Imagine: Reality without Affection

If anyone is wondering, I generally take the titles of my blogs from t-shirts that I see in Japan. The above is written out super-girly and with glitter. It’s a bit weird!

So I’m paid and happy. Good times! The payday celebration with other ALTs in Shibuya was a lot of fun. Some carousing was involved! Amusing anecdote: one of the places we went was a hip-hop club. There was a large mural-type thing up on one wall of the United States, with each state showing a picture of a (even vaguely) hip-hop star. I didn’t recognize who was representing Georgia, but Snoop Dogg was Texas and Justin Timberlake was South Dakota.

One of the things that annoys me about living where no one speaks your language is that no one can see how darn witty I am. For example, I met a class of first-graders (oh gosh so cute) and one of the girls was named Riyo. I said “yeah, I bet you dance on the sand, too,” and it was lost on everyone, teachers included. Gah.

Speaking of the first graders, I’m starting to understand some of the questions they are asking. That’s right, folks! My Japanese is almost as good as a first grader’s!

Saturday was both a great day and a pretty rough day. My junior high school was having a music festival, which of course I had to attend. It was pretty neat, really – the ninth graders all did a song that was based off of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which is basically my favorite musical piece of all time. (Probably because I’m not a cellist.) I don’t know, something about that song hits all the pleasure spots in the brain that music can hit. Also, I was dragged up on stage with the rest of the teachers to sing a song in Japanese. I can read some hiragana and can also read music, so I winged it. Fun!

However, the weather was absolutely terrible. Windy, rainy, and it got dark at about 4pm. Biking 2-3 miles in it was a bit of an ordeal. I found out later that it was a bit of a tropical storm – not quite typhoon level, but still terrible to bike in! Boy, some of that rain should have gone towards Georgia, eh?

And, even worse, I was waiting on some very important news! The night before, I found out that my sister’s water broke! So, as it was hard for the folks back home to send me news when it happened, I was spending every free moment I had checking my email to make sure no one back home had died. Luckily, I now know I have a nephew and he is ridic. Cute. It sure was frustrating at the time, though!

Today, Sunday, was a great deal better! I woke up to find that the tropical storm had left the world’s most beautiful weather. I headed out to Tokyo for a few hours and had a pretty good time. I stopped in Akihabara to pick up some electronics stuff and a new Nintendo DS game, then went to Ueno to check out Ueno Park.

Unfortunately, no one in Akihabara spoke enough English to help me find lithium batteries for my (admittedly old) digital camera.

Me: “Is this a LITHIUM battery?” (shows the clerk the package of batteries I was holding, along with the old depleted battery that helped the old camera work)

Clerk: “Yes.”

Me: “Can I use it for digital cameras?” (asking pointing to the wall stocked with digital cameras)

Clerk: “Yes.”

(I buy the batteries, put them in the camera, try to turn it on, of course it doesn’t work, and I give up. At least I have batteries for the tv remote, now!)

I’m pretty upset that my camera was not working in Ueno Park. There were some sights that even put Harajuku to shame. There was a street performer who stacked six chairs on top of four glass bottles on a table and was doing handstands on top of them, which was horribly impressive, and then he was approached by someone on stilts in some weird monster costume who gave him a high five. Also, there were men wearing suits and some sort of eyeball dome on their heads. Maybe inspired by The Residents? Also, a man dressed all in black, with black paint on his face and hands, holding up a black sheet around him so he was a solid wall of black walking around.

So yeah, next time I go there, I’ll hit the zoo as well, and maybe at that point I’ll have a working camera.

Hope everyone’s doing alright out there!

McSister

Well, hello again everyone! I haven’t blogged in a little while now. Mainly, that’s because nothing very interesting has happened. I’ve made a couple of trips to Tokyo that weren’t worth mentioning, and also stopped in Omiya, which is the biggest city in my prefecture – kind of like a half-sized Tokyo that’s half the distance away. I’ve been hanging out with ALTs in this region while in Omiya, and that’s fun too.

Honestly, though, things are starting to settle into a routine, and I don’t really do all that much that’s exciting. Maybe once I get my first check I can do some wild and crazy things – a bunch of the Heart School employees I met during orientation are planning exactly that on payday, in fact – but I haven’t had too much of a chance to cut loose recently. (I did recently get a care package sent from my parents, which included the first season of 30 Rock. Thanks mom and dad! 30 Rock is such a good show. If you haven’t heard me talking about it, you probably haven’t talked to me recently.)

I’m getting more settled in a ‘teacher’ role. During junior high hours, I basically sit at my desk and try to learn Japanese. (A doomed venture.) Then, I go up in front of classes and repeat things in English so that kids can hear a native speaker say it. It can be boring, but I try to goof around a little to get the kids to laugh, and that’s fun. Recently, some of the teachers have asked me to create some lessons for their classes. My favorite lesson was one I made recently, where I played Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” and gave the students chopped-up lines of the lyrics, which they had to put into order. (Veterans of Mrs. Jackson’s class in Parkview might remember that exercise with a lovely song called “Aicha.”) When they were done with that, I talked about American superstitions and asked them about Japanese superstitions. I like when I get to be creative.

Elementary school classes are also kind of like that. I work at two elementary schools, and visit them each once a week. At one of them, I have to create the lessons beforehand, and at the other, I have to stick with the Heart School regimen of classroom lessons. Either way, it’s definitely more work than the junior high classes – I’m the head teacher in the class and I’m usually the only person who understands English.

Welllll, like I said – not much going on. I’ll leave you guys with some weird/funny things I’ve noticed about Japan…

-People slap each other on the back of the head, Three Stooges style. It’s hilarious. Students do it to other students, and sometimes teachers do it to students! I can’t help laughing. Then, the rest of the class laughs, because apparently my cracking up is hilarious.

-Stitch is huge. You know, of “Lilo And…” fame? You see that little dude everywhere in the Elementary and Jr High schools. There are keychains, pencil bags, patches on bookbags… I’d say 90% of kids in schools here have some sort of Stitch merchandise. It’s like, “Mickey who?”

-People wear face-masks if they’ve got a cough. Like, those masks you see doctors wearing during surgery. It’s weird to see little girls walk around school with those on… kind of creepy, as well…

-Maybe it’s just me being a cultural imperialist, but honestly, why do they have such a ridiculous writing system? In class, a teacher’ll write up something in English on the board, then write it in Japanese – which takes about 4 times as long as writing it in English. It’d just be easier to learn the English language!! Then again, I’m sure the brains of Japanese students get much more of a workout from learning thousands of characters instead of 26 letters, so maybe that’s why everyone thinks they’re smarter than we are.

Well, here’s hoping that everyone back home is doing alright – and thanks, everyone, for the birthday wishes! It was a pretty low-key birthday, but it was definitely all sorts of alright. Any birthday where Radiohead gives me an album is good by me.