We finished up the open high school lessons today. Nobody could be more happy about it than me – the beleaguered singer of a band thrown together during desperate times. I don’t think I’ll be pursuing a solo career after this.
The class itself was fun – the students were all girls except for one boy, who was clearly and completely embarrassed with being surrounded by girls, and with our cheesy lesson as well.
The teachers at school are starting to realize that my wedding day is coming up, and people have been stopping by to say congratulations. Tomorrow I’m going to have to make a short speech in front of the staffroom, so today I was practicing what to say. Speeches are no big deal in your own language, but in a foreign language it is another thing entirely. I can’t just “wing it” in Japanese.
After school some of the teachers that had open high school got together at a local okonomiyaki restaurant to drink beers and tell stories. The food was good, and it was another good test of my listening skills. Even though I seem to do better at Japanese when I have a couple of beers, the Japanese speakers around me were harder to comprehend the more they drank.
The place is run by a lady who is really nice, but she was busy making us food so she told us to serve ourselves from the draft beer tap and just tell her when we take a glass. Self serve beer? Oh yeah. Suddenly the foamy head of our beer was a lot smaller – cutting into the owners bottom line.
One of the teachers, Sakano sensei, pulled from the wrong tap and got a giant glass of shochu. That’s a pretty strong undiluted drink, in a big mug. He hammered it down, though, and turned a nice shade of pink the rest of the evening.
I came home relatively early, and Kuniko and I took a look at the pictures that had been delivered from the portrait studio. These are the pictures with us dressed up in traditional Japanese clothes, and they turned out really nice. I’m going to take them into work in the next few days and scan them into the computer.
We’re both tired already, and it’s only Tuesday. Three more days to go before the weekend. And counting.
