You're welcome

So I am walking around grocery store looking for something to make for dinner when I hear a small child whining to her parents.

When I am in the child's vision, all of the sudden, she goes quiet and stares.

Because, of course, I am probably one of the most unusual looking people she's seen in her life.

So she stares. Silently.

Of course, this is nothing even remotely unusual for me now, so I smile and wave to the child as I pass.

But this time I realized that my mere existence stopped the little girl from whining. Could anything the parents said or done have achieved that so completely?

I must be doing some people a favor by just walking around and not being Japanese.

So, you're welcome.

It's funny how I am an oddity around here whether I am actually doing something unusual or not.

:)

(Sorry about the lack of a second blog last week, I have a cold and it's sort of blocking the creative juices.)

Spring?

Sorry, I forgot to blog last week. My mood has been doing funny things lately (ok, so not "funny"), but I feel like I am doing a lot better now. I'll try to blog here twice this week.

Spring has come early this year, it seems.

The cold generally has a bad effect on my body and mood.

Cherry trees are now blooming. Usually they're blooming late March, early April as far as I understand it.

It's kind of funny how, although I've seen cherry blossoms before, the colors really impress me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that they're a real sign that winter is over.

My first Japanese winter is OVER. Although I suppose I should feel cheated by global warming making it end quicker or upset that the effects of global warming is -this- apparent.

I am -NOT- happy about global warming, but I can't help it if my body says "ewww" to cold and "hurray" to warm.

I hope the cherry blossoms stick around for a while, but I don't really know how these things work to begin with.

I suppose I hadn't really said a terrible lot in this entry, but I'll try to post again later this week.

Glasses and influenza

Who else thinks that my blog title should be the name of a rock song?

No? No takers?

Then I'll just skip to the blog then.

I got new glasses a few weeks ago. Perhaps the most amusing part of the process was how obsessive compulsive the man was about cleaning my glasses. He cleaned my old pair when I purchased the new glasses and then he cleaned the old pair AND the new pair when I went to go pick up the new glasses later.

I haven't even worn the old glasses since getting these new ones.

But I suppose I know that they're clean at least.

Today I was sitting in the teacher's room at an elementary school when suddenly someone was standing behind me and offering to clean my glasses for me. I was really startled, confused, and baffled by the situation. Finally, I realized that she worked for a glasses shop here in town. Apparently, it is normal for workers from glasses shops to go around to different work places, talking to people about glasses and cleaning people's glasses for them

By the way, the glasses store to shoe store ratio in this town is 6:1. There is only one shoe store. However, there probably are more glasses stores that I can think to count at the moment.

Isn't that weird???

The flu has been going around these days. 2 ALTs in this city have caught it already. I haven't yet and I don't feel the signs of my body fighting it off, so I guess I'm in pretty good shape so far. I think it is kind of funny that the Japanese use the word "influenza" for flu. For me, I've always heard the word "influenza" in places such as history books. People feeling sick these days have the "flu" and someone who died hundreds of years ago had "influenza." I know that they are the same thing, but I can't help but think that "influenza" is worse than "the flu".

People are constantly telling people to take care not to catch the flu these days. It's nice to see people have so much concern for one another.

Famous?

Today I had only two class periods at one of my elementary schools.

I had three second grade classes in the second period and the other two classes in the third.

I was walking with one of the teachers to the building where we were going to have the first lesson. Two of the three classes were standing outside waiting for the door to open. When they saw me walking up, they began cheering, yelling "hello!", waving, and jumping around. I walked through the crowd to the door waving, smiling, and saying "hello" back.

This is what it is like to be famous.

It's funny how elementary school students can make you feel like you're their favorite person in the world. ;)

Life in general

What happened last week? I can't say I quite know the answer for you. Part of it was the fact that nothing really popped out at me as being especially blog worthy and the other part being that whenever I found myself in front of a computer with sufficint time, all that came to my head was "blah."

Ok, so I'll admit it hasn't been helping that I've been watching television shows on the internet. Those can be time consuming.

I honestly watch a lot more TV than I have for years back in the US. Of course, my actual TV hasn't been turned on for a month (possibly two months.)

Since I still don't feel like there is a horrible lot to talk about, I'll talk about my life in general, like how I am eating, what I am doing with my living space, and a little about my students.

It's funny how things change.

For a while, I felt like I found the grand solution to feeding myself by raiding the frozen food aisle. Now, that idea doesn't appeal to me at ALL. These days, I find myself buying some kind of easy dish that requires me to also buy meat and vegetables, cooking it on the stove and eating it out of my big bowl over rice.

Is it weird that I eat maybe 85% of my dinners from this same big bowl?

I haven't been cooking anything super sophisticated, but I think I am doing rather well considering that I am cooking only for myself.

