Nonononovember!

Happy November everyone! Time to boycott uniforms and take the SAT subject tests and go to amusement parks! Well I didn’t do that first one, but I swear, making students wear skirts in the winter is a health hazard. And so is cleaning the school. I had the worst assignment for this months ‘big cleaning’. The girl’s bathroom. I think my teacher is out to get me. One of the toilets in there had been stalled for three weeks. Imagine what three weeks would do to milk or a sandwich, or even worse, what I pulled out of the pipe! Since they have toilets on the floor the plunger wouldn’t work right. It kept folding in on itself and, yes, splashing me. So I used these ancient looking rusty salad tong things to remove the uh problem along with other things you might find stuck in a jammed toilet… Needless to say I am now a toilet hero and of course never found without my hand sanitizer. (I think I might have mentioned once they don’t have soap in the bathrooms) Anyway that was how I ended my Friday before running home early to get rested up for the SAT II. I got up at 4 am the next day to go with my host mom to the testing center which was eons away. It was being held at the American School in Japan. I think I suffered from overload of American teenagerness. They were everywhere, and pretty much all of them went to the school. So it was all intimidating and weird, especially understanding all the side conversations going on. I made it through with all my limbs intact though! I took the Japanese with listening test. I think I nailed the listening part, seriously. I’m probably un-nailing it by writing it down, but that’s okay (not really). One poor girl sitting in front of me had her CD player break half way through and there was nothing that could be done! Ouch. Anyway, I was really glad to get out of there. When you’ve been a foreigner in Japan a long time you really start to get that weird feeling when you see other foreigners. It’s like ‘hello yes I know you’re there but I’m just gonna go on my own little foreign way and you can go on yours’. But this was more awkward because all these kids had their own little groups and they all knew each other. It was funny, on the way home this girl got on the train and was so busy staring at me she stepped on my foot. And completely unrelated, there was this guy that sat down across from me. He sat down really fast and wacked his head really hard on the window. He sat for like 10 minutes cradling his head like he dislodged something serious. People are strange! But I did have a really great time on Thursday. I went to Yomiuri Land (I still can’t say it right) with the 2nd year Judo girls. Two of us road everything there, except for the rides for 3-7 years old. Bummer! Below are pictures from our day.