Spring Break!

It's been pretty busy around here, lately; really busy, in fact. Not at school, though, not there. In fact, since the sannensei left, my job has become incredibly boring, sitting at my desk for five out of eight hours trying to come up with creative new ways to keep myself from nodding off. I'm usually at least semi-successful.

Outside of work, though, things have been busy. Last weekend—last weekend, was it? I think so. It seems like forever ago now.--I went down to Hamada with some friends to get bus tickets and check out a rock festival that was going on in town. Nothing special, mostly local groups, but what spurred us to attend the event in the first place was the fact that one of these groups—the infamous “Terrordactyl”--was actually a group of Hamada ALTs. It's important in those kinds of situations to show up and represent, yo.

Terrordactyl was pretty good, although I'm not sure their audience—mostly Japanese teenagers—really got it when they started their set with “Earth Angel.” Strange, seeing as how Back to the Future seems to be one of the few American movies that every Japanese person seems to know. In any case, my only real disappointment with the performance was that they failed to follow up their opener with “Johnny B. Goode.” If you're not gonna do that, then what's the point?

This Thursday saw me at another music festival, this time in Masuda. It was called a jazz festival, but I found once I arrived and the performance began that it really was just swing music, which suited me just fine. In fact, I probably enjoyed it more than I enjoyed the rock show. In the great scheme of things, I don't think I like jazz any more than I do rock, but the difference between local amateur rockers and skilled, professional jazz musicians is pretty severe. There are apparently going to be a few more jazz acts coming to Masuda this spring, so if the price is right, I may check those out, too.

This Tuesday, a couple friends and I will be trekking out to Osaka and Kyoto for a week. I'm looking forward to that, especially after getting to be in Osaka for such a short time in winter. I'm excited to see more of the city this time around. I'm assuming Kyoto should also be suitably awesome, but I've never seen it before, so I don't really know exactly what to expect. I'll try to get some photos and video from my exploits in these fine towns, so expect some stuff next week.

MONKEYWATCH, 2008

I'm not entirely sure why I feel the need to let you know every time I see a monkey out here. I imagine you can only hear about someone seeing monkeys one or two times before it becomes incredibly boring, sort of like looking at pictures of someone's baby while they jaw on about how much it weighs and how it looks “just like her mother, thank goodness!” This is sort of the same, only these babies are covered in fur, and I can't really vouch for whether they look like their mother. Also, they might try to claw your eyes out if you get too close.

Anyway, I was making my way home from Hikimi yesterday (Don't the cool things always happen in Hikimi?), the weather was perfect, and I was psyched to get home and fall asleep. Only one thing could have made me feel better right about then, and sure enough, there they were. Not one, but two monkeys had ventured beyond the safety of the mountainous forest to—presumably—make some kind of life for themselves on the road's shoulder. I could tell that thus far it had been rough going. After all, it's difficult to find food in a place where plants don't grow. Granted, they could always return to the forest, but that would be like admitting defeat, and they would never be able to look their monkey peers in the eye again. As I drove by, they looked at me solemnly, and their eyes betrayed a terrible wisdom; it was a wisdom borne of folly, the kind gained only far too late.

In other, far less important news, all of my sannensei(san = three nen = year sei = student) graduated yesterday. A chuugakkou (middle school) sannensei is the equivalent of a high school freshman in America, and that's where middle school ends, so today they're all gone. It's a strange feeling. I didn't even see any of the schools' graduation ceremonies because I was at an elementary school yesterday, so today it was like they had just vanished. It's kind of distressing to think that I probably won't see any of them again, especially at Hikimi, where all the students—especially the sannensei—have been awesome.

All the same, I'm excited about the classes moving up to become ichinensei (ichi = one). Again, this is primarily at Hikimi, where I actually teach at the elementary school twice a month, so I know all of the students that will be moving up. They're all a lot of fun in class, and I'm looking forward to having a class at the middle school that I've already built a rapport with. I've always been completely in charge of classes at the elementary school, so it'll be interesting to see how they deal with me kind of taking a backseat and just occasionally reading words for them to repeat. However it works out, I'm excited to be getting them in class. They're no monkeys, but they'll do.

