Welcome to Japanese Summer

Welcome to Japanese summer….where you wake up sweating.  Then you go to work and sweat some more.  Then you come home and work out (just in case you hadn’t already sweated enough).  Then you take a cold shower and finally go to bed with a fresh layer of sweat.  Repeat day after day.

I can handle the heat waaaaaaaaaaaaay better than I can the cold, and you’ll hear me complaining significantly less in the summer.  HOWEVER, today has just been miserable!  It’s been one of those days when even the windows open and the breeze rolling in doesn’t get rid of that sticky heat.  I’m not a person who sweats a lot, but today I had a huge circle of sweat around my waist and upper back that never really disappeared.  Totally awesome.  Just call me Sweaty-sensei.

The air conditioner has yet to be turned on in the teacher’s room, and it only gets turned on in the classrooms if the current teacher teaching deems it to be on.  Luckily for me, Mr. Fujiwara has a low heat tolerance, so for the past two afternoons, I’ve had afternoon classes on the third floor, and the air conditioner was turned on both times.  It was nice, and after going so long without air conditioning, it was like, “OOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHH, so THAT’S what it feels like to not be hot!”  *sigh* I will NEVER complain about being hot/cold in a temperature controlled building EVER again once I get home.  Promise!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Japanese drivers are some of the craziest!  I’ve seen just about everything, but two recent experiences really made me bend over in laughter.  We were in Yatsushiro a few weekends ago, and as we hit a stop light, we rolled up beside a giant Hummer with nice chrome rims and a shiny paint job….a total testosterone filled guy car.  (Since half of Japan’s streets are so narrow, having a Hummer in this county is ridiculous, but I guess that’s beside the point….)  The guy was totally jamming out to American music on his incredibly loud sound system.  Anyone want to guess what he was jamming out to? 

Heavy metal?  No. 

Rock and Roll?  No. 

Beethoven’s 5th symphony?  ….Almost as crazy. 

It was Selena Gomez!  Mr. Testosterone was bopping his head and mouthing the words to “A Day Without Rain.”  You have my full permission to laugh hysterically now.  The second story is that we were driving around Hitoyoshi last weekend, and we passed by a car in which there was a white cat resting on the dashboard right above the steering wheel.  I’m not joking!  We know it was real because we saw it move.  The woman driving really didn’t seem surprised by it at all…..just a typical day driving a car with a cat on the dashboard.  Talk about a driver distraction!!  I wish that I had a video/picture of either one of these things, but both happened too quickly for me to capture it!

Today is our 3rd anniversary.  Hurray!  However, Ian’s in the city for work, so we won’t get to see each other.  Booooo!  I wrote in the last blog about how we had peach chicken for our anniversary celebration dinner on Monday, but I didn’t get to write about how the kids reacted to me taking the leftovers for lunch the following day.  I ate lunch with my 2nd graders at the JHS, and everyone is usually curious about what the foreigner packed for lunch.  I told them that it was peach chicken.  They said “EEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHH?” so I repeated it in both English and Japanese.  They were completely curious and baffled why you would mix chicken with peaches.  As I ate bite after bite, they looked at me with disgust as if I was picking my own boogers and eating them.  Peach chicken=delicious, y’all!

I guess it would only make sense for me to have the following dream on our anniversary.  I dreamed that we got pregnant, hurray!  Not only were we blessed with one bundle of joy but TWO!  We were having twins!  How exciting is that?  Awwww, it was a sweet anniversary dream.  This dream couldn’t get any better, right?  WRONG!  The best part of the dream was that IAN was the one who was pregnant with twins, not me!  HAHAHAHAHA!  I laughed so hard when I woke up!

Anyway, that’s all for now!  I’ll catch you again later!