Let’s Updating

Classes officially started two weeks ago and they have been keeping me busy. The 2nd year students are doing their lesson over “must” and “have to”. During the excruciating “have to” lesson, Japanese ingenuity once again reared its incompetent head. My co-teacher was explaining, “We don’t have to stop at the blue light”. If you had your eyes closed during this lesson, you might think this was a lesson about phrases to use while shopping. As in this conversation at a super-capitalmart between a wife and her frugal husband:

Wife: I think we have all that we need, can you think of anything else?
Husband: I’m going to just take a look at the blue light specials in the back of the store.
Wife: We don’t have to stop at the blue light anymore. You got that promotion. Imagine what the neighbours would think?

But no. This “blue light” was referring to what the rest of the colour world calls a “green light”. I’ve been told a couple times that the Japanese language used to have only one word for both green and blue. I’ve also been told that this was quite a while ago. Like when Samurais were around and English wasn’t a required school subject. Unless Japan used stoplights for rickshaws, I’m pretty sure the stoplight is relatively new. Enough so that the new concept of “green” would have been understood by the time people were referring to the green lights in everyday conversation. Make no mistake; the stoplights in Japan have red, yellow and green lights. There is no blue on them at all. But oh well. When two airplanes almost hit we call it a “near miss”.

Some other highlights of the past week…. Last Thursday the teachers union had a meeting for the English program. I still don’t know why they meet, but they meet about once a month to talk with the ALTs about English education related things. Since there are two new ALTs in Sasayama, they wanted us all to make a poster to introduce ourselves. I have no idea where these posters are going, but they should make an impression. Through some miscommunication, I didn’t bring any pictures, so I was forced to use my expertise in the drawing world. I can barely draw a square without the students questioning what it is. But of course I pulled through. Since I couldn’t think of what Dub (my dog) looked like, I just drew a picture of Snoopy. (Snoopy’s inbred cousin rather)

Since my birthday was last Friday, I decided to do a birthday lesson at my elementary school. By “birthday lesson”, I mean the kids made me birthday cards. In one class, they even lined up to give me a massage. Since most of the kids spend all day trying to spank me or getting me to say the new naughty word they learned in Japanese, I don’t feel bad exploiting them.

Saturday, we had a joint birthday party for three of us that all have birthdays in these two weeks. Clint, Imogen and I. We decided on a theme and everyone followed through. The rule was that you must only wear things that you bought from the 100 yen store. The possibilities were endless. I ended up wearing a windshield visor, feathery boa, Christmas lights, monkey mask, bat wings and a monkey mask. Oh, and a baby’s T shirt. Brandon came in various bath-related goods. To scare the Japanese, we all walked over to the 7/11 and took pictures. Even the manager of 7/11 came out to see the freaks on parade.

In weather news, it’s finally become autumn. Today dropped to like 15 and I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt AND I drank hot coffee this morning and neither made me sweat. Great success. Now it’s time to enjoy the few weeks in between sweating to death and freezing to death.