Splash of good fortune

I'm a little bit tipsy, which is unusual for a school night, but I felt I should probably write this post so people could at least laugh at the misfortune (or fortune, depending on your perspective) that led me to cry 'tonight I deserve the chu-hi that's chilling in the fridge!'

After finishing up at my visit school today, I decided to stop off at the shopping mall that's kind of en route to my apartment. I was relaxing and looking at various gifts I wanted to buy and decided to measure my make-up against a small-looking make-up bag (covered in Totoro!!) that I wanted to buy for myself. As I reached into my bag I found an email and two missed calls from my supervisor on my phone. The email read:

"There is an overflow of water in your house. The landlord and a mechanic came there. They need the permission from you. Now I got a call from the principal telling me that a mechanic is fixing the problem, he is now in the verander."

Oh.. poo.

So I rang him straight back, running towards the shopping mall exit even as the phone was ringing. When he picked up he didn't have much more information than was in the email as he was still at school waiting to hear from me. He offered to pick me up from my home station and I pegged it across the bridge and towards the ticket barriers. I slipped onto the train just as the doors were closing and was confronted by a man who stared just a little too hard and had a mild case of halitosis. Running through my mind was every possibility that could have led to my apartment flooding. I'm so careful. I had checked the taps were closed before I left that morning,. A pipe must have burst! My supervisor had said my apartment was 'full of water' - what was damaged? How would I afford the repairs? What a nightmare :(

At my station I slipped off the train as quickly as I had slid on and headed for the exit. 30 seconds later my supervisor picked me up in his car and we hurtled towards what has been my home for the past ten months. We briefly talked about the possibilities, what could have happened, and I felt my heart pounding. Why! I wanted to cry.

5 minutes later we were at my apartment. My supervisor went to park the car as I hopped out and hurtled towards my door, keys already in hand to let any necessary mechanic / plumber / superhero in.

But no one was waiting outside. I knocked and unlocked, and peered in. I expected water to gush out over my wellies.. but nothing. I stepped in and switch the light on. Stuck my head into the bathroom. Tiptoed into the bedroom. Nothing.

Well, it must be the balcony that flooded, I thought.

Nope, the balcony was bone dry. I let my supervisor in, and it quickly dawned on us that the landlord had made a mistake. He called the school and let them know, but his irritation with the landlord was clear. In the meantime I had a couple of kittens and decided to just be grateful my possessions hadn't floated out of my apartment in my absence. Without a doubt I will be doubly paranoid for my remaining six and a half weeks in the shoebox apartment, but I am glad that the place hadn't flooded.

It dawned on me afterwards.. the landlord contacted my school but he had obviously got me confused with someone else. Maybe there is another ALT in my town who is in for a nasty shock tonight? What a long day this has been indeed. I'm glad I had the foresight to buy an alcoholic drink this weekend.

Osaka Aquarium

This weekend I went with some friends to the aquarium in Osaka, which was expensive but definitely a good afternoon out. (Tip: go when you know there won't be so many small children. I was kicked by one and sneezed on by another.)

Here's a link to the website in case you're interested in going. The adult tickets are 2000 yen, with an extra 600 yen getting you a ride on the ferris wheel. I opted not to do this as I am chicken, hear me buckaw.

When you're inside the enormous building, you take an escalator right to the top of the 7 levels and see the otters and the fish and crustaceans that you find near the surface. Then come the sea lions. As you descend you come across ever more kooky and colourful forms of life, from the flourescent, tiny little fish to the big, fat, gormless ones that look as if they have undergone a full frontal lobotomy. Whale sharks and dolphins also make an appearance and sting rays abound.

After we'd spent about two and a half hours looking at everything, we headed to the nearest food court where I had my first Japanese subway sandwich. The guy toasted my bread before he put the cheese on (WHAT) but there was a new flavour we don't have back home - avocado and veggie. You win some, you lose some.

Despite copmpletely tiring myself out this weekend (Friday saw a JET farewell party at an all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink place out in the sticks), I was unable to sleep last night and have been awake this morning since 5.20am. This is probably going to be a looong week folks, so please disregard any uncharacteristic spelling mistakes. I hope all is well back in the land of fish and chips.

Mmm... chips.

