The staffroom is not cosy

I finally managed to sneak a photo of the staffroom chaos to show you all. Taken from my desk, this show the amount of scheduling mania that occurs here. Up the front are the principal and vice-principals desks, behind which is The Blackboard which has a monthly planner and also a day-by-day schedule which tells me how many dull meetings I will need to attend and the like. You may also notice that each desk has an actual mound of books and paper and shit on it, most teachers also have a little shelf under their desk too, where I put my feet. The homeroom teachers also have a desk full of crap in their classrooms too. I don't have a photo of my desk but it is easy to describe; empty. I don't know about anyone elses primary school, but my school's staffroom was quite different. More of a teachers' retreat; lounges, a fridge, sink and coffee machine, no desks or schedules and what not. I think they had an overhead projector in the corner but I am dubious as to whether it was ever used. It was the sanctuary for the adults and being admitted in there was a great honour and really quite scary. The kids here run in and out of the office willy nilly. Sometimes they stand behind me and watch me type saying hayai!! (fast).

The whale issue

The school menu for June was released today. June 15: Whale. Eek. Now you know I have to eat it. I am not a vegetarian. I have no qualms about eating dead animals so how can I possibly take a stand against this particular animal? It's like 'vegetarians' who eat fish... four legged animals are somehow more worth taking a stand over than aquatic ones? But vegetariansim is a slippery slope at the best of times. Where do you stop? At some point you have to draw a line and say "this organism is not intelligent enough for me to care about its being eaten." Clearly for me anything that is edible is fair game.

Before coming to Japan I never really thought about it much. For some reason there is a disproportionately high number of vegetarian Westerners living in this area, some of whom eat fish and some who don't (I don't know what the hell they are eating though because virtually everything in this country is in some way fish-based). For me the whole meat eating thing is a non-issue I think. For a great many years humans have been eating meat, hunting and killing animals. Why would I stop just because society has found a more efficient way of finding said meat than running through the bush with spears? Yes, this is what I think, I have discovered today. It is good I think to check your opinions on such matters occasionally. Sometimes your opinions change so you have to keep updated. I could be a meat eating vegetarian for all I know!

Anyway, in summation. I will eat the whale for 3 reasons;
1) I try not to be a hypocrite
2) I am curious about the taste
3) If I don't eat it I will be very hungry indeed on June 15

The lunch woman told me that a previous CIR refused to speak to her because she served whale meat. I speak to the lunch woman. She's friendly and I am sure she has never been whaling, I am even sure that if the menu were up to her she would not serve whale because frankly, it isn't that popular any more. I suggested that they add kangaroo to the menu and their horror was something approximate to that I encounter in Aussies when I say I will eat whale. Hmm.

Undoukai goes off with a bang

Ah, the much awaited sports day finally arrives! Here we have the grade 4 relay baton exchange. The relay was the only real sports involved in the day. Other than that there was a lot of dancing and game playing. I was only involved in one event; The Ball in the Bowl. Our team lost. Bugger. It was fun though because I got paired up with one of my favourite kids. (yes I have favourites). For all the planning and general running around crazy-like that was happening over the past month, it was a very ordinary day though. I had to be at the school at bloody 7am to help set up tables and etc which of course was acheived in about 10 minutes because it usually doesn't take 15 grown adults an hour to move 20 tables 10 metres and tie a few signs up. But oh we felt really prepared because we got up super early on a Sunday. Luckily it hadn't rained much overnight so we didn't have to resort to mopping the sports field (see pictured patch of gritty dirt) using newspaper and towels which was the plan discussed at the What if it rains?? meeting we had late Saturday arvo. In the end the weather was good; not wet, not too hot and a little breeze so all the weather updates we had been getting from all angles every hour on the hour for the past week seemed even more ludicrous than when they had been happening.

One great thing that happened was during the tug of war picture left two kids ran into each other while racing to pick up the rope and bounced off each other and fell arse over in the dust. It was hilarious although I don't think I was supposed to laugh. At lunch time the kids all sat and ate with their parents and we retreated to the staffroom. The teachers were a bit overwhelmed by the dads being there too I think. Usually the school only sees the mothers of the kids so when the dads rock up they don't really have anything to say to them because a)they don't know whose parent they are and b) they don't know anything about them. But the kids were heaps excited about it and kept saying, "Look that's my dad!" In the end the white team won by 9 points which they didn't seem extremely excited about, just pleased I would say. They had organised cheers and the like, but when they won a game or something they never seemed particularly delirious with the joy of success, only about half of them would bother doing the bonzai (which was the designated way to celebrate a win as written in the schedule). Except the grade 1s, they were heaps excited about everything and even the losing team jumped around during their bonzai. In all I found it was a much more sedate affair than the sports days I remember as a child. But perhaps that is because I was a child then and clearly am trying not to be now... It wasn't an awful day. Especially when you consider that we had drinks afterwards in Shin-Kurashiki followed by karaoke. Can't go wrong.