Another thing that really changed is how I view my apartment. When I first moved in here, I looked around and I just kind of decided it was satisfactory because it was how my predecessor left it and I just kind of assumed she would have known better than me. Since then, however, I've changed little things (I put a table cloth on my table, for example) and I've realized that there are a lot of things I can do to like my living space even more than I already do.

I also want to start cleaning a lot more.

Of course, these things (cooking and cleaning) require a lot of initiative.

I went to one of my middle schools Monday, Tuesday, and Friday this week and the other middle school Wednesday and Thursday. This was an unusually great middle school week. At this time, a Friday evening, I can really say that I feel good about my middle school students.

Yes, there are rude kids who laugh when I try to strike conversation during lunchtime. However, there is also a 3rd year student who visited California, a class of 2nd years that totally crack me up, three 1st year boys that I have funny English nicknames for and a special needs class filled with students that seem to really appreciate me at one school. At the other school, there is a group of girls that like to visit me in the teacher's room during the afternoon break, stare over my shoulder, comment on my typing speed, and talk to me about random things. Not to mention lots of other good students at both schools.

This week, I did little interviews with some third year students at the middle school that I had previously believed to me a black hole for students with genuine interest in English. However, quite a few of these students really REALLY surprised me. One boy sat very straight and made great eye contact and only required me to repeat something again when I had purposely gone for a difficult question. One girl answered everything I asked quickly and accurately. There was absolutely no way she could have known the questions I was going to ask beforehand. With her, I started having an almost regular conversation, putting aside my list of questions I had prepared. It was really impressive. When their classmates are around, these kids can be so shy and so I never knew how good at English they could be. I know now that I have many, many more good students than I could've possibly ever guessed.

I suppose that's it. Hope this makes up for the lack of a post last week.

Something called a spring rider

It's 11:35 pm Saturday night. I have 25 minutes to write this week's entry.

It's been a week now since I've been back from Tokyo and I work this week. Monday was a meeting with other Hioki city ALTs; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were all office days; and Friday was my first day at a school in this new year.

Unfortunately, the school didn't have any classes for me that day and asked me only to grade students' winter vacation English homework.

Not so unfortunately, there was a lot of it, so I actually busy at work for the entire day doing this.

Part of what the second year students' homework was that they had to talk about their town and what's in it. Most students drew maps.

My mind was officially boggled when a student wrote that a park nearby her house has many "animal chair."

I wondered what animals chairs could possibly be and looked at her illustration and realized that she was referring this sort of thing.

I thought to myself: What IS the word for those?

I pulled up an internet browser and looked up playground on wikipedia. It turns out it's called a "spring rider"

I can't remember ever hearing those called ANYTHING much less "spring rider".

I was conflicted- I could see no way around correcting this student's paper with something that probably no one really knows. BUT- if you're talking about a parks, "animal spring riders" is probably a bit more helpful than "animals chairs", so I went with it.

It's so funny when students throw things at you that you really don't know what to do with.

Another 2nd year student wrote that the past tense of "teach" was "peach." I am fairly certain this person was trying to see what they could get away with rather than really thinking they had the correct answer.

In the homework of a 1st year student, she introduced a friend of hers. She wrote: "She likes piano. She is piano." I thought that was amusing. :) Anyway, I crossed out "is" and put "plays" figuring that was a pretty safe guess.

Good to be back to work after 2 weeks of much needed vacation.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year in Japan!
I won’t be able to post this until tomorrow morning, though, but it still won’t be 2009 in California yet.
My New Years Eve was pretty unevenful. I spent my last few hours of 2008 on my computer downstairs plugged into the Internet while the older of the two of my host brothers (now 8 years old) watched pokemon episodes recorded before.
My host mother pretty much pried the remote from his hands so that I could watch the New Year programming at around 11:50 pm.
They showed footage of various shrines around Japan and people out there already to do their first temple visits of the year.
The clock in the living room said that it was 12, but it was early. Something within me (probably something very American) completely refused to accept it until the correct time became 12. (haha) Then, my cell phone, the TV, and the website I was looking at for the time all said 12. It was a quiet evening, but I still felt really happy about it being midnight New Years day like I always do. It’s silly because I am awake at midnight ALL of the time, but it was nice.
Then, I watched the 8-year-old roll around on the ground in a sort of a hyper, sleep deprived stupor and then went up stairs to plug in my phone, put away my laptop, and start getting ready for bed. Just as I was about to start charging the phone, the Japanese word for New Years just randomly showed up in the blue light display on the outside of my phone. I wasn’t expecting that at all. My phone is really just too sweet. (Actually, it gave me a special greeting on my birthday, too. :) ). I sat down on the bed to start writing this blog and I realized I could hear a temple bell (gong???) ringing. The same sort of sounds I heard from the television were happening all about the same time all around this country.
Anyway, these were small things, of course. But now I really feel like it’s the start of a pretty good year.
Happy New Year, everyone.
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3