Tuesday 9/1

First day at Kagamihara. As I was zoning out during the morning meeting with the staff (I was only zoning out because I had no idea what they were talking about), the JTE suddenly called my name and said “Samantha-san, are you ready for your self-introduction in front of the staff?”. . . what! He never told me I had to! Well good thing I am a good girl scout and plan ahead, because I totally wrote out some mumble-jumble in Japanese last night with the help from Toru and Gary just in case! “Hello my name is Samantha, blah blah blah, Nice to meet you” *In Nihongo!*

Then we moved into the gym where we had the opening ceremony… can you say ATSUI! It was like sitting on top of the sun, drinking hot otcha, at an onsen, right after a long jog.

I did not teach today due to testing.

Some interesting things I discovered: Everyone brushes their teeth after lunch. So Japanese people brush their teeth at school, but they can’t get braces?

Some things that I learned: You need to eat (swallow) lunch fast. Today I ate with the third graders. I like to chew my food. So I did. There are serious consequences for chewing your food; you won’t be able to finish in time. I was about 7-mouthfulls through my meal, when they did a unison “gochisosamadeshita”. I looked around like “eh?” and everyone had already licked their plate clean. Great. I was still hungry.

After school I went to buy some supplies. On the way home I witnessed a car crash (not really)! I was sitting at a traffic light, when I heard a POP, like someone ran into a huge jug of water or something. I look up and water was flying in the air… Only it wasn’t water, it was glass from the car. When the light turned green, of course everyone was rubber-necking and I swear I thought the guy who got hit was dead. He wasn’t dead though, he was just sleeping, just like how that floating gold fish is not dead, it’s sleeping. The guy’s hat flew off his head onto the streets, but the lady who hit him was so nice, she went and got it for him. When he wakes up from his nap he should thank her for getting his hat.

Just joking he wasn’t sleeping! The lady did get his hat though.