It was nice to sleep in a little bit this morning, thanks to Kuniko’s lunch buy yesterday. I got an extra 40 minutes or so of sleep, and that made a big difference.
At work I spent most of my free time today translating a newspaper article that the vice-principal had passed out to all the teachers. The article was about the recent bout of bullying that has been in the news so much lately here in Japan. There were lots of interesting words, and I went through the article painstakingly until I understood every word.
In my classes, there were a couple of weird moments. In one of my classes, I noticed that a first year student had a button on his pencil case that said “Marijuana” with a big leaf. I was wondering if anybody realized the significance, but I think the answer is no. I always see weird stuff on my students – the Playboy brand is really popular here and I’ve seen 12 year old girls wearing Playboy socks and carrying Playboy pencil cases. I’m not sure if they know exactly what it really is, but it’s popular so they buy it.
In the middle of another class some school visitors came through the classroom. The vice-principal led in a group of visitors from Nepal. They were really disruptive, though – I was surprised. As soon as they walked in they interrupted what we were doing and started talking to the students, in a language I didn’t understand. Some of them walked over to the students and looked through their papers and books, and I noticed that they treated the students with a little bit of disdain. I liked the reaction of the students, though. They called out “Namaste!” to the visitors, and didn’t seem to mind that they weren’t so friendly. The kids at that age are full of wonder, and are really interested in anything that is out of the ordinary.
Tonight I made spicy peanut chicken to go with some leftover rice. It was pretty good, and afterwards Kuniko and I sipped port and hung out in the kotatsu. Tomorrow is finally Friday, and I think Kuniko is really ready for the weekend. She’ll be stuck doing some morning classes on Saturday, but she should be free on Sunday to relax.
