This morning I woke up with no headache, still stuffy, but with an improvement in my health. Finally! For the first time today I didn’t take any aspirin, which is also a good sign. As I write this now I could use one or two but I’m going to try to hold off until right before bed.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in with advice and diagnoses. I ended up trying something that was strange but worked quite well. I heated up my bathtub to a really high temperature, and then breathed in the steam – I breathed in and out until my nose loosened up and then I cleared it out and started over. It worked really well.
At school people commented that my voice is getting back to normal, but I still have a cough that freaks people out. I found out today that I infected Mr. Kimura, Mr. Hayashi, and Miss Kageyama with my cold. I felt bad – now they have to go through my hell for a whole week. Ick.
Today I had my last two paper airplane classes, which were also the last two for the entire term. Now I won’t have any more classes until sometime in April. With my sumo trip and Korean trip coming up, I’m going to do all my travel before my official holidays start – now I have to think up something to do for the two weeks or so that I have free.
To celebrate my last two classes I made a custom paper airplane – I found the instructions on the internet and after about forty minutes of folding I came up with a pretty good design. I did some test flights before the class showed up, and it worked pretty well – to a point. It would drift along comfortably for a little, and then take a sudden corkscrew and go diving straight down into the ground. It looks really cool right before it crashes – kind of a suicide pinwheel move. I decided to use it during my introduction, and let the kids see it crash.
So I start my introduction, but the kids all know already what it’s about. The students have been telling each other what is going on here and the students are excited about the prospect of an easy lesson. I get to the part where I’m introducing the topic. I fly the generic easy plane, which makes a short straight flight about three quarters of the way across the room. The class is impressed, a couple of ohhhh’s and ahhhh’s. I grabbed my suicide plane and let it fly.
And it was amazing.
I threw it just as before, maybe a bit more gently, and it flew across the room towards the two Japanese teachers in the back, making a wide banking turn to avoid the far wall, and continuing on a slow circle about a foot above the heads of the students. The plane came back towards me, about the same height as my podium. As it got close I reached out to grab it and it kind of lifted up, and then dropped right into my open hand.
The kids loved it. I loved it – I didn’t know that was going to happen. I just pretended like I knew it all along, but I’m sure the big look of shock on my face was a dead giveaway. With that, I passed out sheets of paper and everyone started folding with a sense of purpose. It was great!
After class lots of students stuck around to talk with me – something that is a little unusual. I had a good talk – some students asked me why all Japanese people have black hair. I tried to tackle that topic, along with identifying various parts of the face in English in Japanese. It was fun – they didn’t want to leave, and we had a good connection.
My new second year ESS student dropped by with a friend to see if we were watching Tomb Raider 2 today, but I had to postpone, I didn’t want to get anyone else sick. She was OK with it – so we set up a time to get together with some of the other ESS members after I get back from Korea.
Tonight I cooked up the spiciest dish I’ve ever made in Japan – a chicken chipotle noodle soup. Delicious!
