another wonderful blog post

Hello all, and welcome to another wonderful blog post.

One thing that I forgot to mention in the last blog was our shaken.  Shaken in Japan is a mandatory check-up on your car every two years.  Generally, the older your car is, the crappy it is, and the more you have to pay for shaken.  Our shaken is due on November 17th, so we had two options: buy a new car or pay shaken and continue to drive our crappy little one.  At first, we knew we wanted to get a new car.  The word “crappy” doesn’t completely describe how…..special our car is.  However, through the past couple of months, it has grown on us…..like a fungus.  When Brittany visited us, she told us that she had the very same car as us.  She said that despite its crappiness, she only paid a couple of hundred dollars for shaken, and her car didn’t even have wheels at the time.    We know our car sucks, but we’re only going to be here for another year or two, so we didn’t want to buy another car.  I told my supervisor that we would pay shaken, and she made an appointment for us.  When we got our car back, we were VERY surprised of its condition.  It’s white!  This whole time, we thought that it was a dingy yellow color but no.  It’s actually white!  In addition, they cleaned that car WELL.  For the first time in however long, it was vacuumed.  I feel sorry for whoever had to do that.  We haven’t vacuumed it since we got it in August, so I’m sure that whoever did it probably thought that those foreigners are MESSY!!    In addition to just the cosmetics, it runs soooooooooooooo much better.  Instead of sounding like a wheezy old man when it starts, it’s normal.  Instead of engine being run by one hamster wheel, I think there are multiple hamsters for better control now.  I wouldn’t say that it’s like a new car, but we can definitely tell a difference, and we like it!

Last week was a bit dreary and cool.  It started off beautifully.  At the beginning of this weekend, I was wearing a short sleeve blouse and skirt to work.  By the end of the week, I was wearing a sweater and khakis.  Monday and Tuesday were BEAUTIFUL days, but Wednesday it got colder.  This is the first week that I actually had to get out my winter clothes.  On Thursday, I wore a long sleeved blouse to work, and it just wasn’t quite enough, so on Friday, I wore a sweater, and it was nice and warm.  Despite the temperature, that doesn’t stop the school from opening windows and leaving doors to outside wide open, and no one seems to mind that.    Wakarimasen!

Friday was a bit weird.  Right after lunch, I came back down to the teacher’s room to check my email before playing games with my students during the break time, and an alarm went off.  It sounded like a fire alarm.  The vice principal and I were the only people in the teacher’s room at the time, and he jumped up and went to the hall.  I wasn’t sure if it was a fire drill or actual fire (or even IF it was a fire alarm), so I followed behind.  There were students out in the hallway covering their ears, but no one seemed like they were in a rush for the door.  A lot of the teachers crowded around some sort of electronic box in the teacher’s room.  One of the office ladies made a call to what I think was the fire department to tell them NOT to come to the school since it was a false alarm.  I have no idea why the fire alarm went off, but it did, and it was loud and obnoxious. 

During the break time after lunch, I usually roam the halls looking for students to talk to or play games with.  On Friday, I saw that some of the 3rd (really 9th) grade girls were playing some game on the board in which they drew pictures.  I always enjoy watching them draw because everyone here is a fabulous artist!  If they ask me to draw, it’s always fun because I’m horrible, so they laugh at me.    I’m not exactly sure of the rules for the game, but I’m guessing that it was a word association game.  While they played that game, I scanned the room for someone to play with me.  There’s one girl in the 3rd grade class who is ridiculously quiet.  She NEVER speaks to me (no surprise) or any of the other students.  Honestly, I’m not sure if she has friends.  I’m not sure if she’s excluded, or she’s just really shy.  She was sitting at her desk timidly watching the other girls play, so I motioned for her to come over by me.  I think she had a moment of panic as I waved her over because it took her a minute to realize that the big, scary foreigner was actually wanting her and not the person behind her.  I taught her tic-tac-toe, and we played that on the board.  She didn’t grasp the game at first, so I’d have to set her up to win, but by the time we were finished, she was good.  We played for nearly twenty minutes.  I was getting a little bored with it, and I don’t know what she was thinking, but I didn’t want to stop because that might have been the only time she was invited to play with someone.  If she was bored to tears, but continued to play since the big, dumb foreigner made grids on the board so be it, but if I made her day, that makes me happy!   

Friday was national Pocky Day!  What’s pocky, you ask?  Pocky is a Japanese candy.  It’s similar to chocolate covered pretzels.  I saw several friends’ statuses were something about Pocky Day.  At school, one of the math teachers walked in our English class to hand out pocky to everyone.  Ian and I thought that since we’re in Japan, we should definitely embrace this holiday.  Friday night, we had big, fat Friday!  I walked to the super market and bought pizza, coke, and pocky.  We ate the whole pizza (Before you make judgments, the pizza was probably only ten inches in diameter.), drank the 1.5 liters of coke, and ate two small boxes of pocky.  All-in-all, it was a great night.