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.

Why not take a cruise to Terra Australis?

For today's L&L time I reduced the entire saga of the First Fleet and British convict transportation to Australia down to a 5 minute story board. History has never looked so wonderful. A bunch of black and white striped people board a romantic looking ship in merry England, go for an 11 month cruise via Africa and various tropical islands before arriving in sunny Sydney Harbour in time to see Guy Sebastian perform at the Opera House. 218 years in the blink of an eye. The teachers loved it. Turns out most of them had little idea about Aussie history and while being vaguely aware of some connection we have with England they never quite realised what it stemmed from. No, we don't just think they have cute accents, they are us. Well, some of us... unfortunately explaining the concept of multiculturalism is too much for one week's L&L, I will attempt that one next week. Yes, I gave them a "to be continued..." today. Keep em all on the edge of their seats.

Meanwhile preparations for the school sports day continue at a frantic pace. Every single facet of the day has been rehearsed beyond belief. I reckon they even made the kids practice their Sport Day Poo. I am a participant in the "ball in the bowl" event which sees me jump on a wooden board to fling a ball up in the air which my partner (grade 4 Haruna-chan) has to catch in a bowl. We have practiced this. There don't seem to be any sports events though, not like athletics or anything, just a bunch of games. There are two teams, redhats and whitehats. I am in Redhats I think. I don't have a red hat though, only a green one. There are so many ways in which I don't fit in here; I also won't have my T-shirt tucked into the waistband of my trackie daks (which are pulled up Tommy McHighpants style), nor a towel around my neck, nor I fear, will I be spending any time in the sun without my sunnies on. Such a rebel.

I resist the charms of kittens

Today at lunch the kids realised that I am practically a walking dictionary when it comes to English words that they don't know and the whole time while we were eating they kept asking me what all the food was called in English. Trouble was that most of the food we ate today was actually Western in origin and so when they asked me "What's potato chipusu in English?" They were invariably disappointed to hear it was almost exactly the same. I was trying to explain that the foods generally keep their title from the country of origin, we don't call sushi "raw fish rolled in rice" just like they don't have Japanese names for Coke or hamburger. At least todays dessert was an improvement on yesterday's quarter of a lemon; we had icecream wrapped in mochi which is an absolutely revolting white substance made out of beans (I think, I hate it so much I am loathe to waste any of my time actually finding out how it's made). That little dessert is Japan in a nutshell for me; the great part is completely innaccessible without labouring through the rather horrid exterior.

Last night I went for a walk over the hill and far away and ran into the ocean! Well, more of a sea really, but I didn't realise Kamogata was this close to the water. I also got pounced on by 2 kittens while reading the Yoroshima town map. They were so cute and clearly very hungry (or very good actors, which I could easily believe because such is the craftiness of cats) and I wanted to take em home. But thought they were probably disease ridden already and besides which, where would I put them? So I left them to their inevitable fate of being run over by cars or eaten by stray dogs. There are so many stray cats around here, but I am yet to see a stray dog... must be because the Japs are obsessed with dogs. There is a massive industry in this country that simply caters for dogs; clothing, food, grooming. I saw a shop once where you could buy yourself and your dog matching outfits, including shoes. This kind of hilarity is the icecream part of Japan.

Quack-o

Making the news this morning in Okayama; a duckling that can paddle backwards. There was even an interview with a random elderly lady who looked extremely pleased with herself and said (somewhat predictably), "I have been coming to this park and watching the ducks for 12 years and I have never seen one go backwards before." Then they went to the trouble of ringing a "duck specialist" up and asking him what he thought to which he replied, "Hmm, I have never heard of such a thing before. It is strange." Then they cut back to the studio and the newreaders had to pretend to be all interested and surprised about a duck being able to reverse. I just feel so blessed to be living in the part of Japan that is home to such clever ducks.