Who's at the door?
It's Zsa Zsa Gabor!
Good Halloween to you all Xeno-fans! Another week another poorly aimed use of the child-height urinals as Hashihama school continues refurbishing and my socks get ever more piddily.
The week gone was a quiet one to be sure to be sure, as Halloween is upon us I was able to make up about an hours worth of activities and apply it rigourously to all my students without regard to their age, level of interest or appropriateness of content. A few word games and pictures of Turnip Jack O Lanterns (Irish style) were mixed with a poorly translated account of the Famine and a rather skilled glossing over of why so many Americans came to Japan on boats bringing Halloween with them.
It wasn't to give them an award for niceness
Oddlly I think the Famine was a bit of a hit as when I tried to explain that the spuds got a "Potato Sickness" and turned inedible and black, this went down to uproarious laughter as I mimed picking them out of the ground and looking at them. Also everyone forgot what a Banshee does so I got to shriek in a book-ish kids face at full scream.
A 7.9 on the Richard scale.
The best things in life ARE free. Also this week I was enlisted to do a culture lesson because a bunch of city fat heads were in visiting to every lesson they did that day. So they all had to be planned rigourously and jampacked with engaging, informative content. As opposed to every other day where they repeat "Grapes am swell!" for 45 minutes before they all bow to a picture of Hello Kitty and eat a bowl of fermented seaweed. Okay I was overstating quite a bit there...
...apart from the seaweed.
I told them about what it's like to be submerged in another culture where everything you are is basically the greatest of affronts to good taste and ettiquette. My examples were when a waiter followed us for 5 minutes out of a restauraunt because we had left a 10cent tip, when I took another teachers sandals to be the Toilet Sandals and came out to find them shouting at a kid they assumed had stolen them as a trick and then finding a postman in my apartment as I shielded my nethers with a dripping towel. Stirring stuff indeed.
My forays into the nut bustingly hard core world of Asian martial arts contiues sluggishly with a large part of my kendo time spent beating several shits out of a mannequin with an old car tyre for a head. Oh and shouting MEH! every couple of seconds. One kids` MEH was deemed so sub-par he had to spend 10 minutes MEHing his Nipponese nuts off before the teacher would allow the class to end. Also I am currently looking for a set of second hand kendo gear as to buy it new, predictably costs as much as an evening of high end erotic dancing from the Spanish PM.
<enter spicy sausage joke here>
Bar these minor considerations it has been a fairly pedestrian week with a standard Halloween-proximal Saturday night of rubbish costumes (mine at least) and eventually very drunken Karoke, Japanese style which means in a lightless booth with just you and the set of friends you walk in with with no one else to talk to. Never been my bag per se but when in Rome... you'll see open racism.
Their mad for it over there, the divils.
Meg to be fair was rocking a pretty deadly costume of some random be-bearded hunk of 100% Irish beefsteak. In an anime t-shirt wearing dirty swimming trunks maskerading as shorts and small stuffed pig. She looked so damn good I would've cheated on her with me, who was her who was me who was her who was me...(trails off and breathes through mouth...)
In other news I'm beginning to finally get a few visitors in the next few months and am getting my grits together to have something to show them. As an aside to anyone who's considering popping over while I'm here, yee've got about 9 months before this turkey... hatches. Put a fork in the turkey! Because it's eggs are all in one basket and counted before they've hatched.
So...yeah visit me up a notch ya shower of beggars!
Also I'm trying desperately to worm my way in with both former lecturers/employers to try and wring references out of them for when I return. So if you feel like writing down something complimentary about me and keep the swearing to a minimum I'm accepting anything anyones willing to give! Hai dozo!
Afraid that's gonna have to do yez for this week, jesus, they just brought in the school lunch. Who knew that grey had a smell?
I did. I knew.
Turnip Jack O lanterns in Japan