Be more careful in future, kid

Yesterday I gave a lesson on the future tense, explaining the difference between ‘I’m going to ~’ and ‘I will ~’

To set the scene, I first decided to revise the past tense, so asked the students very simply what they had done the previous weekend. In this class there are a few more students willing to volunteer than in others, but they were still a little slow to get started. I reminded them that they could get reward stamps for volunteering, at which point the hands started to go up.

Most of them talked about how they practised their instruments or played sports, but one boy raised his hand and with a cheeky smile said ‘I did nothing.’

‘Oh really?’ I asked, moving towards him. If students don’t give full enough answers I have a habit of questioning them further until I’m satisfied they’ve tried their best. I could see from my angle that he had his leg up on a chair too, so I decided to make him really work for his stamp. ‘Why didn’t you..’

I stopped in front of him. The foot that was on the chair next to him was encased in the most enormous plaster cast I have ever seen, with his toes poking sadly out the end. He grinned and pointed at his leg.

‘What did you do??’ I asked, the shock evident on my face.

‘Broken’ he replied.

‘How?’ I persisted, more from curiosity than from any desire to stretch his English. He clenched two fists together and made a snapping-twig gesture, accompanied by a crunching noise.

‘Aaargh!’ I yelled, the class erupting in laughter. ‘Yes but.. how? Football?’

‘Rugby,’ came the answer. I stamped his card and went back to the front of the classroom.

So on I went with the lesson, explaining the grammar and tailoring the questions accordingly. ‘What are you going to do this weekend?’ I asked the class.

Up went the hand of the broken-foot student. ‘I’m not going to do anything,’ he began, pointing melodramatically to his foot. ‘I can’t!’ Another stamp.

‘Any volunteers to read the dialogue?’ I continued. The broken-foot student volunteered himself and his friend.

‘Okay, stand up then.. no no, not you! You can sit down!’ The students normally stand up to read out loud and he wouldn’t be told to sit down if his friend was standing, preferring to balance precariously on one foot. Another stamp.

Every second time I asked for volunteers, he was there, reminding me that he was injured but still soldiering on. Twenty stamps or so later, I came to the final grammar point; using the present tense – ‘I am ~ing’ – to talk about the future.

‘What are you doing after school today?’ came my final question.

‘I’m going to the hospital’ shouted broken-foot student, pointing one last time to his cast.

Okay kid, I get it!!

Japanese efficiency

Sunday morning. Early. The world is awake because, it seems, Sunday is just another day to work in Japan. Last night my neighbours kept me up past 1am (which is a big deal now I'm not a student anymore) so I was looking forward to at least being able to lie in until 9am or later.

At around 6.45am an unexplained loud noise woke me up. Groggily, I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I was aware of moving around outside my balcony.

At around 7.30am the machinery started. Loud hedge trimmers and something that sounded like a pneumatic drill began operating on the area outside my apartment. A group of men were intermittently chattering loudly in Kansai dialect close to my balcony. They sounded so chirpy and awake that I wanted to go out and thump them.

The noise continued and continued, until I was fully conscious and unable to go back to sleep. At 8.45am I gave up and decided to go and make a cup of coffee and start my day. I came and sat at my computer at about 9am and looked out the window to see the guys all loading their machinery back onto their truck, the day's work apparently completed.

HGFUISDHGFKNDKGBAEDIHGFSD

Volunteering - June

Today I went to the children's home again, which was a lot of fun and just what I needed. There were only two of us going today but it caused a fair amount of excitement anyway. With no game tournaments going on and the weather too rubbish for running around in the yard, we wandered the corridors to see what the kids were up to. The girls appeared to be eating a late lunch so we made our way to the boys' floor.

That's where I was first attacked by a 7 year old with an imaginary light sabre.

As I fell to the ground in slow motion, matrix style, another small child rushed at me with a large yellow bean bag and began swiping for my head. I stood up straight, realising only my height would save me and noticed I'd arrived at the main play room for the boys. The more boisterous boys got distracted by something further down the corridor, so I breathed a sigh of relief and looked at the others who were staring up at me inquisitively.

"It's a new person," one of them said in Japanese. Another one popped up from behind me and began tugging at my name card. I hadn't seen him before and figured he must have arrived fairly recently. He sounded out my name and asked where I had come from. "I'm from England," I replied.

