The closet

At the elementary school that I am going to this week there are over a thousand kids. You can forget about remembering names here. There's just no way. Kids are usually kids, and no matter what school I go to they are pretty much the same. The teachers, however, are a different breed altogether. At this school there are so many teachers that there is not enough space in the office, so they put me in this little room off to the side of the broadcasting room. Every morning, I come to school, walk into the office, flip my name tag thing to show that I'm in school, and head straight to my little closet. I don't even say "hi" to the principal or teachers like I do at my other schools. They probably don't really want to do this English class thing. It's okay. They don't bother me, I don't bother them. I come to the little closet, flip on the A/C and wait for class. In this little closet are a couple other characters besides myself. There's this math teacher, we'll call him Ishida, who has a desk in the office, but I think everyone thinks he's a donkey, so he comes into the closet. There used to be the counselor that helps this one sixth grade girl who is destined to be a statistic because she is too lazy to do any work, but they moved out of the closet after the first week. I think they go to the library now. Then, there are the two part-time English teachers who teach the fifth and sixth grade.

The first day I came to the closet, I thought it was weird that I didn't have to sit in the office with the other teachers, but whatever. The first guy that I met in the closet was Ishida. As soon as I met him, he said that in the closet we can only speak Japanese. No English. Okay bastard, I'm not Japanese, and I'm only supposed to speak English at school. This was three weeks ago. By the second week he said it was okay if I spoke English. Aaaaalrighty then. Today the guy brings in this small steel whistle that is some kind of emergency whistle, and explained to me that if there is any trouble to blow twice in quick succession, and someone will come to my aid (fat chance in Japan. It's every man for himself here.) Then, he proceeds to show me how the whistle works, like I've never seen one before. In this little closet the sucking guy starts blowing the whistle all his might. He was turning red in the face, and then he realized that the instructions were inside the whistle, and the paper was making the sound come out funny. He took out the paper, and started blowing it again. I was about to throw the thing out the window, but he finally left to go to class.

The other person in the closet worth talking about is one of the English teachers. Let's call her Morimoto. She talks to herself--all the time. It's one thing if we were in the office, and there are fifty other teachers in a big room bustling about and she talks to herself, but in the closet there are usually just two people: me and her. She doesn't talk quietly either. Whatever she's doing, she gives a running commentary. I sometimes look up, and answer some of her self-directed questions to see if that would throw her off, but it doesn't. In class, she is like Chris Tucker from that Jackie Chan movie. Whenever the kids don't understand what she is saying, she talks louder "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?!" Doesn't help that the kids are fifth grade elementary. Lots of yelling going on in class. The kids have the best expressions in class though. Yesterday she had this activity going where two groups of three kids came up to the board. Each team was given a fly-swatter. On the board are pictures of ten vegetables. I gave hints about the vegetables (It is green. It is round.) and the kids swatted the picture of the right vegetable. So, there are three kids on each team right? After the first two rounds, she says, "Okay, change teams!!" "You guys sit down. I need two more volunteers (teams)." The last girl on one of the teams who didn't have a chance to go because they only went two rounds was like, "but what about my turn?" "Change teams!!" haha. I was rolling. The girl looked at me with the universal WTF!? expression. haha.



update: yesterday, Morimoto changed the flyswatter game into pairs, so now each person could get a turn at swatting the blackboard (English is fun, huh?).

Wrong. She made the teams smaller, but also only gave them one turn, so we still have one kid doing the WTF!? look. haha. It was pretty funny.

fish market

some pictures from a fish market in Ibaraki.


saturday night : ernie cruz jr.

Billy

do you know this guy? Me neither, but seriously, if you ask anybody in Japan who Billy of Billy's Bootcamp is, they will tell you exactly who it is. He came to Japan yesterday because he was probably surprised and thrilled that someone actually watched his "done a million times" dvd and thought that it was something new. He was on every news channel. I trip.

pull ups

Today at school, I was doing Osoji (cleaning) with some of the kids in the playground, and they started jumping on the pull up bars. Kids in Japan use the pull up bars to sit on and swing around on, so I figured I'd show them what you are "supposed" to do with them. I've been doing some running, and playing ball since it started warming up, so I figure that with one or two less kilograms I should be able to knock off ten or so pull ups. I did five. haha. Five pull ups. That's worse than when we did the physical fitness testing in elementary school and I had nine. I was a fatty fat fat in elementary school, too. I'm still fat, but I was really fat during the hanabata days. It's a good thing the kids that I was cleaning with were fourth graders and could only do one. haha.

