Holy crap, I live in Japan!

Sometimes I have these moments when I'm like, "holy crap!  I live in Japan."  I had one of those yesterday in class.  It wasn't anything big, and nothing really happened to make me think that, but it was just a overwhelming "wow" feeling.  :) 

Next week is Silver Week, and I'm excited!  It's two three day weekends in a row, and it'll be a nice break.  We don't really have big plans for either weekend.....yet.  We want to budget and be responsible, so if we do anything, it won't be too big.  It stinks that if we go anywhere, it's double the cost, so if a beach party weekend cost 2,500 yen (Remember, that's yen not dollars!), it' actually 5,000 yen for the Reeds.  :(  We had to pay a lot of start up fees....you know how much it costs to move somewhere with the initial fees.  We're beginning to level out, but we still need to transfer money back to the States soon.  Regardless, if we do anything over Silver Week, it probably won't be anything huge.  We're thinking of going to the Drunken Horse Festival in Kumamoto on Sunday.  Why the heck not??  ;)

I mentioned yesterday that it was the harvest moon.  My English teacher explained that it's not a huge holiday in Japan, more so in China, but it's like Flag Day in the States.  As in, someone might mention
that's it's Flag Day, and you think, "Why yes, it is Flag Day," and carry on about your day.  My English teacher told me that you're supposed to eat bean paste to celebrate the harvest moon.  Bean paste is not as terrible as it sounds.  I like it.  It's put in a lot of sweets.  Ian says that it tastes like sugar and nothing, which is actually a really good way to describe it.  :)  Last night after dinner, we had our bean paste cakes to celebrate the harvest moon.

Another thing that we did last night was play barber shop.  :)  Ian needed his hair cut but was afraid to go to an actual barber shop here.  I told him I'd cut it.  I've never cut hair before other than my or my sister's bangs every once in a while when we were younger.  However, Ian trusted me to do it.  I made a deal with him that if I screwed it up, he could shave it all off.  We moved the desk chair into the shower area.  That first snip was the trickiest.  I didn't think I was doing THAT bad of a job.  Granted, it was taking much longer than it would for a regular barber, so Ian suggested that I use his beard trimmer to get the sides.  The only bad thing about that was that it got the sides waaaaaaaay too short, so we had to shorten it on top as well.  It doesn't look too bad, but Ian's hair is definitely shorter than normal!  lol.  I probably cut off a pound of hair.  There was a lot in the shower area, and it took us a good 15 minutes to sweep and vacuum up all of the hair. 

Today I went to one of my nursery schools.  I love Tuesdays for that reason.  Good Lord, nursery school kids are adorable.  Today we reviewed colors and played two games.  The first game was a relay race.  All of the colors were on the floor in the front of the class room, and I would call out a color.  One person from each team had to race to the front of the class room and grab the card.  Sometimes it was two close to call, and that's where janken comes to play.  Janken is rock, paper, scissors, but Japanese people use it to solve ALL of life's problems.  Can't decide who actually got the card?  Janken for it.  Having problems deciding who's going to clean the lunch trays?  Janken.  Wondering who will be the first to present a dialogue in class?  Janken.  I heard that in some small village somewhere, the mayor's race was so close that they couldn't decide a clear winner, so they used janken, lol.  It will seriously solve any problem in Japan!  The next game we played was fruits basket.  Holy crap, kids go crazy for fruits basket.  It's a really fun game that you can play to teach anything: colors, numbers, foods, animals, etc.  We played with colors.  Each kid gets a color: pink, black, blue, or yellow.  Each student has a chair except for one.  That person is in the middle and calls out a color, for example pink.  All the kids with pink have to run and steal someone else's chair.  The person that doesn't have a chair calls the next color, etc.  The person in the middle can always say "fruits basket," which makes EVERYONE get up and steal someone else's seat.  This game is fun, but it often turns to mayhem.  Refer to my videos posted on facebook.  :)

Tonight we had two tasks to do when I got off of work: go to the post office for the third time and try to send Landon's birthday package and pay a bill.  Both were interesting tasks.  Ian tried twice to send Landon's package yesterday but failed due to the language barrier.  I told him I'd go with him today and hopefully two heads are better than one.  I sent the package on the counter and simply said, "America."  The ladies were very nice and had us to fill out the customs form and pay.  It was pretty quick and easy.  Paying the bill was a little more tricky.  Every other bill automatically deducts from our account, which is nice.  For some reason, our power bill didn't deduct, and my supervisor gave me the paper copy to pay.  In Japan, you can often pay bills at the ATM, so we went to the bank.  We had absolutely NO IDEA which kanji to push, so we waited until the lady at the ATM beside us finished her transaction and asked for help.  After a failed attempt, she told us we'd have to go to a combini (think7-11) to pay.  Weird, right?  So we went there.  There was an ATM, so we went to that and selected English instructions.  The machine falsely advertised because it said that no English instructions were available.  Fail.  Instead, we asked the cashier for help.  She very easily checked us out at the register.....it was like a weight was lifted off our shoulders!

Which leads me to my last point.  It's weird.  Here, if I don't get my eight hours, I'm seriously dead the next day.  At home, I could get six hours and be fine the next day.  The other day, I got seven hours of sleep, and I had bags under my eyes.  Bags!  Ian and I concluded that the reason sleep is so important here is because it's MENTALLY draining here.  We have to constantly think--figure out what someone is saying, where to go to find ________, how to get to __________, what ________ means, etc.  We are CONSTANTLY thinking and processing things, so our brains REALLY need at least eight hours of sleep to just turn off for a while.


That's all for now.  It's getting late, and I still have a few things to do before I go to bed.