"Not Japan?" His eyes widened.

"No, I came from England," I answered. I asked his name and he said it slowly before pointing to his name on the list in the corridor. Then he charged off to overpower another boy's dinosaur with what I think was a plastic gun (it more closely resembled a drill.)

I stuck my head into the playroom and asked if I could come in. The kids graciously granted me permission so I scurried in and sat down on the floor next to a very quiet little boy who was carefully arranging shogi (Japanese chess) pieces on a board. He didn't seem to mind me being there, but he wasn't interested in small talk.

Eventually the others burst back into the room in a storm of fake gun sounds, light sabre swishes, and what can only have been battle cries. I was dragged into the battle between the gun and the dinosaur - the rules changed every minute so I'm pretty sure I lost every round. Then I was whisked away to watch TV, play several rounds of tag, hide and seek, and be killed in battle a few more times. When we left I was pretty exhausted, but happy. Hanging out with the boys was a different experience to last time and reminded me of playing in the garden with my little brothers when we were younger. These boys even had a bag of 'slime' on the playroom table that they claimed to have collected from the garden. It all feels so familiar..

Goodnight, grandma

One of my biggest fears about coming out to Japan was that something would happen to my grandparents whilst I was away. My grandma has had a fair few health problems over the past few years, and even though she pulled through every time, I still worried that something might happen whilst I was so far away.

My grandma died yesterday. She'd not been too well after a recent fall and had deteriorated over the past week or so. The family was with her when she passed away at home and I'm told it was very peaceful. I'm glad that she went in the best way possible.

But I'm also selfishly sad that I couldn't have been there too, to say goodbye or to say thank you. I feel wretched that I can't even go to her funeral when she was there my whole life. This post is my way of saying what I can't say to her, it's the only thing I can do.

When I was little, I used to go to my grandparents' house to stay. I'd normally go with one of my cousins, and at first we'd only stay for one night. As we got older and grew used to being away from home, we'd stay for a few days at a time and sometimes I would even go by myself. We'd all go on day trips to the local park, grandad would help me with my maths homework, grandma would play games with us and talk to us about whatever was going on in the news.

One of the things that stands out at me about memories of my grandma is that she was passionately anti-Thatcher. For as long as I can remember she would talk to me (at me?) about politics, even when I was too young to really understand what she meant. She also talked about social issues in general, teaching, learning difficulties, employment.. no doubt fuelled by what she was learning in her second degree in social sciences. I joked that these were 'lectures', but she inspired me to take sociology at college. Naturally, all the things she'd taught me gave me a head start in my classes, and it's probably not a surprise that I would never ever consider voting Tory.

Learning was a big deal for her. In fact, it always has been for both my grandparents. They bought my brothers and I our first encyclopaedias. For years we would go to see a play by the Royal Shakespeare Company every summer (beforehand she would always insist we dig out the big encyclopaedia of literature and read a synopsis of the play we were about to see.) She taught me a lot, about specific subjects and about the importance of studying. Every morning, before she started to be unwell, she would wake up between 6-7am and do the crossword whilst waiting for my grandad to wake up. I would sneak into her room, sit on the floor and stroke the cat, pretending to muse over the clues she was giving me (I make no pretence, I'm still not capable of doing those crosswords even now.) Sometimes she would give my cousin and I a really long word and ask us how many smaller words we could make with it. We would scamper off to do this whilst she and grandad got up and ready for the day and then together we'd try to make the list longer.

She was a convinced Christian too, and some of the explanations she gave me strengthened the faith I have today.

My grandparents' house has always felt like my second home to me. My cousins and I learned to play so many games there. Scrabble was always the hardest one, and grandma was quite strict about the 'no proper nouns' rule. But my cousins and I learned early on that we could easily trounce her in a game like 'pairs' or any card game involving memory. Those were such fun times, and I used to really look forward to school holidays when I could go and stay with my grandparents.

