Back to Work

I went back to work after the long Golden Week holiday on Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, we had a sports test in lieu of classes. At first I did not think I had ever heard of such a thing, but when I saw the old wooden frame that tests how far you can stretch and saw the students doing sit ups as fast as they could for 20 seconds, it all came back to me. I went around with the 3rd and 2nd year students and participated in the sports test. It was a little unnerving because the students can get far too friendly at times, at my expense. However, I spent the entire day testing my grip, doing sit ups, seeing how far I can jump and how far I can throw a ball (did I mention that I love my job?). After school, I participated in sports club activities with the students outside because the weather was so nice. I played some soccer with the boys and then tagged along with the girls' basketball team on a warm up run, which I mistakenly thought would be a leisurely stroll. Turns out that they run all the way around the school, down three flights of stairs, and up the school driveway repeatedly until they are at the point of organ failure and body malfunction.

On Friday, there were only three classes and the students left to go home and the teachers went to a meeting in Furukawa. I, on the other hand, stayed in the teacher's room alone and watched Japanese soap operas, ate a big cup 'o curry noodles, surfed the web, and wrote this update. Also, today I have officially learned the complete Hiragana alphabet, which consists of 48 characters and some other less commonly used combinations. Too bad this is only one of the three alphabets that Japan uses. Maybe now I can learn the words for the food here so I can actually read menus and know what I am ordering.

There are two cultural differences here that I just want to point out. First, everyone here backs into their parking spaces. Not just a couple of people do this. Everyone does it. It's like a really uneventful episode of the Twilight Zone. When you are trying to find a parking space in a crowded lot, it is almost impossible to predict the movements of the tiny, compact little boxes that they call cars that turn and swivel their way into the spots. Another cultural difference is how they separate and discard of their trash. All garbage here is separated into burnables and non-burnables, or combustibles and non-combustibles. There are trash cans for plastic bottles, aluminum cans, glass, and uneaten food and they take their recycling extremely seriously, which is a great thing.