A brief(ish) catch-up of last week

I’m going to try to cover last week as quickly as possible so that I’m all caught up.  I don’t have as much time to blog this week since it’s Golden Week, which means that it’s a three day weekend followed by a four day weekend, giving me a two day work week.     Bonus: I only have my two favorite work days this week, Tuesday and Wednesday.  I get to sleep in both days until 8:30, visit my nursery/elementary kids, and don’t have my Thursday night class.  Hurray! 

Monday:

Ian had his interview last Monday at 10:30, and I told him to call me as soon as he heard if he got it or not.  I had class until 12:35, but when I got back to my desk, I noticed that he hadn’t called me yet.  I gave him until after my lunch time, 1:15, to call.  I assumed that he had just forgotten about calling.  Since I still hadn’t heard a word from him and was chomping at the bit to do so, I called but got no answer.  I tried back again an hour later with the same result. He finally called me around 3:00 saying that he JUST finished the interview, which turned out to be an interview/training session.  HE GOT THE JOB!  HURRAY!      He’ll be teaching up to three classes a week to factory workers in Nishiki, a town about thirty minutes from Yunomae.  The classes are two hours long each, and the pay is 5,000 yen a class.  Not bad!  I’m sooooooooo proud of him for finding and obtaining this job!

That morning in my 2-1 class we played a game, and I owed prizes to the winners.  A few came to me during the break period, and I assumed that the rest would come sometime that afternoon.  During the break between 5th and 6th period, a few students were milling around my desk looking kind of awkward, and without thinking I whipped out my prizes: a selection of stickers, pencils, American themed post it notes, etc.  The kids looked at each other and then me.  I told them, “Douzo,” which means “go ahead” because usually they’re really shy about snatching a prize.  The girl told me that they weren’t there for me, but for Kyuuma-sensei, the PE teacher who sits beside me.  That’s when it dawned on me that they weren’t even in 2-1; they were third graders!  *face palm*  I was so embarrassed!!

Since Ian wasn’t at home when I got home, I had no distractions and went for a bike ride (below), taking the cycling road again and rode all the way to Asagiri, which took about an hour.  Even though I had a very strong head wind, it was a lovely ride.

When I got home, I started dinner for us, knowing that Ian would be home within the hour.  I wanted it to be super special since we had a pretty good reason for celebrating.  I had stopped by the grocery to pick up a little cake and Coke for celebration time, made a delicious fried rice and caramel drizzle for the cake, actually set the table, colored a “congratulations” banner, and used our nice wine glasses…….. only to have it all go to waste.    As the clock ticked by, I knew that Ian should be home, so I called him.  He said that he was too tired and didn’t feel well, so he had to pull over and take a nap.  When he got home, he looked dreadful and immediately went to the bathroom.  Poor little Ian had food poisoning!  He said that he felt bad all day, but powered through it since he had the interview and had to drive back.    Needless to say, he didn’t want to eat anything and immediately curled in bed.  I asked him if he wanted anything, and he said ginger ale.  I drove to our local conbini and back only to realize that there was a ginger ale he had bought earlier in the day sitting in the passenger’s seat.  Blarg!  I felt so bad for him since he felt awful even though it was such a happy occasion!

Tuesday:  

I had my nursery schools that morning, and I think things are getting a little better at Jikou, where I have younger kids now.  I’m just not used to the extremely shy and quiet type of nursery kids!  At Tobu, all of the kids are always so excited to see me.  One of the kids was making silly faces at me, so I stuck my tongue out at him.  He did the same back at me, but the teacher saw him and said something like “Don’t do that!!”  I was like, “Yeah….don’t do that…..”    Sorry for getting you in trouble, kid!

I was talking to a couple of my third grade girls at the JHS before class that morning, and two girls said that they were best friends and lesbians.  I said “lesbians??”  They nodded.  I’m not sure if they were just wanting to see how I would react to that claim or what, (I highly, HIGHLY doubt they are actually lesbians) but I tried to tell them that no, they weren’t lesbians!

Lunch was great that day because I ate with Obama!  Ha, ha.  A couple of blogs ago I posted about how one of the kids at the JHS is nicknamed Obama, and it just so happens that I ate lunch at his table that day.  (I swear that I’ll eventually get a picture of him!)  I brought my iPhone to lunch that day and played “guess how old Melissa’s family is”.  They love to play that game, and I think it’s rather funny how they have difficulties guessing people’s ages.  It seems like the Japanese look so much younger than they really are until they hit a certain age.  Then once they start to look old, THEY LOOK OLD.  All of my kids are always SOOOOO surprised when I tell them that Grandmother is ninety, Mommy and Daddy are sixty-two, Christina is thirty-one, and Amanda is thirty.  The lowest guess they got for Grandmother was seventy, for Mommy was forty-one, and they thought that Christina was younger than me!  It always makes me laugh!

