And Sometimes Why

Author: David

  • Thing of the Day

    Mario Kart figurines on display by the lunch counter at the ramen shop I used to go to across the street from ALS

  • Thing of the Day

    This is something I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while. I see a lot of neat/weird/cool stuff on a pretty regular basis, but up to now, didn’t really have a good way of sharing it. I’ll probably post a lot of pictures with brief captions in this category.

    So without further ado, here’s today’s Thing of the Day:

    A portrait of me, done by one of my students. =)

  • Aww, crap

    If you’ve known me for a while, you know that I can be a little… particular sometimes. I like clean things. I used to be a little obsessive about keeping my hands clean, but I’ve relaxed a lot over the last ten years or so.

    A couple years ago, a friend told me that I’d relax my hygiene rules once I had a kid to take care of. You know, kids eat off the floor and stick their hands in the dirtiest… Anyway, Shannon Wood, this story is for you.

    Friday afternoon, during a free play period for one of our younger classes (3-4 year olds), I was sitting on the floor between some girls playing with pots and dishes and a group of boys making “guns” out of plastic building blocks. Gender stereotypes aside, I was having fun playing with the kids, my participation going back and forth between the two groups.

    This particular classroom has a restroom in the actual classroom, so I didn’t think too much of it when I caught a whiff of something that smelled like dirty diaper, especially because I was only a few feet from the door. As I was sitting there playing for a few minutes though, I was less and less convinced that the smell was coming from the restroom.

    I asked the boy on my left if he needed to use the restroom, and he said it was the girl on my right, who also said she didn’t need to use the toilet. Slightly confused, I looked around a little more closely and discovered a small piece of poo on the floor near me about the size of a sunflower seed.

    I grabbed a tissue, quickly picked it up, and asked my assistant if she knew what was up. She instantly knew which student it had come from, and took the girl I’d asked earlier into the restroom.

    As it turns out, she’d messed her pants but continued playing, and it had worked its way out of her pants.

    Hoping to keep the problem as contained as possible, I inspected that whole side of the classroom, but didn’t find any other untouched pieces. I did find one that had been rather effectively spread on the bottom of a plastic doctor kit next to where I was sitting. This disturbed me, because I was not interested in rolling around in some kid’s poo, whether it be on my clothing or skin.

    Unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky. I found a few strong smears along my outer left leg from when I’d been sitting with my legs crossed.

    I don’t know exactly what words would describe how I felt. This was my first class of the day, and I had a parents’ observation in a few hours. But really, that was a secondary concern for me right after “I have poo stripes on my pants. I have freaking POO STRIPES on my PANTS.”

    But I couldn’t just abandon my class, obviously. So I got out the hand sanitizer and cleaned up the floor as much as I could. I tried to put it out of my mind as much as I could. We had a drawing exercise we did after play time was over. And during a short break after that class, I went home as quickly as I could. (There’s one nice thing about riding a bicycle instead of driving a car- you can stand up to avoid getting poo on the seat should you need to do so.)

    Disaster averted, I went back to school with clean pants.

    My takeaway lesson is that I can handle the stuff like that that I know I’ll have to deal with around kids, be they mine or someone else’s.

    But seriously? If you can avoid it, don’t sit in someone else’s poo.

  • What’s up with you?

    I know I’ve been a bit of an absent blogger lately. Work’s been kicking my butt, and I’m one of those people who falls into the “if I can’t do it perfectly, then I won’t do it at all” trap sometimes. So to combat that tendency a little bit, I’m going to throw up some information in what I know is a less-than-ideal format. That said, here’s what I’ve been up to recently:

