It. Won't. Stop. Snowing. Seriously. Every freaking time the snow melts off the ground, it snows again and puts more of the infuriating whiteness back there. I can't ride my bike anywhere, and there's no way in hell I'm walking around places in a the snow unless I have to. It's fun for about ten minutes, then it's just cold. I wanted to go grab some sushi yesterday or today, but the ten minute bike ride would be a thirty minute walk in current conditions. Bah.
Satoko continues to be one of my favorite students. I thought the food before was just a one-time thing, but apparently she's planning on doing it whenever she comes in. Mayumi sensei (my head teacher) said that Satoko apparently views me as something of a grandson. That works for me, I definitely had a severe shortage of awesome Japanese grandmas before.
I posted this on Facebook already, but this one has me smiling! (Happy now, Danielle? It looks as awful as predicted) Especially with the smile, my inner child is ridiculously dissapointed in my new default battle regalia. I'm not even supposed to know what half of this shit is or how it functions. Wanna know the worst part? Don't tell that little petulant bastard in my head that rails at me for growing up..... I freaking love wearing suits now.
Random stuff:
1.) My students call Sacramento "sacrament". No matter how many times I correct them, they say that I'm from "Sacrament". It's a little bit hilarious to me.
2.) The weather here is the most confusing thing ever. I could go into a long-winded rant about it, but I'll just give you one example from this week that pretty much sums it up. I was teaching in a classroom that had a window early in the week. When I had left home in the morning, it was completely sunny, but a few hours into my shift it was snowing like a mother fucker. Suddenly, it just stops snowing. Completely. And it's sunny. For about five minutes it's like this, then it starts snowing again. Half an hour later it was hailing. Then it rained. Then it snowed lightly for the rest of the day. What the fucking fuck, Mother Nature? Maybe the obscenities here are a bit extreme, but this is ridiculously frustrating.
3.) Found out why there were kimono girls last week. It's a coming of age thing. Every year, girls that are turning twenty dress up in kimonos and go to events. Then a bunch of them get plastered since twenty is the drinking age here. So there's a day where a bunch of Asian women go out and get drunk then... no. No, I'm not making the driving jokes. Not gonna happen. Nope....
4.) This may be of interest only to me, but I found out something interesting in one of my discussion classes this week. We were doing a unit on families, and I posed the question "What is more important in a family, blood relation or emotional bonds?" Now, I honestly assumed the response would mostly be blood relation. That's kind of what I've always learned about Japan, even in a collegiate setting. Every single one of my students, without even a second of hesitation, said an emotional bond was most important. Blood relation is worthless, they informed me, if family doesn't care for each other. Given a hypothetical scenario between a close-knit extended family that all lived together, a family where the parents were divorced but still involved in their child's life, and a family consisting of two married men that adopted a Chinese girl and African boy, they said that the third family was the best because they all loved each other. Now, given, my class only had three students, but they're pretty much about as far apart as you can get demographically speaking. Color me legitimately surprised.
5.) Got another hair cut this week. Got it cut closer this time, which is good, but now I have an issue. You see, the back of the neck wasn't cleaned up very well. The hairdresser pretty much just got the outlying growth, so now I have this weird fade of obviously newer hair. I didn't catch it while I was there, so it's obviously a bit late to solve it that way. I tried to fix it a bit myself and, well, the results aren't so bad that they're easily noticeable, but it definitely looks worse if you take the time to look at it now. I'm scared to try to do anything to fix it. Maybe I'll just wait til my next time in and make sure it gets taken care of. Bah.
That's all I got folks. ISN'T MY LIFE SO EXCITING?!?!
Edit: I lied, that's not all I got. I also went to my first free Japanese lesson taught by volunteers last week. It's from 10 AM to 11:30 AM on Saturdays, but I have to be to work by 10:45, so I pretty much only get to stay for 1/3 of the lesson. Better than nothing, I guess? The lesson I went to was fucking nerve wracking though. They have far more volunteer teachers than they do students, and they were all really interested in the fact that I was there (not sure why it's so interesting that a foreigner would come to learn Japanese...) What did this mean for Thomas? Simple, it meant that he got to do a lesson while being observed, judged, and corrected by four or five different teachers. I just kept getting more and more nervous until I started making really simple mistakes because my brain was in overload. Seriously hope that's just a one-time thing.
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