I like to sing-a, about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a...

After much deliberation, I believe spring has finally decided to return to this fair city of Masuda. It hasn't quite fully returned yet, but the signs are beginning to crop up. For instance, I have to start putting my drinks in the refrigerator again if I want them to be cold. Gone are the days when I could just leave a package of chicken breasts on a table for a week and not worry about them spoiling. It's inconvenient in a way, really, but I feel it's a fair trade-off, considering I don't feel like I'm going to freeze to death whenever I enter my kitchen now.

Animals are starting to move, too. I'm starting to see birds again, and just last week in Hikimi, I was witness to a herd (pack? flock? gaggle?) of monkeys, making its way along the mountainside, no doubt in search of a decent curry shop. I'm told there are bears out in Hikimi too, but I haven't had the luck of seeing one yet. I have seen a badger, which the school's math teacher told me was a “ground bear.” Have I told you about that already? In any case, the English teacher out there told me that in the spring, the school can be kind of like a zoo, which is bad. I'm assuming that when she said bad, what she really meant was “awesome.” Sometimes things get lost in translation.

The coming of spring also means that the road to Hikimi isn't covered in ice and snow anymore. Since about the beginning of January, I've been riding the bus to Hikimi. This has been both good and bad. Unfortunately, taking the bus to school meant that the earliest I could get there was by the beginning of third period. This can be inconvenient because I'm always the last one to get to work, and I miss any English classes that take place during first or second period. On the other hand, I didn't get to school until the beginning of third period. This gave me an extra two hours of sleep in the morning, since I didn't have to be at the bus stop until 9:10, when the first bus to Hikimi rolled into the station. Riding the bus also meant that I was free to eat breakfast during my trip to work. Every Friday, I had the luxury of stopping at a convenience store on the way to work and grabbing something to eat on the bus. This was a huge plus, since without breakfast I'm usually about to pass out by lunchtime.

Then there was the ride back. On the way home from Hikimi every Friday, I was joined on the bus by three of my students from Hikimi Elementary. This was either awesome or terrible, depending how tired I was. Regardless, I thought these kids were great.

There are three of them, a first grader, a second grader, and a third grader. All of their names are a mystery to me, but I know them well. The third grader seems to be the most collected of the group; I guess that kind of maturity just comes with the territory when you're all of nine years old. He's the one who talks to me the most, and he's really good about it, too. He has the patience that a lot of adults lack, and will use simple explanations to help me if I don't understand a particular word. During our conversations, I've learned that we share a love of the Super Mario Bros. He's excited about Super Mario Galaxy and Smash Bros Brawl, and he tells me he's hoping to get a Wii for his birthday. His birthday is in October.

The second grader seems to enjoy sitting up front and having “very adult conversations” with the bus driver. Every week, he sits at the driver's shoulder and asks what seems to be an endless string of questions. I usually have no idea what he's saying, but it's clear from the tone of his voice that what he's asking about is pretty serious business. I imagine that by the end of his tenure at Hikimi Elementary, he'll know more about the operation of city buses than anything he's been taught at school.

Then there's the first grader. From what I can gather, it seems as though the blood flowing through his veins was long ago replaced by Mountain Dew or some other suitably Xtreme fluid. He rarely stops talking, and he never stops moving. One day I got on the bus to find that all three children had large chunks of ice that they had probably confiscated from some rain gutter. While the other two had stored their ice chunks in their umbrellas for safekeeping, the first grader was wielding his like a sword. He's a cute kid, and I love him to death, but he frightens me, because deep down, I worry that his energy is going to fall into the wrong hands; I am certain that one of these days, someone is going to find a way to harness that energy and, when they do, they'll either use it as a clean power source for all of Japan or they'll destroy the Earth.