Internal Clock Nightmare

This week has been about as good for my internal clock as tile floors are to iphones. A jumble of shortened days (which bear no benefit other than classes being 40 minutes as we are still expected to stay until 4.15 – 4.30 to feign dedication to your role….-)

This Spider's body was about the width of my thumb

On Wednesday I was invited to join the 2^nd graders for lunch at my primary school. The kids were having a “curry party”. The class prior to lunch consisted of a series of vegetable related quizzes and skits in which the kids grew from seeds into eggplants, pumpkins etc (yes it was absolutely adorable), then for lunch we were served curry that the kids had made themselves, from vegetables that they had grown themselves. I can’t say that I’ve ever eaten curry that has instant coffee as one of the ingredients…

Saturday was crunch time. Everyone was at school to prep for the school festival. Unless you were me, in which case you were there at school to make an appearance and make it look like you were using your time constructively. We got fed Bento for lunch, which was fortunate as I left the sushi I had bought in the fridge, just when I think I can decipher the school notices efficiently.

Konoura Harbour

The vice principal asked if I wasn’t going home after lunch, so I took that as a solid invitation and spent the rest of my now free afternoon wandering around Konoura. I made it to the waterfront and decided to take a zigzag route back. It skipped my mind that no streets in rural Japan are straight, meaning that there is often no “logical” direction to take. This was fine until I heard “Kuroi-sensei!” behind me and realised that I now had a group of my primary school kids in tow. I bowled on, determined not to admit to them that I had no idea where I was going and praying that I wouldn’t hit a dead end which would force me to double back and admit to them that I was lost.

Determined not to treat a Saturday evening like a school night, Liam and I drove to Akita city for a change of scenery. We wandered around the city for a while before getting a Taiwanese feast for less than $12nz.

Sunday – School festival. You could tell it was going to be a big day as someone had gone around and left little bottles of energy drink on all of the teachers’ desks. Come lunchtime everyone had two sitting there.

The students performed songs for the morning section, a break for lunch, followed by the afternoon performances. I performed a comedy skit with Su-sensei, small issues when the pin mic decided to pop off of my dress midsentence but the vice principal had said (and this is as close a translation as I can get) that it was ok if we crashed and burned. Regardless I was relieved that it didn’t pop off again during my haka (yes you read right).

We were treated to numerous dance performances – where the 3^rd graders took it upon themselves to gate crash each other’s dances, rather entertaining when a pre-growth-spurt bespectacled second grader joined the 3^rd grade girls on stage for a number that was evidently a verse longer than he had anticipated.

The favourite would have to have been the 3^rd grade boys’ performance of Psy’s Gangnam style.

After the festivities had wrapped up the teachers headed to a local yakiniku restaurant in Nikaho for celebrations. These evenings have turned out to be really good for getting a chance to chat to teachers that you normally wouldn’t at school. One of the teachers had only discovered that week that I had basic conversation level Japanese so was very keen to have a chat, and of course once he was a couple of beers in, the pocket English started coming out.

Yuzawa Gorge

As we had spent all weekend at school everyone got Monday and Tuesday off.

Except muggins.

Who had to go and teach 5 year olds at the Kindergarten how sing “itsy bitsy spider”.

By Tuesday Liam and Dave had recovered from their hangovers so we bowled over to Dave’s place, and sat in his car for 15 minutes trying to figure out what we were going to do with the day.

We drove to Yuzawa to visit the Oyasukyo Daifundō a geothermal gorge with a river running through and steam and hot water erupting from the walls. The smell was nowhere near as strong as Rotorua, but it was definitely there.

We wandered around Yuzawa town for a while before finding a Korean restaurant for a late lunch. The chatty waitress/chef sprinkled us with questions and offered us a service, which explained was kimchi fish stomach lining – after Dave had already eaten some.

It is currently rice harvesting season, so driving through more rural areas you can watch the rice paddies progressing from full and golden, to paddies that where the rice has been tied into bunches ready for cutting, to bare paddocks. And even in this day and day you are able to observe wee baachans and jiichans cutting the rice by hand.