Deskwarming Diaries #15

Welcome to another edition of the Deskwarming Diaries, where an ALT is slowly acclimating back to school life. Today’s post features hiking, some school stuff, and masks from the government. Let’s jump in!

Mt. Iizuna

This mountain is actually one of the big ones I can see out my living room window! A couple weeks ago was the…. fifth(?) time I’ve hiked it. I plan on writing another post for those interested in hiking it themselves, so for now I’ll just say that the weather gods decided to bless me with clear skies (usually it’s so cloudy you can’t actually see anything from the top). Here are some pictures!

School stuff

The kids are back! All at one time! It feels weird to have everyone at school, but also kinda nice; it was creepy for it to be so silent all the time. The kids seem to be happy too. They’re (generally) a bit more focused than I remember, like they’re not taking being able to sit in a room full of their friends for granted. I’ll admit it’s nice. We’ll have to see how long it lasts though!

Kyushoku

YAY 給食!!!! After like three weeks of eating nothing but konbini, FINALLY we’re eating school lunch again. The only problem is I forgot how to eat fast. I find myself taking my time and enjoying the food and then suddenly a student is standing in the front of the class saying gochisosama deshita (what we say when we’re done eating) and I have to throw down the rest of it in like 2 minutes. I mean, I had trouble eating it all before covid, but now I have to consciously remind myself to eat faster. Here are some of the stranger things I’ve had since we’ve been back:

I’ve never seen this in lunch before! It’s called chimaki and it’s a special kind of mochi that’s wrapped in a bamboo leaf and eaten for Children’s Day. We usually have a special lunch around Children’s Day (May 5th), but because of corona, we celebrated it on June 5th instead! The mochi inside was sticky and fresh tasting, like the bamboo leaf it was wrapped in.

Ah. A truly Japanese lunch. The soup had tiny fish in it, the salad was filled with seaweed and pieces of chikuwa (a type of fish cake — not so bad when you’ve been eating it for three years), and the main dish was a handful of 2-inch-long fish that had been fried and which you eat whole. If that wasn’t enough, it also came with a small package of dried konyaku strips, scallop flavor. Yaaayyyy. Some kids dared those around them to eat the konyaku strips which lead to a lot of boys ripping the bags open, taking deep breaths from the bag, and making barf sounds. Yeah, no thanks. I left without eating it and now it’s sitting on my kitchen table.

Prevention and Disinfecting

Courtesy of the ‘rona, school isn’t 100% back to normal. There are signs on the ground indicating where kids should wait for the bathroom, and masks are mandatory for everyone. Anyone displaying any kind of illness is sent home immediately. In class, students are not allowed to face any direction except forward, can’t sing, can’t walk around the classroom, and can’t pass things to other students.

And while I understand all of these rules, they just don’t make sense. The in-class rules are just that — they’re for actual class times. So what about between classes? Kids are jumping all over each other, yelling, masks on desks, passing things to their friends on the other side of the room. Now maybe the school knows something I don’t… But last time I checked, the spread of corona is not relegated to only five or six hours a day.

Here’s another thing. All the teachers now have specific areas of the school they are in charge of bleaching everyday. I help the three office ladies with the teacher’s room. All three of them disinfect different areas, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of pattern. Today we will do all these buttons, tomorrow we won’t. Today we will do the printer, tomorrow we won’t. Can we please just decide to either go at covid 100% or not at all? All this in between stuff doesn’t make sense.

Abe-no-mask

At the beginning of the outbreak in Japan, masks were snatched up in less than a week. Suddenly, you couldn’t buy them anywhere. So Prime Minister Abe announced that the government would be sending two reusable masks to EACH HOUSEHOLD. Dubbed “Abe-no-mask,” or “Abe’s masks” in English, they were quickly ridiculed. The memes were swift and unforgiving. This one’s my favorite:

Besides the quantity being not enough for many households, there were also reports of people getting moldy/stained masks and masks with hair/bugs on them.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that I just received mine yesterday. YESTERDAY. A full three weeks after Japan lifted the state of emergency. Granted corona never got super bad where I am, but still. Glad I figured out how to sew my own!

Until next time!