Little Earthquakes

It's been a busy week or so but it's all good. Tomorrow I'm helping out with a 'trick or treating Halloween Parade' through the mall with the international pre-school and they're going to be so. cute. On the down side we were told yesterday that we needed costumes for it, which left me scouring the hyakuen store (100yen store (about 50p)) for anything that might do. I ended up with a cowboy hat, a toy gun, and a gingham handkerchief to tie around my neck as a bandanna, paired with jeans and my brown cost that will have to do as a cow-girl costume.

Cinema tonight to see PS I Love You, how is it that it's only coming out at the cinema here now? The amount of time some random things take to be released astounds me.

The exchange rate is AMAZING right now. When I came to Japan it was 250 yen to the pound, now it's 174. I just wish I had some money I could send home, I'm going to have to keep my fingers crossed that it will stay low until payday on the 21st.

My predecessor's predecessor has to come to school for a visit. It's been interesting talking to him and getting his thoughts on the job. If he ends up turning up today I think we're going for ramen at lunch. I've moved my private lesson to this week instead of next week so that he can come an see everyone, they'll be so happy to see him!

The weather has finally turned - hurray! Today I actually wore a light coat for my walk to school. It was kind of bizarre though, I never expected the seasons to be so punctual. We had the typhoon, then some hot days (though without the crippling humidity), then came the Autumn public holiday and BAM! Much cooler weather/rain/grey skies (I'm not complaining, I love it). In Japan even the weather is more efficient.

I just amazed a student by eating lunch. I have a student that wants to come and eat lunch with me some days to help improve her English, so she came to the staffroom for the first time today.

For my first trick I ate a hot lunch of bolignaise sauce and broccoli (I had heated it in the staff room microwave). "Hot-to?" she said in confusion. I then finished my lunch and then pulled an apple put of my bag. She was shocked because Japanese people usually have their lunch box and that's it (the apple wouldn't have fit in my bento box). Finally I had to explain a few times that I was definitely eating an apple because she thought all apples were red. To be confronted with a Golden Delicious type variety broke her brain, so I must be eating a pear (pears are apple shaped here).

I should clarify that she is an absolutely lovely student, I had fun, and I'm not berating or otherwise making fun of her. I kind of love discovering these pre-conceived notions people have here, and how something so normal to me can seem so bizarre.

A typhoon is supposed to hit us here at some point this afternoon. At about 9am this morning an announcement came over the loudspeaker telling all students who take the local JR train line to go home because they were closing down the service in preparation for the weather, so they had to get home before that happened. At the beginning of lunch the vice-principal received a warning from The People Who Decide These Things that actually now we have to send all the students home.

But not the teachers. Because apparently in Japan teachers are like captain, they go down with the ship.

Or not, I don't think it will get that bad (and I've been talking to other ALTs who have reported that it wasn't anywhere near as bad as people were saying) but then their students weren't sent home so maybe it's just hitting us more directly?

It's supposed to hit at some point this afternoon and I have to walk 20 minutes home at 4pm. Without a coat (too warm) and probably without an umbrella as I imagine it will be too windy for one at that point. I am not looking forward to it.

I may take a few hours of nenkyuu and just go home now.

I've just walked into the bathroom and realised that my middle shirt button was undone. All I can hope is that it happened during lunch rather than in one of the two classes I've taught today. It's the kind of thing you'd think one of the teachers would mention to me.

It's raining here now which means there's a cool breeze that I'm quite enjoying. However, the bad news is that it's raining because they're expecting a typhoon this weekend, so we'll see how that goes.

The exchange rate bumped up overnight (dammit!). I want it to drop down again to under 190 for when I get paid tomorrow so that I can send some money home.

Be proud of me my eBrethren, though I awoke with only 20 minutes to go before I had to leave I managed to get up and dressed, saute a chicken breast so I could throw together a bento of chicken, cherry tomatoes and string cheese, and both make and scoff a quick breakfast omelet while simultaneously packing my laptop bad and wielding my mascara and toothbrush (thankfully in approximately the right areas of my face). MULTI-TASKING: I HAS IT.

In other news I just booked my hotel for Malaysia (you are going to be sooo sick of hearing about Kuala Lumpur by the time I go). We ended up spending slightly more ($18-24/night rather than $11-14/night) so that we could have a budget hotel rather than a hostel with shared facilities. We had a lovely looking hotel in mind but after some hard digging on the interwebs I uncovered a veritable plague of bad reviews for the place, so we decided to spend a little more and get somewhere that had excellent reviews across the board.