I got to work early this Monday morning, and for some reason, the girls were giggling more than usual today. The whole day had some kind of strange vibe, and I was asked some unusual questions in class. Usually kids are too scared to ask questions at all, but some kids in my first year class asked me my age, where I bought my shirt, if I had a girlfriend, and my favorite question of the day, if my hair color was real (it is).
One of the exercises I had the students do was come to the front of the room with a partner and talk about their name, hobbies, and favorite food. I had grown used to the same one word answers like “baseball” “television” and “movies”, until a student today said his hobby was “collecting Japanese Mafia goods”. I asked him about it later, and it turned out he was talking about swords, weapons, and other items used by the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. I had this mental image of him riding around a bike extorting 80-year old shopkeepers. Go figure.
The rest of my day was pretty uneventful, but while I walked home I was smiling at everyone and I got a few smiles back, which is unusual.
For dinner I cooked up tacos and quesadillas with the somewhat bland cheese I have available to me. The flour tortillas that I had bought here turned out to be quite good, and the meal turned out great. It was a simpler version of tacos as I don’t have access to beans here, so it was ground beef, cheese, lettuce, onions, and Tapatio hot sauce. I’m taking my leftovers into work tomorrow and I can’t wait to see their reaction to that meal.
Melanie had bought an English language newspaper, the Daily Yomiuri, and had left it in my mailbox for me to read. As I settled down with the first newspaper I had read in more than a month, some kids started to scream across the street. It was not an alarming scream, more like some kids fooling around. For the next 45 minutes, they just kind of screamed at random intervals. I think the parents probably had just said, “Fine, go ahead and scream. See if I care”. After about a half hour, I was cracking up. I wanted to join in, just for fun, but what would my neighbors think?