mirrors in the station

Look how nice the JR people in Shibuya are. They installed mirrors on the pillars in the station, so the Shibuyaites can check out their hair and makeup while they wait for the train, or as soon as they get off the train. That was nice of them, huh?

ketchup kudasai

On Thursdays I usually head on over to McyD's for some golden fry goodness. Last week, I decided to try another fast food joint called Lotteria. Now, apparently, in Japan ketchup hasn't caught on quite yet. If you want mustard you can just forget about it, but ketchup is slowly building a following. The king of condiments is definitely mayonnaise. They put mayo on everything here. They don't have ketchup dispensers at any of the McyDs, so you gotta ask them for a packet and they give you "a" packet. Lotteria hasn't caught on to the craze, so when I asked for ketchup to go with my fries they freaked out. They didn't know what to do, but caught between not having any ketchup packets and trying to be super nice to the customer the lady behind the counter wasn't about to let a customer down. She said to wait a minute, so I waited. She grabbed a package from behind the counter and went in the back to the food preparing line. Three people gathered around her, and then she came back to the front with no ketchup. I thought I might have said something wrong and she was waiting for them to make a super-burger or something. Then she went back to the food production line and grabbed the ketchup dispenser they use for the burgers. She squirted some in a little container then super saran wrapped it, and put it in the package. One package for fries and one package for ketchup. Is that crazy?

ice cucumber pepsi

The next flavor to take over the world. Cucumber soda. One of the first of many more crazy flavors to come this Summer. There are new flavors of soda and beer and juice coming out every month in this country. I guess they get tired of stuff fast. I had to get it cause it just sounds weird to have a cucumber flavored soda. It does taste a little like cucumber, but not really. I can't really explain what it tastes like. It wasn't really that good, and I wonder if putting a dab of shoyu in would make it taste better.

genius electone player

I'm watching gakkouikkou and the little kids that play the piano are on again. They are hilarious.

ID please

As you may or may not know, you can buy beer from vending machines in Japan. This might be the reason why the whole country consumes alcohol like Hawaii consumes spam. Nah, I dunno why they drink so much here, but there really isn't anything stopping you from drinking whenever you want. Even if you are 14 years old. Some of my students said they started drinking when they were in JHS. I asked how they got it, and they said they just went to the store and bought it, in their uniforms (they were girls). They said that if the clerk said anything they would just say that it was for their parents. Anyway, this vending machine has an id checker. It's the first one that I've seen in Japan. I should have tried it out. Maybe later. I should start renting out my ID for a ten buck flat fee. haha.

If I move my arms fast, I can walk fast

This is what I call "spooling the turbo." The faster and bigger motions you make with your arms, the faster you can run or walk. This is what I don't like about crowded train stations. People are jammed together trying to get through the bottleneck that is the one stairs that has an escalator on it. Everyone is getting closer together, and moving briskly, and then someone decides to start spooling the turbo. What they don't realize is that their turbo (swinging arms) are at the perfect height to hit someone (me) in the nether regions. It's almost happened a bunch of times, but I saw it coming and quickly applied the brakes, and was out of harms way. It kind of sucks trying to walk fast without using the turbo, but in awareness of others, I think that it is a good rule to not spool your turbo in the train station.

Cassette adapter

Seriously, who still has a tape deck? I remember being too poor in high school to spring for a alpine or nakamichi deck, so I had the cassette deck with the sony discman hooked up. That was the way it was done back then, but now? They still sell these things?

black people are lucky

they get their own smurf. haha



rad or bad? I don't really know which it is. It's kind of awesome, but at the same time kind of degrading. What makes a smurf a smurf? His skin is blue, right? Granted there's papa smurf who gets to wear the red clothes, and then probably the women rights people complained that it was a bad cartoon because it only depicted men, which meant that women are not really needed in the world, so they added a girls smurf, but since when did they add a black smurf? What about a yellow smurf, or red smurf? Gotta be fair to everyone. I should have bought it because it was so weird to see a smurf that wasn't blue. Next time. I saw it at astro bit city, I think was the name of the shop.