Weekly wrap-up

This is probably going to be my last blog post for a while. The weekend is coming up, and the buildings with internet access are closed on weekends. I might be able to get some access on Sunday by sitting outside of one of them, but there’s no guarantee of that. After the weekend, I’ll be in a different city for a couple of days. Both will be busy, and I have no idea what kind of internet access there will be over there. If things go as I expect, this will be my last post until Wednesday (local time). Anyways, for what I’ve been up to…

7-3-08 Cont. (3:24 PM local, 11:24 PM Wednesday at home)

I’m still exhausted. I’ll get back to that later.

We had to walk to the elementary school. It didn’t surprise me, nor was the walk there that difficult. It was still morning, and it hadn’t gotten very hot yet.

At the school, we found out that the teachers already had plans of their own, AND Kazuko had given us bad information. Instead of each of us being sent to our own classroom and having to entertain the students for an hour or so, we were broken up into our three groups and each of those groups was sent to help with an English lesson. When the English lesson was over, THEN we were sent on to different classes on our own. For lunch.

I was assigned to a third grade classroom. Lunch was milk, tsukemono (pickled vegetables), slices of peaches and oranges, and some surprisingly good spaghetti. Spaghetti that had pieces of fish inside of it. The students didn’t have very good English, nor I good Japanese, but I was able to answer some of their questions. After lunch, I went to the front of the classroom and answered some more questions from the class. The class I was assigned to even drew pictures on the blackboard (green board) to celebrate my arrival. I might not have noticed except that one of them was a picture of a kitty. When it was time for me to leave the class, a bunch of students had me give them my signature. One little girl didn’t have a book for me to sign, and so asked me to sign her hand. Odd.

Not long after class, we a lot of us were waiting in the meeting room for a few of us who were playing with the students during recess. Billy (name changed after the drunkenness incident) played his guitar for us and some of the students who followed us into the meeting room. They enjoyed it. When he was done, we somehow got started on the “We Will Rock You” song. It was sung by one of the Japanese students. Surprising. Incidentally, all of this means that I had no opportunity to use the cards that I spent over three hours last night making. So I wasted three hours of my life and over half of my note cards.

The walk back was terrible. By the time we left, the sun was high in the sky and not showing us any mercy. I have moral objections to buying bottled water, so I couldn’t get any out of the vending machines near the school (nor was there anything else there that I would consider drinking). I bought a couple of cans of Mountain Dew out of a vending machine near campus grounds (that vending machine has unusually large cans). Both are gone now.

I was originally planning on heading over to the computer lab to connect to the internet after I recovered from the trip back here. It took me longer than I expected, and I still have no desire to make the trek to the computer lab. There’s still more than an hour until we have to meet for our next activity (some sort of kempo club this time), but considering the amount of time it takes to get to the computer lab and back, and the heat out there… This message will have to wait until tomorrow to be posted. Oh well.

7-4-08 (6:37 AM Friday local, 2:37 PM Thursday back home)

The kempo club was the most entertaining of the three martial arts clubs we’ve been to so far. Mostly because they allowed six of us to volunteer to join them in their practice. Six volunteered, but only five were able to practice. The sixth couldn’t fit into the gi. I was not one of the ones who volunteered.

When we got back to the guest house, some of the local students were waiting for us. I tried to get involved in the conversation, but my reserved nature kept me mostly out of it. I did eventually help another student out with his homework, and then I decided that it was time for bed.

Woke up to a thunderstorm this morning. It was the sort of weather I was warned about when I decided to come to Japan. It was really rather nice to lie in bed and listen to the falling rain and roaring thunder. It was also the first time my room here was actually cold when I woke up. Usually it’s incredibly hot in there in the morning, no matter how cold it was when we went to bed.

Plans for the next few days: Today, we’ll be cooking okonomiyaki, watching a scary movie, and if the schedule is to be trusted, listening to Japanese music as well. Tomorrow (Saturday), we’ll be heading over to Kamakura, a historical city. Hopefully there won’t be any rampaging diclonii while we’re there. I plan on spending a lot of my Sunday over in Machida, shopping for souvenirs and trying to find a taiyaki place I heard about. Come to think of it, I still need to eat gyuudon as well.

That’s all for now.