It’s a frigid day here in Yunomae. When I woke up this morning, I could hear the wind whipping around the side of the house……never a good sign. Despite the fact that I can literally see my schools from my front door, I decided to drive to work today instead of biking. It’s been snowing all morning, and watching the kids’ excitement is delightful. The ground is too warm for it to stick, but that doesn’t stop the kids from getting excited about it. Who can blame them? We’re so far south that it rarely snows. It would be the same excitement that school children in Louisiana or Mississippi would feel if it snowed there. I will say that it is very weird to watch snow falling on palm trees. You can barely even see it in the pictures below, but it’s there….I promise! I’ll make Ian post better pictures with his big fancy camera later.
I’ve been in a really good mood this week. I’m not sure why, but I’m liking it! It started off with Sunday. We wanted to make sure and skype people last weekend since we’re going to Okinawa this weekend. While I woke up around 9:30AM, no one really got online until 11AM. However, once we started skype, we didn’t get off until around 3:30PM. The weekends are really the only time I have to catch up with people, so when I get the opportunity to talk, I want to! Sunday night I usually spend dreading the inevitable Monday morning. However, I never had that sense of dread. On Monday morning, I never felt the normal Monday blues. It was nice!
I got invited to a UNESCO event in Kumamoto later this month by one of my English teachers on Monday morning. I’m not exactly sure what the acronym stands for, but it’s a division of the United Nations that deals with cultural things. Ms. Fuchita was telling me about this event on February 26th. It is for students and ALTs. Basically, we all board a bus, and the driver takes us to different cool places in the area. I told Ms. Fuchita that yes, of course I would like to do that!
In class on Monday, we covered American gestures. There is a page in the back of the book which has some guy from the eighties with his bangs and neon blue polo showing that a thumb’s up means “good,” thumb’s down means “bad,” shrugging your shoulders and having your hands palms up in the air means “I don’t know,” and other gestures. After we covered those, my teacher asked me if there were any other gestures that Americans used. Is it sad that the first gesture that came to my mind was the middle finger?? 
Of course I didn’t show that one, but it was the first thought that popped in my head! haha! Also on Monday, I had a very close call with a snack. I had a snack cracker at school. When I bit into it, it was just like a normal rice cake cracker, but then I tasted something fishy and shrimpy. I looked down at it, and in the middle of the cracker, little dried pieces of what appeared to be shrimp flakes fell out. I immediately freaked out and walked into the kitchen to spit it out. I rinsed out my mouth as much as I could, but I knew that it was too late, and if it was going to happen, it was going to happen. I waited the typical three to four hours, but luckily I didn’t get sick! 
On Tuesday, I got my reappointment papers at the BOE. I pretty much knew that it was going to happen, but officially, the BOE has reappointed me for another year. Yay! During break time on Tuesday, I was taking down my January English board and hanging up my February one. A couple of third grade girls (really ninth grade) started talking to me. We were talking about texting lingo, and they knew omg, so I threw out brb, lol, bb, and a few others. One girl asked me about mf. I gave her a strange look, but she said mf again. I kind of let it slip and said, “Do you mean mother fluffer (but the real words)?” From that point on, they might as well have been four-year-olds learning any four letter word. They repeated it, and I said, “no, no no!” but they just said it louder. They knew it was a bad word. One girl was laughing and saying that she was going to go tell one of my English teachers what I had just taught them. Once that moment passed, I showed them pictures from my board. They really liked my featured foreigner of the month, my brother, Aaron. They said that he was cute. They asked if he had a girlfriend. When I pointed at a picture of him and his dog and said “girlfriend, “ they thought it was funny. One girl told me that she “liked” Ian. In Japanese, there’s not really a difference between “like” and “love,” so when she said that she “liked” Ian, I feigned anger and put up my fists to mock fight her.
Tuesday was my dad’s birthday, so I told him that we went to Baskin Robbins to celebrate. In reality, we met up with Melissa B. and Justine for ice cream because every 31st of the month is a 31% off discount on ice cream. That’s too good of a deal to pass up! I don’t know if it was just a coincidence or we really were at fault, but it was packed when we got there, and after we sat down to eat our ice cream, it seemed like business just died. Regardless, our ice cream was delicious! I had a scoop of tea and scones and one of Italian cannoli. The first was just okay, but the cannoli was perfect. We sat and talked until a little after 8PM.
My day is just about to end, so I’ll finish up tomorrow.
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