Today I continued to gather late homework and journal assignments from my students, most of whom were as surprised as I was to find out the that term is ending. The students have to flag me down to hand in the assignment, and the different approaches that they take are amusing – some in Japanese, some in broken English, some get another teacher to translate. Still, I’m happy to get the assignments, because that is one less student that risks failing my class.
Miss Kageyama was eager to see “Seabiscuit” which opened here in Japan a couple of weeks ago. The only show available was the 9:30 p.m. show, so I went home after school and took a nap. Miss Kageyama doesn’t have any classes tomorrow so she went home and studied, and then we went met up at my place in the evening and went out to catch the movie.
A new food court opened up in the shopping center that has the cinemas, so we went there and walked through. The floor is painted to resemble water, and there are ships and harbors that serve as small restaurants. Each restaurant has a specialty ramen dish from a certain part of Japan. We picked one and sat down, and were served some large bowls of delicious ramen. Our dishes were served in the Shikoku style, an island to the south of us. There were flavorful chunks floating around in the soup, and we were wondering what it was. Miss Kageyama asked the waitress, and she said it was fat. Actually, she said it was “back fat”. I’m not sure whose back it came from, but I stopped drinking the broth right there. I finished up the noodles and the pork, though – it tasted great. Back fat, indeed.
Afterwards we went into the arcade to kill a little time, and we did Taiko drumming, which was more fun than I thought it would be. We also had some pictures taken and drank a coffee at Starbucks while waiting for the movie to start. We bumped into some other JETs that I know somewhat, so I talked a little with them. They had just finished karate practice and were out having a good time.
The movie itself was quite good, and I really enjoyed the story. As Miss Kageyama said afterwards, “I was moved”. It’s about 1 a.m. on a school night, so I ought to hit the sack! G’night!