    • I moved in with Yuko a few months ago. Her parents weren’t thrilled with the idea at first, but they’ve since come around, which brings me to my next point:
    • I met Yuko’s parents yesterday. They were supposed to come out to Matsuyama around Christmas, but her dad hurt his back. They brought a carload of stuff, including enough food to feed a small militia for a few days. Luckily, Yuko is a fantastic cook, and the veggies her mom brought are all really fresh.
    • I applied to JET for the 2009-2010 school year, and had to go to Guam in February to interview. This created a tricky timing problem. I had to tell American Language School in April if I was going to renew my contract (set to expire in July), but JET notifies participants through May (and sometimes later) if they’re hired for positions starting in August. I ended up not renewing with ALS but not getting a JET position either, which leads to my next point:
    • I started working for a different English school here in Matsuyama. I now work for Miki Study Pals (pictured at left), a school that caters to parents who can pay for their kids to become essentially bilingual. Even though the bilingual students only represent about 10% of the students at the school, they have a bit of a “halo effect”, much like the Toyota Prius makes people associate fuel economy with Toyota.
    • I mentioned that work has been kicking my ass. I’ve been tasked with designing the curriculum for the last three months of the school year (January – March) for one of my co-teaching classes, and decided to go with a music unit. So I’ve been reading a lot of lesson plans, worksheets, and exercises that teachers have put out there on the web, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the kids, who are all around ten years old, and mostly bilingual. Then I had to wrap my head around the best way to organize and present the material. My first lesson was Saturday, and it went quite well. =)

    I think that’s all of the major stuff. I’ve done some traveling with Yuko recently that I should blog about. And I keep taking photographs of weird stuff with the ultimate goal of putting them up here. I’m sure I’ll figure out a way.

  • The Minister and the Seagulls

    Kinda sounds like some sort of parable name, doesn’t it? 🙂
    Last weekend, I had my first training session for my new part time job as wedding minister. While I was at Dogo Catholic Church for that, a local singing group came to rehearse in the chapel, and when they started singing a couple of Christmas songs, I began humming along from the back room where we were working. On the way out, the wedding officiator with whom I was working stopped to tell the director that I was also a singer, and director invited me to come to what I thought was their next performance.

    When I arrived back at the church last night, however, I discovered the director had invited me to a rehearsal. I was a bit surprised, but I stayed and sang for about two hours of their 3.5 hour(!) rehearsal. (Incidentally, one of the pieces they’re working on is “Hail, Holy Queen” from Sister Act, which I thought was a nice stretch.) I hadn’t realized how much I missed singing until I had the opportunity to do so. Another reason it was neat was that I was the only non-Japanese person there, and of course the rehearsal was conducted all in Japanese.

    Thankfully, I understand numbers well enough to understand bar numbers, and most musical markings are in Italian, regardless of what country the music is being used in- I just had to adjust my ear to listen for highly accented versions of “diminuendo” and “staccato.” A lot of the Japanese was pretty basic, too: “<from the head>” means “from the beginning,” for instance.

    Anyway, I found out the group is named “Seagulls,” and is mostly university students, but not all. Also, it isn’t associated with the church, but they rehearse there. I told the director I needed to go during a break, and he asked me to say a few words to the rest of the members about myself, at which time he invited me to join the group. Everyone seemed very welcoming, and they were eager for me to come to their performance next weekend. As a spectator, of course. 😉

  • Blast from the Past – With a Twist

    While walking to the grocery store a couple days ago, Yuko and I stumbled across a secondhand video game store named キャンプ (Camp). Yuko was super-interested, and wouldn’t walk away without at least browsing to see what classic titles they had.

    Oh wait, that was me. 🙂

    They had a bunch of stuff you’d expect, and a few surprises. Here’s a Japanese Super Famicom, brother of the Super Nintendo many of us know and love. It’s in the lower left of the case full of games, as you can see. Oh, and please excuse the image quality here, as all I had was my phone.
    No Super Nintendo display would be complete without Super Mario Kart, so they had a unit running. Yuko and I played a couple of races, and what really struck me was how primitive it looked. For a seventeen year old game though, it’s still pretty solid.
    They also had Nintendo 64 games. I wanted to snap a pic of the Japanese labels because it’s odd seeing something with which you’re very familiar changed just a little. Imagine if you went back to the house where you grew up and your bedroom door opened out, instead of in. Wouldn’t you take a picture of that? Also, I thought it was a travesty that Smash Brothers was more than twice the price of Ocarina of Time.
    In Japan, you can buy a black Wii, and associated peripherals. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they don’t sell it in America. I’m sure it would sell well. Anyway, here’s a black Wii bundled with Monster Hunter 3 and the Classic Controller Pro, also not sold in America. Also, a snap of some used black peripherals.
    Rounding out my trip down memory lane was this pair of NES machines (that would be the original Nintendo Entertainment System, for the uninitiated). On the left is Nintendo’s reissue of the original NES machine, and on the right is a recent knockoff of the console. I imagine the “original” machine is more expensive because they’re harder to come by. Anyway, if anyone really wants any of this stuff or other Japanese gaming stuff, let me know, as I pass this shop going to and from work every day. 🙂

