A k-car and Bunkasai Preparations

The weekend of October 15th, Anne and I rather unexpectedly got a car!  Apparently Suzuki-san was getting sick of driving us around because he got in contact with an agency which was set up to make donating specific things to the tsunami-affected area easier.  Through this agency he asked if there were any cheap cars available and was put in contact with a couple from the city of Nagoya.  This particular couple had a spare car which had belonged to the husband’s father until he passed away last year.  Suzuki-san told the couple about Anne and me and they decided to give us the car for free!  So that Saturday the couple arrived in Minamisanriku after driving the car a good 850 km (about 525 miles) with the intention of taking the shinkansen (bullet train) back on Sunday.  We met the couple briefly on Saturday afternoon to thank them for the car.  Both the husband and wife spoke good English and so they were able to explain all the features of the car to us.  The car is... kind of old (old enough to have a cassette player but not old enough to have roll-down windows).  The car was well-cared for and was apparently kept in a garage most of the time (a rare occurrence in Japan where there are few garages).  Having an older car in Japan can be a hassle though.  Every two years we must have an official inspection which costs around $2000 just because the car is over four years old.  If the car fails the inspection then we will have to pay for repairs too.  Luckily the official inspection isn’t due until the end of August.  Our car is also... not really a car.  It is too small and doesn’t have enough horsepower or weight for international standards so it's in a different class of vehicle known as a k-car.  In Japan k-cars are required to have yellow license plates to differentiate them from regular cars which have white license plates.  My mom asked me if the car was just a "glorified golf-cart" but I can assure you that it’s more comfortable and powerful than that (getting up hills may take a while though).

So, Anne and I drove the k-car back to the apartment but then we weren’t allowed to use it after that since we didn’t have car insurance yet.  The license plates were also removed so that they could be returned to the dealership and exchanged for Miyagi prefecture ones.  After that we’ll be able to use it on weekends but we don’t have permission to use it to drive to school since we’re foreigners and we might get in a car crash... I mean... we need to check to make sure there are parking spots available at the schools (basically Suzuki-san said something like that).  Other JETs use cars to drive to school though so I think that if we don’t crash the car over the weekends for a few weeks in a row then we’ll be able to get permission to use it after that.  I'll post a picture of the car soon but it seems like every time I think of it the sun has already gone down (I think it seriously went down at 5 PM today, actually I just looked it up and it set at 4:52... <O_O>).

Anyway, this past week at school I had another small speech in front of Hayai Elementary.  Luckily there aren’t very many students so it wasn’t as intimidating as it had been at Hashi JHS.  Other random events have been going on at my schools as well.  Hashi is preparing for its yearly bunkasai (Cultural Festival) which will take place on Sunday, and Michiue and Hayai both had some kind of performance festivals as well.  At Hayai I watched some fourth graders practicing for a yosakoi performance and some third graders preparing for a play (they were so cute!).  At Hashi a class of 7th graders asked me if I would be Alice from “Alice in Wonderland” for their performance.  Hopefully they were kidding since I haven’t heard anything about it since then and I’m not even sure if it’s a skit or what.  While preparing for the bunkasai, the middle school students have been having fewer classes during the day and using the rest of the time to prepare their various skits, presentations and performances.  Meanwhile I’ve been trying to learn all the students’ names which is no small task since there are quite a few of them and I don’t see them all consistently.  I’ll keep working on it though!