Anyway, I wanted to post sooner but I got caught up doing some important things like:
1. Sending in my absentee ballot registration form for the big election (luckily I'll be able to email my actual ballot)
2. Finally sending the IRS my tax documents (don't worry I paid my estimate back in April and then just got an extension for the paperwork)
And most importantly:
3. Re-reading (well re-re-reading) the two Heroes of Olympus books by Rick Riordan since the third book in the series is due out next week! I'm super excited about it and I hope that this series doesn't end up as a trilogy since I want to read more about Percy Jackson and company later on. Actually I realized recently that I like the Percy Jackson series/world even better than Harry Potter since Rick Riordan's writing style is just so funny.
In other news I've been in Japan for almost a year now (wow!). I also got plane tickets to go back home in December to spend time with my family (more specifically my cat). The high temperature and humidity suddenly broke last week so the weather has been quite lovely since then (though a bit rainy at times). I took a screenshot of the temperature drop from AccuWeather (after setting it to Fahrenheit) so that I would have evidence of this.
Notice that the recorded low temperature from September 20th is equal to the predicted high temperature for the 21st.
I don't want to write too much else today so I've decided to just tell a few amusing stories from school for now. I'll get back to the big trip (with Mikey) for my next post.
First a quick one that happened at Shiroharu Elementary school on Monday. One of the 6th grade classes was about to start and the kids were still chatting as I came in the room. Suddenly a boy in the back said, "Come here" (in English) in a pretty loud voice as he was talking to his friend and the homeroom teacher (all elementary English classes are required to have the homeroom teacher present) overheard him. This particular teacher has a good sense of humor so he said, "'Come here'? OK." and went over to the student. The boy was confused since he didn't know the meaning of the words (he probably just heard it on TV or in a video game). So the teacher told the class the meaning in Japanese (koko ni koi) and all the kids in the class thought it was very funny. During the lesson when I called students to the board I made sure to say, "Come here," and so by the end of class everyone knew the phrase. Then yesterday I had to stop by the local convenience store and as I got out of the car I heard some voices calling, "Come here!" I looked over to see some of the same 6th graders riding by on their bikes (and apparently calling out their new favorite English phrase).
Last week at Hashi Middle School the 3rd years had a dialog section in their textbook in which one of the book's characters was over her friend's house for dinner. The dialog was a conversation between the character and her friend's father and contained phrases like, "What would you like to drink?" and "It's delicious." So I asked Shingo-sensei if I could also give the students some tips on table manners in the US. He thought it was a good idea but I only had a few minutes before class to prepare. I wanted to bring props so that I could show the students what I was describing (how to hold the utensils, where to put the napkin, etc.). I was able to find a plastic fork which was kind of amazing but there were no butter-knives so I grabbed a pair of chopsticks that were still in their white paper wrapper (I figured I could tell the students to imagine that it was a knife and at least it was the right shape). I took a tissue with me to be the "napkin" and after failing to find any plate-like object I decided to just tell the students to pretend that my textbook was a plate.
The mini-presentation went well. I told the students that while using a knife to cut they should hold it in their dominant hand and use their fork to hold down the food. Since they didn't know what I meant by "dominant hand," I told them that I was a righty (and pretended to write and cut with my right hand) then I called on a boy in the front row who's a lefty and had him hold the 'knife' with his left hand - the kids caught on after that. The students were surprised to learn that after cutting they would have to switch the fork to the dominant hand to eat. I also told the kids to keep their elbows down while cutting their food or else they would "look like a bird" (tori mitai desu). Finally I wanted to tell them to keep their plates and bowls on the table instead of lifting them up while eating (which is the norm in Japan). Unfortunately the words for "plate" and "monkey" are similar in Japanese (sara vs. saru) so when I was explaining that they should pretend that the textbook was a plate I definitely said "monkey" the first time. The kids thought that was pretty amusing...
To end the post, a cute story that Anne told me from one of her elementary schools. She was eating lunch with some of the younger students (third graders I think) and was sitting next to a very talkative little boy who was asking her all sorts of questions about America. After a few minutes of asking about various topics he turned to her with a serious expression and asked, "Do they have zombies in America?" Anne was thinking of leading him on but one of the teachers overheard the question and said something along the lines of, "What kind of question is that, of course they don't have zombies!" haha.
On a related topic, the good news for Japan is that during the Zombie Apocalypse we will be relatively zombie-free as 99.85% of the population opts for cremation ; )