Tuesday Kuniko got up to go to school really early, and I got up with her. I originally had planned to go hiking with Antoine today, but we rescheduled the hike to Wednesday to allow his girlfriend Miwako and Kuniko to come along. That left me with a free day.<\/p>\n
I cleaned house a little bit, had breakfast and answered some email during the morning. I also did a little bit of shopping at the grocery store. People around town give me a double take when they see me during the day walking around. I think they are wondering why I’m not at work somewhere. It shouldn’t be a big deal – lots of foreigners only work nights at language schools – that’s when Japanese people are free to learn. Still, I get even more attention walking around during the workday.<\/p>\n
Back home, Kuniko called the home phone out of the blue, and asked me to do her a big favor. She had forgotten some cookies from New Zealand that she was going to bring for her students’ party. She asked me to bring them to her school. She arranged to meet me at the front gate at 11:30. I got organized and headed out around ten. <\/p>\n
I hadn’t really ever visited the school without Kuniko guiding me there, so I put in a little extra time just in case I got lost. Luckily I found the school right away. Unfortunately I was twenty minutes early. There was a guard at the gate (because it is a girls’ school they want to keep the perverts away) and I tried to drop off the cookies with him and head back. He wouldn’t take the cookies, instead guiding me inside. I repeated my plea to the front desk but the pretty girl working there insisted that I follow her to a meeting room to wait for Kuniko herself. While I was waiting she turned on all the heaters and came back with tea for me to drink. All this time I never identified myself as Kuniko’s husband, because I know it would cause a comotion. <\/p>\n
Finally Kuniko made it in to see me. She was both sorry to have dragged me all the way there and embarrassed that I was at her school. She brought a friend in to meet me, and then waited until there was a break in the stream of students leaving to sneak me out. <\/p>\n
Kuniko recently put me on her insurance, because I’m going to be working “off the record” with Nozaki sensei and I won’t be insured through her school. When Kuniko filed the paperwork, she said the office staff looked a little concerned and sympathetic – to them it looked like I was some unemployed American bum living off my poor hard-working wife.<\/p>\n
Then I showed up today dressed in jeans and my ratty clean-the-house shirt and they must have really been impressed. Now I was getting a better sense about why Kuniko might be a little embarrassed. We walked from the school down to the local convenience store to buy some drinks for the party, and on the way Kuniko said that the office staff had said I looked like Leo DiCaprio. So I guess I’m a relatively famous-looking unemployed American bum.<\/p>\n
After saying goodbye to Kuniko I stopped on the way home in Chinatown and had some spicy suigyoza and pork buns, and then made a quick stop at the import food store to get supplies for (yet another) taco party this Friday. Several of Kuniko’s coworkers will be stopping by as kind of a farewell party for one teacher. <\/p>\n
Now I’m back home and I’ve got dinner all ready to go. We’re having some more Japanese food tonight – rice, miso soup and vegetables. Tomorrow is the big hike with Antoine and Miwako – we’re going to have to get up early again…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tuesday Kuniko got up to go to school really early, and I got up with her. I originally had planned to go hiking with Antoine today, but we rescheduled the hike to Wednesday to allow his girlfriend Miwako and Kuniko to come along. That left me with a free day. I cleaned house a little […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-jY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}