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| JET Adventures 66 - Procrastination |
| Sunday, December 17, 2006 |
This weekend was going to be THE WEEKEND where I sorted important things out, like tracking down my plane tickets, doing complicated financial equations in my head, packing, cleaning, and generally organising things for when I go home. But instead evil fate thwarted my plans and made me do none of those things by filling me with the urge to wildy procrastinate.
It wasn't entirely my fault though. Ben and JingJing came down to stay with me on Friday night and we accidentally rented a DVD that didn't have English subtitles. It was called Russian Dolls and was mostly in French and Russian, so we turned on the Japanese subtitles and watched it anyway - JingJing can kind of read Japanese kanji and Ben and I utilised our rubbish French skills, so together we managed to piece together about 75% of what was going on. We got drunk in our pyjamas, on apple juice and vodka and gorged Japanese Turkish food. It was all tinged with a bit of melancholy though because it will be the last time I see JingJing before she goes back to China next week, forever. Waaaaa, I wish it wasn't always the cool people who leave and never the retards.
At school, I was overjoyed to discover that I would be away for the Bonenkai this year (the year forget party) - last year we'd had to do this incomprehensible dance and drama thing and I thought I'd managed to escape this year's ritual humiliation. But my teachers have foiled me by deciding to make a video this year. It's of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody and we all have to sing and dance and air-play imaginary instruments. I was going to get to be Brian May but after I skived one practice session I got demoted to being Roger Taylor - the cheek! Needless to say I am basing my performance on Animal off the muppets and intend to drum maniacally through everything, especially the bits where there are no drums. |
posted by Alice @ 6:31 pm  |
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| JET Adventures 65 - Flamenco |
| Sunday, December 10, 2006 |
This is me with my friend Taka-chan at this year's Flamenco performance. I am blushing because she's actually in floods of tears, even though you can't really see it - but my Evil Supervisor MADE me have my photo taken, presumably because she likes to see embarrassed gaijin juxtaposed with emotional wreck Okinawans.
Regular devotees of my blog (all three of you), will recall that I went last year and was disdainful of the mechanical emotionless line-dancing. This year was much better because they'd ditched all the rubbish people (especially the only man-dancer dressed up as a cowboy (for some reason) who looked more like the bottom part of a pantomime horse). And instead of zero passion, there was bucketloads of it, streaming down their faces which were contorted into various pictures of agony, heartbreak, really rather over the top joy, and I swear at one point one of them put her fists up and mouthed the words 'come and have a go if you think you're hard enough'. It was a good performance, although not quite good enough to warrant the five encores they insisted on doing.
Well my "buy an outfit and dress up as a weird animal" lesson was a catastrophic failure - they were far more interested in why I was soaked to the skin (for some reason my excuse of 'it's raining, retards' didn't appease them), and were utterly baffled by what they were supposed to be doing. So instead of shopping like good obedient students, they tried to attack me with my own cardboard clothes. Then the button on my real trousers came off and it was game over. Still, at least it's not as bad as the time I had a different class draw a story only to have them draw pornographic cartoons and proudly show them to the vice-principal. Oddly, Family Fortunes has been the success lesson of the month - I never thought I'd ever be in a position where I was actually grateful to Les Dennis.
This is what my local pizza delivery leaflet promises to all its customers:
"All the taste and toppings you want on a pizza, straight from the oven. We put our hearts into our pizza and deliver them to your door." Yummy! Tastes just like chicken. |
| posted by Alice @ 10:37 pm |
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| JET Adventures 64 - The Winds Of God |
| Monday, December 04, 2006 |
Hello and welcome to Alice Takes Photos Badly.
First up is this picture of the clouds. You can't see it, but they're AMAZING. It was almost like God had woven a special patchwork sky of cotton wool goodness. What a shame you can't see it.
And this one is of the theatre I went to today:
I'm great at photography! I'm also great at not taking photos of things that really need photographing. This week, those things include:
* A new arcade game that has a treadmill and you have to take this big virtual dog for a walk on it.
* The latest Christmas must-have for EVERYONE - a mechanical bronco thing that you hook up to the TV. You get these videos that come with it that show you how to ride your mechanical horse, using footage of real horses in green pastures with blonde blue-eyed kids riding them.
The theatre thing was a school trip, as a "reward" for the end of year exams being over. It's not really a reward, because the kids don't really have any interest in some stupid drama play, and because they have to make their own way to the theatre; an hour-long walk or a £10 taxi ride. Last year, you may recall, we had to sit through this traditional Okinawan play performed in slow motion by teachers from other schools. They spoke in Okinawan dialect that only people over the age of a million understand. This year was a bit better - it was a real play with real actors speaking real Japanese called The Winds Of God *snigger*. My Japanese is still a bit too rubbish for me to understand all of it, but I think it was about a couple of clowns who time travel back to WWII where they're kamikaze pilots (kamikaze = winds of god), and they crash and burn for their country and only one of them makes it back to the present. I think only Japan can combine clowns, death, war, and time travel and make it kind of work but at least the students seemed as confused as me as to what the message was supposed to be. It was still a million times better than the new James Bond film though.
I've been feeling very sorry for my students this past month. They have to clean the school every day after school and the week before last they didn't do a good enough job of cleaning the toilets. They were all make to stand in the baseball field in the cold and listen to a big lecture from the discipline teacher (she's like Godzilla crossed with The Terminator) about the important of cleanliness. Then this week was declared "Clean The Toilets" week and every student had to spend an extra half hour scrubbing away using soap and sticks that were slightly bigger than toothbrushes and use their own money to pay for plants and air fresheners.
It's not enough to dampen my mood though - things are good. I have WON at the evil Christmas shopping game. It's not that the shops are packed out with people (Christmas is a working day and present buying isn't really a big thing), but there are still Christmas decorations everywhere and teeth grating Christmas music piped into my ears from all directions. It was inspiring actually - last week I made a Christmas Shopping game for my students where they each get given an outfit (e.g. Panda Crossdressed As An Alligator) that they have to buy from the other students while I play Slade at full volume. I have also given in to their demands and made an activity based on Wham's Last Christmas, although I should be grateful that they seem to be unaware of Girls Aloud covering Tiffany. I don't care! Take my sweets! Listen to awful music! I'm out of here in two and a half weeks (and counting) for the friends and family pandemonium that I've missed so much. |
| posted by Alice @ 7:05 pm |
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