  • Typhoon 18

    It’s been an interesting day. I woke up super early this morning (5am is super early for me now) to go see this year’s fighting mikoshi festival at Dogo. I didn’t bring my real camera because I didn’t want it to get rained on, so I’m glad I got decent photos and video last year. The pics snapped with my phone camera are pretty useless, but Kevin got a decent video or two.

    It’s been raining for the last three days, actually. It started out as a nice steady light rain, but just in the last few hours it’s gotten heavier. At this point though, the rain isn’t as big a deal as the wind, which almost inverted my umbrella as I was riding to work. You see folks, Typhoon 18 is about to hit southern Japan.

    I hear about typhoons pretty regularly, but I don’t usually pay attention to the warnings because the east-west mountain range just south of the city usually diffuses any strong weather before it hits Matsuyama. (Unless of course, I’m riding a bicycle across a series of bridges that day. Then it will undoubtedly rain cats and dogs.)

    This time is a little different though. I actually have a typhoon warning on my phone, evening classes at my school were canceled (which I didn’t learn until I had already pedaled over there), and the business next door to my apartment building piled sandbags in front of their door.

    I think we’re in for some real weather here.

    If I don’t post again, look for me in Oz.

    ******** Update October 9th, 2009 ********

    Much ado about nothing down here in Matsuyama. It hardly rained that night, and the next day was beautiful. The city of Tsuchiura, in Ibaraki prefecture however, was not so lucky:

  • 24 Hours in Himeji

    Yesterday, Yuko and I took a one day trip to see Himeji castle near Kobe. We chose Silver Week to do so because I don’t have many consecutive days off right now at my new job, so the five day break (four for me…) seemed an obvious time to travel. Also, they’re going to be doing five years’ worth of restoration starting next month, so I figured I should get on it before they put up the scaffolding. Silver Week happens sporadically (once every five to ten years-ish) when national holidays and the stars align (not kidding- one of the holidays is the autumnal equinox). The name comes from the desire of Japanese commercial interests to capitalize on the entertainment money spent during Golden Week every April.

    Our trip was originally going to be a two day trip, but as every hotel Yuko called was completely booked (including capsule hotels, though I later discovered she hadn’t tried any love hotels), we shortened it to one day. Almost exactly twenty four hours in fact, as we caught the highway bus at 6:00am on Monday, and returned on the overnight bus at 5:52am this morning.

    Anyway, it was pretty sweet. We arrived in Kobe at about 10am, and went straight to Himeji castle. One of the highlights of the trip for me was eating lunch at Subway before going to the castle. Matsuyama doesn’t have any sandwich shops, and I really miss being able to get a sub sometimes.

    Never underestimate Japanese people’s ability to spontaneously form a line. I guess the throng that showed up because of the national holiday was a lot more than normal, so they had to control the number of people inside the castle at once. As visitors entered the grounds from the main gate, they sort of spontaneously started congealing and slowing down to form a line. Being American, I insisted on seeing what the front of the line was up to before joining the back end of it, a trip that satisfied my curiosity but cost us about 15 spaces in line.

    I don’t know many Japanese ghost stories, but one that I’d heard before coming to Japan was of the servant girl Okiku who was betrayed, murdered, and thrown down a well. I was pleasantly surprised to find Okiku’s well on the grounds of Himeji Castle.

