Phew, yesterday was stressful! My adaptor plug, allowing me to plug my NZ laptop into the Japanese wall plug, had been steadily getting more and more difficult to connect - requiring lots of jiggling to get it going. Then yesterday ten minutes jiggling had no effect. I declared it officially dead. Unfortunately, I was plugging in because my laptop had only seven minutes left, so that meant my laptop was also dead! It's amazing how much time you have when you have no computer. Mainly because I couldn't do anything! No blog, no emailling, no searching google for images to use for my Thursday lesson, no using itunes to play my Japanese study CD, no listening to music... I ended up doing the only sensible thing: putting my laptop back in the car and bringing Harry Potter up to the office!
Jeff had done a bit of shopping around for me last week, looking for solutions to my laptop problem (surprisingly, NZ adaptors aren't easy to come by in a city that Lonely Planet says to skip!). I managed to convince a computer store to sell me the cord that goes from wall to the in-cord adaptor. The guy made it specifically clear that if it didn't work they wouldn't give me a refund (how's that for inspirising enthusiasm in the customer!), but it was only about $15 and it WORKS. Yay!
To update you on the weekend, my work dinner (Friday night) had an unexpectedly good twist - at lunchtime Nakamura-sensei (who I was supposed to meet at Fukuyama station so she could take me to the right bus stop) came to tell me we had been invited to the onsen in the hotel first. She was really hesitant, saying she knew many foreigners felt uncomfortable going to onsens (we're not used to the naked thing), but I assured her I loved them and we were set. In all honesty, I don't know any women who don't like onsens. It's so liberating to not be worried about looking sexy in bikinis or anything. It's just everyone, starkers. You have a wee shower/wash first, so there's no makeup or anything (as you sometimes, strangely, see at the beach). There are women of all ages and shapes and everyone is just there to relax. When all you have to protect you modesty is a cloth the size of a small tea towel that goes on your head when you're in the water, there's not much you can do to make yourself look good. It's too late, let it go and relax. So I do :)
This onsen was particularly cool as it was several stories up in the hotel, so the outdoor pool looked over the waves crashing on the rocks below and out to the lights of Fukuyama city glowing across the bay. To the right you could faintly see the outlines of the mountainous islands that dot the water round the Fukuyama-Tomonoura-Onomichi area. I'm not good with hot water for extended periods of time, so I loved being able to raise my shoulders out of the steaming water to feel the delicious night breeze lick me with its chilly tongue. The others went off to the sauna leaving me to absorb the amazing view in an intense silence created by the rain, waves and quiet chatter of elderly Japanese ladies.
Of course, after that the party would have to have been mind-boggling to top that experience - one of my favourite moments in Japan. As it was, the party was fun if a little confusing. Seating was done by pulling a seat number out of a box on your way in, so I ended up between two slightly alarmed-looking teachers who didn't appear to speak English. The younger one on my right was trying valiently, though, while the one on my left laughed at his appalling English and supplied words for him when he was stuck (wouldn't this be easier if I remembered names!).
Later the one on my left was the only one left for me to chat to, so I rounded on him. It turned out he has pretty decent English, is the school rugby coach and has taken a group to Christchurch to play rugby before. Of course I got all excited about the idea of arranging for his team to visit NZ and meet the Massey team. The teacher said, "Oh yes, and they can play a game." I keep cringing at my condescending response, "Hmm... or at least practice together. The team at my high school are... very big." It seems so rude to suggest they can't even play the Massey team. And then I remember that he had just told me they only have ten students on the team at the moment and that at Massey guys often repeated their last year once, even twice, just to stay on the first 15. I think of pitting 10 little Japanese kids against 15 guys aged up to 20, many of Maori or Island ethnicity, and I realise why I said what I did. I hate that, when you regret how you said something, but when you review the conversation, you realise why you said what you did and that you would probably say it the same next time.
