" They were all very quick to correct me and say, "Not throw away, just throw." Semantics.

country life

Last night for the first time I slept in the second room of my house. It is the room where until now I have been keeping my clothes and I guess would be the actual bedroom. And now IS the bedroom! It's destiny has been fulfilled. It was a bit like going on holiday, to sleep in a different room. There were no mosquitoes in there though so it was a better option than the loungeroom where I have been unrolling my futon every night until now. I left the window open because it is quite humid nowadays and during the night it started bucketing down. Japanese houses don't really do the eaves thing, so the rain just came straight through the flyscreen and I woke up with a moist doona. The rain is so noisy, even though I have a floor above me so I don't get the rain on the roof noises, there were all kinds of loud dripping and drumming noises going on. It rained like this from 6am when I woke up initally until 9am when I left for the station. When I reached the station it stopped of course. I guess because of the rain, this country is so green. Everything is green green green, even the rice paddys have been planted now so they are sprouting green fuzz. And there are frogs everywhere, big ones, little ones and they are so noisy. At night unless I am really buggered it is hard to get to sleep because they are all out there creaking and croaking away in all their different languages. When I go for a walk they jump onto my legs and scare the hell out of me, or jump under my foot and make a murderer out of me. (Do we call that amphibicide?) There are some really big ugly ones too that remind me of cane toads, I saw a flat one on the road yesterday and smirked at it, even if they aren't pests here I still feel disgust towards them. The air always smells like rain, even when it isn't raining. Except of course when one of my pyromaniac neighbours is burning their rubbish under my window.

I don't know anything about rice growing. Over the last month people have slowing been filling thier small fields with what looks like long grass in painstakingly straight rows which they acheive with a funny little ride on sewing machine. The fields aren't that big so I wonder how they justify the cost of purchasing such a machine. Most people have a field probably the size of 2 cricket pitches. Althogh perhaps they have more than one field in differnet areas. It's not like the country in Australia where one persons's property stretches over 100s of kilometres, here the land is all divided up, and dotted in between houses of families who have no interest in farming there will be a paddy field which is tended by someone who lives in the next suburb. I only ever see old people working in the fields. So I cannot tell if the fields are a hobby to keep grandma and grandpa busy, or if they are actual income for the family and when the older people die the family will keep it going. It seems a big stretch for salaryman Bob to quit his highly paid suit job and go trudge around in a rice paddy all day. And I also don't know where the rice goes. Is this the rice that ends up on the supermarket shelf or is this just for their own personal consumption? I don't know how much rice one tiny little paddy like that can yield, it doesn't seem like it would be very profitable. Perhaps all these issues are the reason why the rice farmers are so well subsidised and protected by the government. There is no imported rice in Japan and there is not likely to be any. Without the guaranteed market and heavy subsidies, how could such small farmers turn a profit? So good luck Little Johnny trying to get Koizumi to let you export Aussie rice here.