    Even once we were inside the castle grounds, the large number of people visiting the castle on the same day created a remarkably long line to actually get inside the castle building. They set it up very much like a Disneyland ride line, where you go through one waiting area thinking that you’re almost to the front, only to turn the corner and find that there’s another area full of people waiting.

    The castle itself provided a commanding view of the city surrounding it, of course.

    Many of the walls inside had hooks for weapons and gunpowder bags.

    I found the architecture really neat. It takes huge wooden beams to support a six story castle, and they were definitely in evidence. I was a little surprised to learn that the current form of Himeji had never been used in a war, so all of the intricate battlements constructed remain essentially untested.

    After the castle, we went to Koko-en garden just outside the main gate. They have nine different styles of Japanese gardens on the grounds, which I would have given a pass, but Yuko was interested. The gardens were very serene and beautiful, to be sure, and they had some landscape art installations that were interesting. It was near the end of a very long day though, and I was tired from all the walking we’d done, so it was hard for me to be as appreciative as I might otherwise have been.

    No trip to Kobe would be complete without a steak dinner, so we stopped by “ステーキランド”, the very appropriately named “Steak Land” restaurant near Sannomiya station. We both ordered one of the less-expensive dinner sets, but let me tell you, it was easily the best steak I have ever had. They cook on teppan grills in front of the customer (think Benihana) using only the most basic of ingredients: meat, salt, pepper, butter, and oil. The steaks there come with two light dipping sauces, adding a subtle flavor of garlic or soy sauce, but the steak easily stood by itself. My steak was so tender that when I poked it with one of my chopsticks, it cut a little circular hole through the surface of the steak, but the meat still had a very pleasing texture in the mouth. Absolutely exquisite, I tell you. While we were eating, another couple at the same table ordered shrimp, and it was so fresh that it was actually alive as the chef put it on the grill, its little legs moving around, huffing for its last few breaths of suffocating air.

    After dinner, we spent our last few hours in Kobe on the boardwalk called Harbor Land (“ハーバーランド”). It was a surprisingly American affair, with an open-air mall atop a parking garage and restaurants, replete with fair-type attractions like a ferris wheel, kiddie rides, crane games, and a playground. One interesting attraction held two “3-D” roller coaster magic motion pods. The experience was 3-D by way of a helmet covering the user’s eyes with two small screens filmed from two video cameras in the front seat of a few famous rides, including the Desperado at Buffalo Bill’s. After riding, I can tell you that it’s fun, but not nearly as exciting as the real thing. It’s kind of like a roller coaster for people afraid of roller coasters, but the experience was worth the $3. We also took our requisite ferris wheel ride and ate dessert at a small cafe with a view of the Kobe tower, overlooking the water. After that, we killed our last half hour or so by leisurely window shopping our way through the closed mall.

    Closing out our very long day, we caught the midnight bus back to Matsuyama, arriving just as the city was starting to wake up.

    Last up is a picture from my seat in the overnight bus, showing that they only have three seats across, with two aisles (and free coffee and tea). The seats recline pretty steeply, and leg and foot rests extend from the seats as well, so it’s easy to relax. Think about that next time you’re sitting in economy class wondering if there isn’t a more comfortable way to travel.

    I leave you with a slideshow of most of my better pictures from the trip. Though if you’re reading my blog on Facebook, you won’t be able to see it. Try this link: http://www.davidhed.com/blog/

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Week

  • It’s the Little Things #4

    No open container laws.

    In the left cup holder is an open Asahi beer, and in the right is an open bottle of tea. In all fairness though, Japanese people do not mess around with alcohol and driving a car. There’s none of that “I’ve only had a couple, I’m okay to drive” thinking that you sometimes find in the states. If you’ve had alcohol, you don’t drive.

  • It’s the Little Things #3

    Pictured on the left is a wall plate of five Japanese light switches. They’re always mounted to switch horizontally (as opposed to vertically in the US). The little oval mark is the “on” position, which always seems to be on the right. The bottom two switches are for vent fans (I took this picture in a commercial kitchen), which when switched on, are backlit by a red light.

    Also interesting is that most switches are outside of the room they’re switching, so you have to turn the light on before you enter a room, or you’ll have to go back out if you forget.