Mondays are a lot nicer when you only have to go in to work for a few hours. I was up pretty early this morning, probably because of the surplus of sleep that I picked up on Sunday. I strolled to work and said to hello to all the usual people.
At work Yamada sensei was back – her husband died about a week ago, and she’s been off work the past week. She looked OK. I went over before the morning meeting and offered my condolences and talked with her a bit. I crammed the correct Japanese terms into my head and they all seemed to come out OK, so that was a relief. She is a really nice lady – in English she said “My husband dead”, and she held my hand and looked me in the eye and we both almost lost it. My Japanese wasn’t adequate to say what I wanted, all I know how to say is “do your best” which didn’t seem appropriate. She seemed to do OK the rest of the day, though, and maybe being at work will help her think of other things for a while.
The history teacher came by and told me all about how he woke up Saturday night in a pool of blood from his nose. He said that it looked like a murder scene, and he had made an appointment to see the doctor that afternoon. Unfortunately he got another bloody nose right in the middle of the morning meeting, so he got a ride to the doctor and they laser fused the blood vessels together right then and there, and now he’s going to be fine. Wow!
At around 11:30 I left school for home. All the students were leaving around the same time, going home early to study for the last day of midterms. I chatted with a few on my way back – they love speaking English. Some of them are shy, but once I break the ice, they seem to try hard to communicate.
On the way home I did some shopping at Ito Yokado for the week, and then came home and opened up the house to let the breeze through. I put on some shorts and then went out to the post office to mail some things.
I did surprisingly well communicating how I wanted to handle shipping, mainly by listening for keywords and focusing on the sentence around those. Sometimes the person I’m talking to will do a whole sentence that I completely miss, you just have to keep listening until you get something, and then go from there. I hope the packages make it OK.
I don’t get over to Higashi Futami so often nowaday, so when I was walking from the post office I was very surprised to pass a blonde Caucasian girl going the other way. She was just as shocked, and we said hello to each other. I think we were both wondering who the hell the other person was. Could it be there is a third foreigner living in my town? Wow.
The last stop in Higashi Futami was the liquor store. I cashed in a few beer coupons courtesy of Kuniko’s father, and I also got a chance to chat with the people that own the place. They are really nice people, and the son is the guy that I exchanged a bottle of sake for a bottle of wine. He’s looking forward to opening it up on his birthday – it’s coming up at the end of this month. I’m interested to hear what his opinion is.
I’d like to say that I got back home, had a wild party, and freaked out all my neighbors by throwing beer kegs out my windows onto the street below, but it was actually a quiet night of studying, listening to music, a dinner of mushrooms, beef and rice, and some Japanese TV. Those guys are really hard to understand.
Tomorrow is the last day of midterms, and therefore the last easy day for me for a while. I’ve got a full schedule on Wednesday, but my classes are all planned out and I think they’ll end up being fun. After Wednesday things should start settling back into a normal schedule.