She'd always been hard of hearing, so one day my grandad bought her a hearing aid. It felt like a new era! All of a sudden she could hear us so much better. When she had it in, of course. She had a habit of not putting it in when we went to see her, which we only realised when she started to tell us off half-way through a conversation for speaking too quietly (often ensued by cries of 'put your hearing aid in, grandma!') She'd put it in and switch it on, then look expectantly at grandad. Grandad would then quietly say 'Mary had a little lamb..' and she would finish with 'and then she had some more.' This was their test to check the hearing aid was working properly, and it cracked me up every single time.

I'm going to miss my grandma so much. She was a huge part of my childhood and used to give such great advice, especially when I was having a tough time at school.

One day she said to me 'don't worry about boys and about what the other girls at school are doing. Study hard. Do well at school, pass your exams and when you get to University you'll be the belle of the ball.' I never forgot those words.

Thank you grandma, for everything. Thank you for helping me do well at school. Thank you for helping me be a better Christian. Thank you for your wise words. Thank you for patiently sitting and playing with me and my brothers and cousins for hours and hours. Thank you for being the best grandma ever.

I'll always remember you xxx

Japanese flower arranging

Determined to do as many Japanese things as possible before returning to the UK, I approached one of the teachers in charge of the Tea Ceremony club (茶道部) and asked if there were any activities I could join in with. She gave a me a schedule of some classes and invited me to an Ikebana lesson! Ikebana 生け花 is Japanese flower-arranging. I have never even done European flower-arranging before, so I’ve been excited about this for a while. Nervous too, because I heard that the lady outside school who comes to teach was very strict.

So yesterday I went along to the lesson with my English-speaking colleague, who was kind enough to stay with me the whole time to translate. I learned a huge amount about flowers in that short time.

Each of us had a selection of three types of plant waiting for us. Small, yellow chrysanthemums; the leaves from a kind of lily; and the focal flower which was tall and straight, with a purple bud. The main teacher came over to me and explained the principles of flower arranging, the main one being balance. You shouldn’t have too many flowers, and they shouldn’t be too bright. They shouldn’t all be the same size, and there are rules governing how tall or short they should be.

For example, there were three of the main flower in my selection, which the teacher cut to three different sizes for me. They were placed on the base first.

The base, by the way, is a flat pin bed submerged in water. You stick the flowers onto the pins so as hold them in place.

I was told that the shortest flower on the base should be around a third of the size of the tallest flower. (Yeah, this is where I started to get lost in the forest of yet more Japanese rules and etiquette.) The chrysanthemums were duly cut to size for me. There were additional tall leaves with the bunch that had apparently come from the tall flowers. This should be cut to the height of where the stem of the tallest flower stops and the flower itself starts. (Still with me?)

The lily leaves (the flowers of which are superfluous because the leaves themselves display a simple beauty worthy of a place on the stand) should not all face the same direction. Rather, they should look in or out in different directions in the interests of balance.

Before I knew it, the main teacher had arranged all my flowers perfectly for me. She was then whisked off to help some other students, leaving my colleague and I to look at the masterpiece she had left behind.

“You can try now if you want to,” she said. “This is the teacher’s style, but if you follow the principles of Ikebana then you can find your own style.”

I voiced my concern that the teacher would be offended at my interference in the balance that she had created. My colleague insisted though, so I took away all but the tallest flowers and began rearranging them with her help.

In the meantime we talked about flower arranging traditions. I learned that there are three main holidays each year, from January to May, where she herself would arrange flowers in her home. For other times the Japanese in general might display smaller pockets of flowers around their home, in front of which they might pray for dead relatives. Interestingly she said they favoured small chrysanthemums over the big ones, as they ‘give gentler feelings.’ I liked this idea.

The teacher came over to see what we’d done and contained her dismay in a very Japanese way – by emitting a small nervous laughter. Then she began rearranging my flowers again until they resembled more closely what she had done before. Apparently the main flowers were very tall and straight, meaning we should adopt a very ‘tall and straight’ style for them.

My flowers are now on display in front of the office.. I cheekily tweaked them one last time after the teacher reorganised them. It’s mostly my work I guess but it doesn’t really matter, I enjoyed the experience anyway.

My colleague left me with a wise observation. “We Japanese often think about colour and the brightness of flowers, but Ikebana is about balance. We should spend more time thinking about the balance.”

I guess in a country where work-life balance is hard to achieve, it is all the more important to preserve the principles of practices like Ikebana.