Deskwarming Diaries #24

Welcome to another edition of the Deskwarming Diaries where an ALT finds herself shoveling snow much more than she’s used to. This edition features winter, Kyoto, a giant box of snacks, and future plans. Let’s jump in!

First, as always, the highlights:

• I’m eating lunch with an elementary class and they are a HOOT! It’s been so long since I really enjoyed myself at lunch, and I owe it all to those crazy kids. The other day, a kid went to the front to get more of the salad, a konnyaku-seaweed mix. Even though he was appalled that there was only seaweed left, he proceeded to try to dump the remaining contents onto his plate, and, when that didn’t work, scrape the inside with the ladle. After five minutes, his teacher said, “Just… take it back to your seat.” “REALLY?!” And this kid, overjoyed, walked back to his seat with the whole bucket, spooning out the seaweed into his mouth. A little while later, I heard snickering and turned around just in time to see his head disappearing into the bucket. His teacher yelled at him to stop, so he stood up, looked into the bucket, and said, “Oh my ga! Kore wa beautiful!” (This is beautiful!”) I could NOT stop laughing!
• Last week, in another elementary class, the teacher was passing back a test and telling the kids that when she says “Translate the following sentence from English to Japanese,” that means to write what the English sentence means… in Japanese… Apparently, a couple of students had just re-written the pronunciation of the sentences, so “I went to Suwa” became “Ai wento to Suwa.” Just as she finished explaining, a previously-absent student came in and gave her his make-up test. She took one look at it and waved him back over. “Hey… why is this all in hiragana [one of Japan’s three scripts]?” “Well, you said to put it in Japanese so..” “Yeah, I get that. Why are there no kanji [Chinese characters used in Japanese]?” “Because kanji are from China.” Everyone laughed and she was very exasperated.
• Also last week, Jess and I made Valentine’s Day cards with an elementary class. We wrote the English on the board, explained to them what it meant, and they copied it onto their cards. Maybe 10 minutes in, the principal stopped by. He ended up spending maybe 10-15 minutes in the class, walking around complimenting the kids’ writing skills and helping them with their letters. When we told the kids to decide who they wanted to give the cards to, a few of them raised their hands and said, “Mine is for the principal!” The look of joy on his face was wonderful.

A giant box of snacks

A couple of months ago, my local supermarket had a raffle, giveaway thingy. I collected the raffle cards for a couple weeks, not amassing many. But my neighbors got a ton of them as a gift, so I ended up having around 50! Turns out, you get 1 chance for every 5 you have, so I had 10 tries. For what? No idea!

We showed up on the day of the event to lots of pavilions set up in the parking lot. Our tickets were checked, and I was given the number 10 before being shuffled to the next station.

Here, I had to draw, omikuji style, 10 sticks from a large box (omikuji style means that at the bottom of the sticks was a color that corresponded to prizes). I drew three — yellow, yellow, green — and paused when I heard the guy manning the station gasp. A couple others drew closer. “What?” “No, no, keep goin!!” The rest of the sticks I drew were colorless. But I had won something! They started clapping and ringing a loud bell, then sent me to the next station where the attendent had placed a large box on the table. “Congratulations!! This is your prize!!” “I’m sorry, what? All of this?!” *laughs* “Yup! All of that!”

So I picked up the box and walked through the rest of the pavilions, everyone clapping and congratulating me. It was really strange; I’m not used to winning things, and I typically try to keep a low profile in the community. Plus some of my kids were there, so they immediately started yelling my name and waving. When we got back to the car, I looked in the box to find — SNACKS. Soooo many snacks.

Hey, guess what? It’s winter.

So. Much. SNOW. It’s really bad this year. Apparently, this winter is what it is normally like in my area and the last four years have been abnormal. When I say bad, I mean we had a huge snowstorm in late December (about a foot-and-a-half in a couple of days), and it hasn’t let up, or melted, since. I’m used to it snowing a bunch and then melting over the course of the next week!

Now, we have about two feet in the sunny places and closer to three or four in the not sunny. The boys have already shoveled the roof once; they might have to do it again before winter is done!

Also new this year is our pipes keep freezing. We have learned to let everything drip, but before, we would go a few days with hot water just in the bathroom. We had to heat water on the stove and then use that for the dishes! Never ever ever had to deal with that before.

Winter trip to Kyoto

After brainstorming for weeks about where we should go for winter break, Hunter and I finally settled on Kyoto. “It’s south, so there won’t be snow, and it’s a major hub, so we should be able to take public transportation everywhere.” Is what we thought. But once we arrived at 6am after taking an overnight bus from Nagano, our expectations were immediately dashed. “Why… Why is it snowing… And WHY is it so COLD?!” I guess Kyoto isn’t very ‘south’ when your country is about as big as California.

Cold aside, our trip was pretty nice! Going around New Years meant that many things had limited hours or were closed, but we managed to fit quite a lot in. We went to the typical places, like Kiyomizu-dera and Yasaka-jinja, but we also went to Enryaku-ji, an aquarium, Bishamon-do, and found all the Pokemon-themed manhole covers! I’m still working on the posts for all these wonderful places, so keep an eye out!

Future Plans

Well, my time on JET is coming to a close. My contracting organization offered me a sixth year, but I turned them down. If the last two years of ‘rona have taught me anything, it’s that Japan is not where I want to live full-time. That means that in July, Hunter and I will be heading back to the States! Really nervous about the move, and we don’t have a clear vision yet of what we’ll do when we get back, but I’m looking forward to the change. Both of us have been taking online classes for potential jobs, so we’ll see! For now, though, I’m trying to take it one day at a time.

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Until next time!