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| JET Adventures 41 - Last day of term |
| Friday, March 24, 2006 |
See my smiley face? It's saying 'Yay! The school year has finished! Wheeeee!' Even though the powers of darkness have done everything in their evil power to put an end to my self-imposed solitude, and even though school starts again in only a week's time, I'm blissfully happy because I'm going to escape to Australia on Sunday.
I wish I'd been able to leave a week earlier because then I would have missed:
a) a godawful concert given by one of my teachers where it took 3 hours to get there and featured the worst flute playing I've ever heard (imagine 'panpipe mood' tracks with lots of squeaking and wrong notes)
b) helping the students to clean the school, scrubbing the floors with a pan scourer - I tried to convince them to skive off and come to MacDonalds with me but they were having none of it
c) the 'farewell party' for the 15 teachers who are leaving, which meant three and a half hours of farewell speeches
d) two days of hyperventilating into a brown paper bag over visa issues that actually turned out to be non-existent.
On the plus side, I finally found a copy of Katamari Damacy and it has renewed my faith in video games. My friend Nick came to stay with me for a couple of days while he was homeless before leaving Okinawa to go travelling around China and we played it non-stop while munching his 'good riddance' cake. |
posted by Alice @ 11:03 pm  |
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| Hermit |
| Sunday, March 12, 2006 |
There are no more adventures. I am never leaving my apartment again. I'm going to draw the curtains and grow my hair down to my knees, for ever and ever.
I bought a PS2 last week (£50 for a new one with a controller and memory card) and it was so good that I had to take a day off just to sit around in my pyjamas and play it. I can't understand any of the games I'm playing but I don't care! Riding around on a big horse and making it jump off high things and stabbing huge monsters in the face supercedes all language barriers. As does shooting things and making pretty sounds to achieve that elusive Buddha state. As soon as I get my hands on a copy of Katamari Damacy my life will be perfect.
Going outside is overrated, anyway. I went out for lunch at a restaurant this week and they had the lunch time special on, so there were only three things on the menu. I could read approximately none of them, so I opted for the one that might have been 'pasta'. It turned out to be tentacle and fish egg pasta. Like, a million tiny fish eggs in a bright pink sauce with some tentacles sticking out of it. God I hope they were fish eggs and not, you know, ant eggs or fly brains or something. And then the day after I went out to my favourite ramen restaurant to cure a pretty serious hangover, only to find it overrun with the baseball team from my school. I don't understand why they were so excited to see me, but they wouldn't leave me alone until I'd bought them some gyoza to make them stop tormenting me with their nonsense.
So, no more going out. UKNova (The Apprentice! Gordon Ramsay! Shameless series 3!) and incomprehensible Playstation games and a bumper pack of instant noodles are my new friends. |
| posted by Alice @ 12:29 pm |
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| JET Adventures 40 - Graduation, Concerts and Karaoke |
| Tuesday, March 07, 2006 |
The school year finishes at the end of March, but all the third years got kicked out last week with a huge graduation ceremony. The whole day was filled with teachers in suits, flowers, speeches and tears. It was a big deal - even the Mayor was there to inspire them with his talk about "love is more important than money". Everyone was in tears and getting emotional but I didn't really get it. Surely the students are happy to be leaving after 3 years of wearing brown uniforms and having to clean the school every day? And surely the teachers don't break down on stage every year? After 4 hours of speeches, they all parade through the school which has been decorated with flowers, and the first and second years (out of their own pocket) ply them with balloons, sweets, and more flowers.
As if that wasn't enough excitement, I went to two concerts last week. A teacher had given me a ticket to see some Eisa (Okinawan dancing and music) at one of the universities. They had won the Grand Prix prize for Eisa at one of the festivals last summer and had spent the cash on a huge speaker system. The front three rows were filled with pensioners who had all arrived 2 hours early to bag the best seats but spent the whole concert with their hands over their ears because the volume was so loud and because they'd mixed the traditional Okinawan sanshin music in with some rocking electric guitar and awesome feedback. \m/
The other concert was the school's marching band concert (they're number one in the whole world, y'know). They do it every year, but this year was special because the much-adored music teacher is leaving! Teachers here can only stay at one school for 3 years before the board of education move them all around like musical chairs to 'refresh' them. The music teacher is hallowed, not only for training the marching band up like crack commandos, but also because he was a student at the school and it's the only school that he's ever taught at. My school had managed to hold on to him for 6 years somehow, but now the board have decreed that his time is up. He's said he'll never manage another marching band again until he can come back to Nishihara, and half the marching band are saying they'll quit until he returns (awwww!)
Anyway, the concert was awesome, if a little long (4 hours! 3 encores!). Of course there were more tears, flowers and speeches. Like with all school performances, there is always a bit where the students put on swimming gear and dance around the stage, although thankfully it wasn't tiny Speedos this time:
Miraculously I managed to avoid going to karaoke after each of these monumental occasions (there's always karaoke), but got caught out on Sunday when my friends Nick and Rachel enticed me with peanut tofu, cunningly disguised as karaoke. See how lovely they look?
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| posted by Alice @ 10:05 pm |
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