I dragged myself out of bed this morning – it was pretty hard to get up. In the beginning of the week I was on some mysterious medication that the doctor had given me for my chest pain. I went off the meds in the middle of the week because I was so tired after taking them. I’ve been on a sleep deficit ever since, despite going to bed early almost every night. Staying out last night really wiped me out.
It was even colder this morning (-3 degrees C) but I’m getting used to it now. At school I stand next to one of the big kerosene heaters to warm up from my “commute”, and then I’m good to go. The students are still banned from the teacher’s room, so they have no access to heat.
My classes went pretty well. During one of my second year classes, a girl student came up and told me that she had seen me and Miss Kageyama together on Sunday when we had gone to see “Bruce Almighty”. She had a mischievous look in her eyes, and she wanted to know details. It’s amazing how well the students speak English when they find out about something like this. These are the same students that are too shy to say “Hello” in the hallways.
I answered her questions dutifully, making my best efforts at preserving Miss Kageyama’s honor and reputation. I explained that we are just friends, it wasn’t a date, etc, etc. The girl went back to tell her friends, and they were giggling pretty hard the rest of the lesson. Yikes!
My classes ran right through my lunchbreak, so I had to go eat lunch in the cafeteria with the students, which is always an adventure. I bellied up to the bar and laid down my lunch ticket. One of the perks of being a teacher is that if a cook sees me lay down my ticket, she’ll take care of me before everyone else. There’s a crowd waiting for lunch – maybe 40 or 50 students waiting impatiently for chow. It is like the pits of the New York Stock Exchange down there – it can be an ugly scene. One of my students put his ticket down right as I put mine down, so I waited until one of the cooks saw me there, and then I pushed both tickets to the edge of the counter.
The cook was right on it, and delivered a hot bowl of soba noodles and rice for me, and a bowl of curry soba for my student. She turned off and helped some other people, and I passed the curry to it’s rightful owner. The kid figured out what had happened, and said “Thank you very much” in English. That made my day!
I taught my teacher class in the afternoon, and had another weird miscommunication that was pretty amusing (at least to me). One of the teachers had said that I was a “good guy”. Another teacher thought that she was saying a “good gaijin”. Gaijin means foreigner – “gai” means outside/foreign and “jin” means people. So she heard “good guy” and in her mind she thought I was being referred to as a good “gai”. Anyway, once we figured it out they were pretty embarrassed but I had a good laugh.
No snow today, and Mr. Hayashi and I bailed out an hour early. On the way home I took a couple of photos of the train – for some reason we had a train driver and two observers – no idea why.
I used the extra time to walk through the door and promptly crash into bed. I woke up a couple of hours ago and cooked a quick dinner (curry and tonkatsu over rice), and now I’m starting to think about that bed again.