….and to wrap up Tuesday on a good note, I found out that I won the blog challenge!  Remember how I was a guest blogger and asked you all to visit my friend’s blog so that I could get the most views and win?  Well, I won!  A big THANKS! to all of you who helped me achieve that.  As a result, I won a book!  Woo-hoo!

Wednesday:

I blogged about Wednesday last week, so check out that post, but I have more to add.  We went out to eat with Mary, Justine, and Melissa that night to discuss plans for our trip to Nagasaki at the end of this week.  When we got up to pay, Mary realized that her 30,000 yen (more that $300) had fallen out of her pocket!    We went back and double checked the booth, her car, the parking lot, EVERY WHERE, but it wasn’t there.  Even the sweet waitresses were trying to find it for us.  She said that the ONLY other place it could be was the shopping center that she went to before she met us.  At this point, I’m sure most of you are groaning and thinking about how that’s $300 that she’ll never see again.  If this was America, chances are that would be true.  However, this is Japan, and people are honest here.  She called the shopping center the next day to see if anyone had noticed the missing money.  The person said that yes, a guy had picked it up and turned it into the police.  All Mary had to do was go to the station, fill out some paperwork, and she got her money back.  It was amazing!  None of us could believe that she got that money back!  I really love Japan sometimes. 

Thursday:

Although my schedule said that I only had one class on Thursday, it didn’t stop it from being a difficult day.  I thought that I was going to have the rest of the day to blog or do whatever, but it was a special PTA day at school, and therefore the schedule was out of order.  The PTA in Japan is NOTHING like it is at home.  From what I remember from my own experiences, parents DREAD going to the ONE PTA meeting that’s held each semester.  Here, meetings are often, and the parents are super involved in the school.  I had to attend an hour long meeting that afternoon in the gym with a lot of the parents and rest of the teachers.  The only reason I had to do this was because they needed me to introduce myself to the parents at the end of the meeting with the other teachers.  Therefore, for an hour I sat there spacing out until I introduced myself, which took all of three seconds.  Ridiculous waste of my time. 

Before my Thursday night class, I finally decided to plant my flowers (below, left).  It had rained on Wednesday, so the ground was perfectly moist.  I had bought miniature sunflower seeds at the grocery, and hopefully planted them correctly.  Ian is (surprisingly) much better at this gardening stuff than me.  He showed me how to barely press a finger into the ground, dump in a seed, and gently rake the dirt over it.  By next week, I hope to have a few green sprouts to show you!  I noticed a few poking out of the dirt this morning on my way to school.  Hurray!

 

Ian went with me to my Thursday night class that night and agree that this group (above, right) is 110% better and easier to handle than our last group.  He gave a little self-introduction to the group, and even though he told them that his name was “Ian,” the girls kept calling him “danasan” (husband).    I mean, it’s true.  That’s what he is! 

Friday:

I hung up my May English board (below) during the break period on Friday and was happily surprised when my vice principal came up behind me and started commenting on it.  I told her who each of the people were and about the holidays as best as I could in broken English/Japanese.  I love it when people actually look at my board because so often I feel like it’s all for nothing!

 

After school on Friday, we had to go to the post office.  Those poor, poor post office employees.  I’m pretty sure that whenever they see us walking in, they silently say “oh, crap!”    Usually all I do is send letters to America, but sometimes I have multiple things to do, and trying to explain it in broken English/Japanese is difficult.    We had four different tasks: pay our car taxes, send a letter to Tokyo, send two letters to America, and send a very complicated registered cash envelope.  The first three things were no big deal, but the final one was a pain in the butt which resulted in a thirty minute process.  In order to get our Japanese driver’s licenses, we have to have it translated by the JAF (Japan Automobile Federation) office in Kumamoto City.  It cost 3,000 yen a piece, plus return postage of 380.  Neither one of us have done the registered cash envelope thing in Japan, which is a very delicate procedure.  I was getting so flustered at not understanding each instruction the post office worker was telling me, but luckily Ian was also there to help interpret.  By the time we walked out of that building, I had sweaty palms and prayed to the good Lord that we did everything right!

Our car is so completely ghetto.  Last week we realized that there’s a small leak on the driver’s side, and now the driver’s door handle broke off.    It couldn’t be on the passenger side or the back…..nooooo!  It has to be the ONE side that is ALWAYS occupied.  Blarg!  Ian actually broke it, but he didn’t say anything about it and waited until I pulled on it so that it would seem like I broke it.  What a turd! 

Anyway, that’s all of last week.  Next up are my wonderful Golden Week adventures!