2001-12-03 - 10:06 p.m.
Had a less than great day today. The 40-minute bike ride was no problem, and actually didn’t seem that long, and was quite pretty at parts. I pass a really neat little graveyard I’ll have to explore sometime. However, I was expecting great things from this new school and was a bit disappointed. I taught three seventh-grade classes today. One was great, one was pretty noisy, and the third was an absolute nightmare. There were two really unruly girls who seemed to be the ringleaders, and they literally shouted throughout the entire class, walked around the classroom, laughed, and did their hair as the teacher did nothing to stop them. The highlight of this circus was during the question and answer period when one of the girls asked me “Do you like sex?” After getting over my impulse to smack her (and I was within range), I informed her that this was not a polite question in America or in Japan, in English or in Japanese. That shut her up, though it was most likely my expression more than my words, which she probably didn’t understand anyway. I was completely shocked, because I had been told that this was a good school -- but things change with each entering grade and the frequent rotation of teachers among schools. The staff were nice enough, but I didn’t get the same warm feeling I got from my last school. I miss those secret tea parties already.
My last day on Friday was great, though I was nervous all day because I had to make speech in Japanese to the teachers at the very beginning of the day and then another speech to the students in English at the end of the day. Nerves aside, I got a really nice good-bye from everyone, with many students writing me thank you letters and giving me little presents.
This weekend I went to a neighborhood in Tokyo I’d never been to before called Koenji. Saori is looking for an apartment there so we walked all around. Koenji is home to a lot of young, poor artists and also a lot of old people who’ve lived there for ages, which makes for a really interesting mix. There was a pet store with a big parrot outside who squawked greetings in Japanese to passers-by.
Some good news: my Japanese is getting a lot better, especially my listening (I understood the parrot, ha ha!). Today these teachers were talking about me right in front of me, saying that I studied Japanese very hard and that I was doing really well for only being here four months. Yeah -- well enough that I can understand when people are talking about me! Saori is also really impressed, but maybe she’s just saying that. I’m also learning kanji now -- the Chinese characters which are my major barrier to reading Japanese. They are symbolic, not phonetic, so you have to learn each character, you can’t sound it out. Now that I know about 50 or so of the thousands of kanji, I feel sometimes as if I am finally starting to crack the code that surrounds me. I need to work on speaking -- it’s so bungley and laborious that it’s much easier to just sit and listen. But I met a woman my age at my karate class who has offered to have coffee with me & speak Japanese, so hopefully that will pan out. This whole learning Japanese thing is rather amusing to me, because I don’t really plan on continuing it after my year here -- so I look at it as my hobby. I seem determined to become barely literate in as many languages as possible (French, Hebrew, Dutch, Japanese, and counting).
I feel like my entries have been really boring lately but hey... it’s just my life. I’ll try to get some more pictures up soon!
