Ah... New Year's Eve

The past few months haven't been all fun and games.  A nagging sore throat turned into a cold in early November, healed a bit, and then came back for another round.  It was late December, almost Christmas, before I got over most of the effects of the cold.  Thanks to the steady colder weather we've had for the past two weeks, there are times where I've felt it coming back a bit.  Luckily I've managed to hold it off.

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This past year has been okay.  Nothing much happened in the early part of the year other than being woken up early often by the noise of the construction going on next door.  I went back to Canada in the early summer to pay a visit to relative whose health wasn't that good.  If I go back in late February it may be the last time we meet.  Summer this year wasn't typical.  Not as humid or hot as I had hoped for.  The fall was quite nice.  I had the pleasure of showing the local sites to a friend who came to visit in late October.  And in the past week, winter has struck with a bit of vengeance.  One snowfall in mid-December (which was washed out by rain just prior to Christmas) and a couple of days of snow since last Thursday.

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On Wednesday last week, which was Boxing Day, I travelled up to Tendo to do some substitute teaching.  One of the teachers at our school there had taken time off and gone on a holiday to Osaka.  The day started off with an element of panic though as we got a phone call from our school in Yamagata asking if I could teach there too.  A teacher there had come down with a heavy cold.  I looked at the clock and said there wouldn't be time for me to get there on a local train.  Would they pay for me to get there on the Yamagata Shinkansen?  Yes.  So I started off to get my car keys.  A few steps from my apartment door, I got a phone call.  At first I didn't realize it was my phone.  I had gotten a new phone the previous week and that was the first incoming call I had received.  Turned out they had fished up a Japanese teacher who could fill in.  That was a good thing because if I had taught at Yamagata then they would've been on the hook to get me to Tendo...there were no trains which could get me there on time for my first class.

The classes in Tendo went quite well.  I did laugh when a kid purposely switched some words in a verse he was reading.  The look in his eyes gave away his ploy.  He was trying to annoy me; the other teacher at the school scolds him when he does that - she has him on a merit system where he has to earn the James dollar he expects for finishing his lesson.  When I pointed out that I saw what he had done, told him that it was good, and praised him; it was he who was left feeling annoyed.  He wasn't expecting that. 

The foot in mouth problem of the day came during the last class; two girls and a boy.  There was one girl who is years younger than the other two students.  She's a bit of an over-actor but not disruptive. 

That day's lesson included a song which contains the lyric "It's my birthday today".  For the first time ever I had a kid tell me that it actually was their birthday that very day we were singing that song.  In this case it was the older girl.  I checked, "Your birthday is today?".  She answered, "Yes".  Whoa!  I wasn't expecting that.  So I had the kids go through the song with some changes; the name of the child and the count of her age.

The next to last item in the lesson was a test.  The younger girl reminded me of a girl who I teach in Yonezawa...perhaps a bit too much.  When I handed out the tests I instructed the kids to write their names on the test sheets.  The younger girl asked me how to spell her name...which wasn't what I had been calling her for the past half hour.  Oops!  Birthday girl got a laugh out of that at my expense.

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Nothing more to add here...so if you happen to read this post, have a happy New Year and all the best in 2019!

November's Kids...and Rice, too

Last Friday I went to teach a lesson at a preschool/nursery school.  I usually go there twice a month though it's not always the same Fridays.  This is on account of holidays that fall on Fridays.  I've been teaching there on a regular basis since April of this year.  Up until that time I hadn't been assigned a regular teaching gig at a preschool since I had been tied up teaching at a company two days a week (and sometimes three days).

Teaching a class of 20 "nen-cho" (oldest group) children isn't a super difficult task at this particular preschool.  The kids are well behaved and they genuinely enjoy their English lessons.  One just has to make sure that you have plenty of material to work with and to keep the pace of the lesson moving at a pretty good clip.  Accidents will happen though and I did forget to take along the CD of songs which I use in the lesson.  That time I managed to pull off the lesson by singing the tunes accompanied only by the kids.

There was one class in late August where I was completely caught off guard.  That was the time there was a local cable TV crew there to video my lesson.  No one had given me any notice of their being there so I just did my best to ignore the cameras and teach a standard lesson.  A few weeks later folks started mentioning they had seen me on TV.  The most peculiar incident being the one when one elementary school girl who is a student at our school decided to ask if that was indeed me she saw on TV.  How she went about it...well...I was seated in our teachers' area and she came walking up to me with a somewhat serious look on her face.  I didn't pay any attention to her until she whacked me on the shoulder and said "...Hoiku-en...NCV".  "Yes..." was my reply, which apparently was all that was necessary as she turned on her heel and walked off to her classroom.  I see....

Going back to last Friday.  I taught the lesson and after the usual "Goodbyes" headed to the exit to put away the slippers I had been wearing and slip into my street shoes.  Just as I finished putting my shoes on, the teacher was there, with all the kids in tow, to present me with a "daikon" (giant radish).  I thanked her and the kids quite profusely and did a round of high-fives with all the kids.

I wasn't sure why I had received that daikon but once I had it unwrapped at home I kind of had it sussed out.  It definitely looked like it was fresh picked.  So I assume it was grown at the preschool.  It was really quite charming.

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Late last Saturday night I got a phone call from a friend..."What are you doing?".  I went out to meet her at a bar and near the end of our "nomi hodai" (all you can drink) round we got onto the topic of the movie "Bohemian Rhapsody".  She had seen it a few days before and I had seen it the previous week.  Both of us had enjoyed the movie quite a bit.  Needless to say, when we shifted operations over to a karaoke box, we proceeded to select and sing a stream of Queen tunes.  I think we managed eight or nine in total.

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Last night I went over to Oirase, the scene of the Halloween event I had taken a Canadian friend who had taken the time to make the trek up to Yonezawa.  While the place had been fully decked out with Halloween decorations back then, it was back to its normal appearances now.  Except for group of small packages of rice sitting on the piano.  As I was getting ready to leave I asked Mayumi, Oirase's proprietress, about the rice.  "They're for sale.  Why don't you buy one as a gift?", she said.  There were two varieties of rice there.  One was Tsuyahime.  It's a well known brand which has made its way to Canada according to my sister, although with a considerable mark up in price.  The other one I had never seen before..."Mi ru ki- Ku i- n"..."Milky Queen".  Okay, I'd never set eyes on that variety before.  Mami, Mayumi's friend and part-timer at Oirase, then went on about how it was really tasty and "mochi mochi" (or something to that effect).  I was sold...made the purchase and then headed home.  As I did so I thought to myself, "Where else in the world would one go to bar for drinks and end up walking home with rice purchased at the same bar?".....