The most important thing about the party, though, was definately the food. There was an incredible amount of food - the number of courses more than made up for the fact I didn't eat or only partially ate several of them. The meal opened with sashimi, a quarter lobster filled with tofu and mushroom over a gas burner and a bunch of little dishes that I ate but still don't know what they were. One was maybe tofu, one was some sea critter in a shell that was impaled on a toothpick (the most... err... texturally challenging food of the evening. I needed a BIG swig of beer to get that one down!) and the rest were unknown. Other dishes that followed included two legs of raw crab (King crab? Queen crab? One of those big ones), fish cooked in some kind of leaf, oyster in some kind of batter that made it look like a root vegetable (maybe my favourite thing I ate. I thought of you, Jeff... oh, err, only cos you love oysters, not because... I'm stopping here), an entire, if smallish, fried fish and three small pieces of steak and a slab of butter that you put on what looked like a flat-topped incense burner so it cooked in front of you. By this time I was getting really full and I struggled to get through the clear soup with fish paste and the egg custard thing with mushroom. Finally (I sigh as I write this, the memory of how full I was is still that fresh!), there was a lemon jelly for dessert. As I said, I couldn't bring myself to eat all of it (I ate one piece of sashimi, but when they replenished me with two more, I realised I wouldn't win that and just told the kimono'ed waitress that I was finished with it), but as everyone was flitting from table to table and some people were much more focused on drinking than eating, I didn't embarrass myself.
Other than that, there was some game based on a Japanese game show that I couldn't follow at all and the very thin calligraphy teacher dressed as Santa giving out the numbers for a Bingo game. I found out why the tickets were so expensive when I saw that everyone got a Bingo prize! I won a disc that you stand on - one side is reflexology points (if only we could read the kanji to know how to target what!) and the other is a balance board for exercise. I was pretty happy with that prize - the guy next to me won a clock and letter drawer combined. Lovely, I'm sure... On the whole it was a funny evening and everyone tried their hardest to look after me, so that was really cool.
On the Sunday we went to a school show at Jeff's favourite primary school, Kurumi. It's a really small school, 40-something students I think, so he is able to get a good relationship with all the students. We watched a small play or educational talk from each of the different year levels, though we privately agreed the first year students was the most interesting. It wasn't only that they got all the cuteness points, and that I'm a sucker for little ones in kimono, it was also that theirs was entirely a play so we could follow along. There was a farming couple and two ladies in kimono who formed the 'locals', then a red devil moves in (played by a slightly ADD student in a red shiny wig, red sweatshirt and hilarious poofy very short girls shorts). Everyone was frightened until the red devil fought off a blue devil that started terrorising the locals (played by a kid similarly dressed but in longer shorts, with only one horn on his wig). Everyone is happy - and cute!
Jeff was going nuts taking photos of his students with our new camera. The Vice-Principal noticed and asked Jeff to give the school copies of his pics later, so that made Jeff nervous, which made him take about a million more pictures to make sure he got ones the school would like. The whole show finished with a dance that included all the students. They were dressed in colourful happi/hapi (not sure on spelling), first and third years in red, second and fourth years in blue and fifth and sixth graders in a few different colours depending on their position in the dance. The start of the music sent shivers down my spine, it was so beautiful and chilling. The students did a really great job at the dance, even trying hard to accomodate the special needs student who hadn't attended any of the rehersals and wanted to dance, while not having a clue where he was supposed to be or what he was supposed to be doing.
One of Jeff's favourite students was at the front - her mother teaches with Jeff at a different school. Her father is Korean and uses English every day at work, so both her and her little brother have names that easily translate to English and their mother tells them they must always talk to the ALT to practise their English. As a result, when the little boy saw me in the hallway he stopped for a look. "Hello." "Hello, how are you?" Jeff overheard from the next room and tells me I said it too fast, so I only got a quizzical look. However, ever mindful of his mother's instructions to always practise his English, he thought then asked me, "What's your favourite subject?" "I like English" I told him. Solemnly he told me, "I like Science and Maths." Just then Jeff came into the hallway. When the little boy saw us together he clicked who I was and squealed in excitement to see Jeff and his wife. Too cute!
Ok, now I'm going to end this before this update moves from short story length to novella. Sorry, folks!
Charly
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