Week Five

It’s been another busy week but I’ll post a quick update before I doze off here on Sunday night.  My golden week vacation came to an unexciting end.  The last day I went on an excursion to Gamagori, which has an island connected to the mainland by a narrow bridge.  I rode the train for 90 minutes and then walked around the island for about 10.  The town also features an overpriced aquarium and museum that I passed on.  I brought one coworker who was similarly unimpressed.  Instead we opted for the boat racing stadium.  It’s a huge outdoor stadium around an artificial lake where guys race around on tiny motorboats.  Thanks to legal gambling admission is free.  I did not place any bets but I did get to see one guy wipe out and get scooped out of the water by the ambulance boat.  Kinda fun but not really worth $30 in train fare, especially when I live next to a bicycle racing stadium. 

So then it was back to work for another fairly grueling week.  On Tuesday I teach for three hours with no break in a room that is intended to be used for parent teacher conferences.  There are two rows of desks and the back row is literally four desks wall to wall.  When I want Billy to come write on the white board I have to make him climb over or under his own desk.  Actually since all the kids are in 7^th-9^th grades they seem to enjoy it.  Next week I’m teaching “Tea Time English” classes for Shimon teachers before work.  My boss told me he wanted it to be a casual conversation class.  Then he decided half of it should be spent drilling pronunciation of vowels so the teachers could “speak more confidently” in class.   In case you didn’t know Japanese has only five simple vowels while English has roughly 600.  Honestly I don’t think English speakers care if a Japanese person pronounces the words “color” and “collar” the same.  So far I only have one student.

This weekend was the Ogaki festival.  They close down the main street and set up hundreds of carnival booths with every kind of fried food you could dream of.  They also have big groups of men carry huge floats around town.  I put a picture of one on facebook.  One of the floats had six girls aged 6-8 in Kimonos and full geisha make up.  Another one had a creepy 3 foot tall puppet.  I wound up going three times in two days with various coworkers, and also running into three other people I knew there.  I have also seen the same woman working at a pineapple booth at all three festivals I’ve been to so far.  It makes me wonder about the secret lives of Japanese carnies.  Really though it make me excited for the October festival where are the American men get to carry one of the huge floats while the townspeople cheer and hand us free beer.  Okay it’s late and I have another big week coming up.  I’ll update within a week or so.