Moveable Type: Day 55 in Japan

Today was a wonderful day! For starters, it was a Friday. Secondly, it was sunny but not too hot. And thirdly (and most importantly) it was a Friday! I started teaching lessons about food today but neglected to have breakfast. That was a mistake. By lunchtime, my stomach was growling, and I was describing bruschetta in way too much detail to my bewildered first year students. Some of the nice teachers donated me rice crackers and other snacks, but I tore into my lunch bento when it finally came. After lunch, the kids got to practise their rope skipping, and I took about a million photos and videos.

Third years wear blue shorts

Second years wear red shorts

First years wear green shorts

So let me explain this. Next week we have our school Sports Day. This is like an athletics carnival in an Australia - we would normally be broken up into houses and could earn points for our house by competing in events. Here they are broken up into their homerooms (they are broken up by years - for example in my school there are nine first year home rooms), and as well as the individual events, there are a few events where they compete in groups. One of the biggest events is the jump rope, where the kids have 3 minutes to jump a huge rope as a whole class as many times as possible. They get one point for each jump, and it's really competitive. The various classes have been coming in early a few days each week for the last week or two, and today was the day for the whole school to practise, one year at a time. Most of the kids were so serious about it - particularly the third years.

Above is a video of my first year special science class jumping the rope. They managed over 20 jumps on their best attempts, after they had videoed their first practises and analysed where they were going wrong. I love these kids! I have my fingers crossed for them to get the most jumps.

After school, Sam and I went to McDonalds. Twice. For the Happy Meal toys. DON'T JUDGE ME. This week at McDonalds, there are Taiko drum game mascots on offer, and we wanted all four, so we had two Happy Meals each for dinner (at different McDonalds' so we wouldn't look like pigs). We love playing the Taiko drumming game when we are at arcades, and we really wanted the toys. So I ate 2 cheeseburgers, 2 fries and 2 cokes. It was awesome and horrible. And now I have a Mozart Taiko drum, Mecha Taiko drum, Ribbon Taiko drum and a Panda Taiko drum.

These are the Taiko drum mascots I now own (Katsu and Don).

We decided to complete our corporate whorishness by actually going to play the game at the arcade as well - we played a song from Soul Calibur, the Mario theme song, and a McDonalds song. The new electronics store near our house also opened today, so we went to check it out. Apparently, so did the rest of Akashi - the place was totally packed! I think there was someone from the Hanshin Tigers (the Osaka baseball team), and everyone was in a huge line to sign up for the point cards (WHY WOULD YOU BOTHER STANDING IN A LINE FOR AN HOUR TO GET A CARD THAT MIGHT GIVE YOU A 1% DISCOUNT IF YOU SPEND LIKE $1000? AAARGH - IT'S A TERRIBLE SYSTEM, PEOPLE. REBEL!). Anyway, it was a crowded half hour wandering around and looking at the Japanese selection of games - my very rough estimate was 5% XBox, 15% PSP, 10% PS2 20% PS3, 25% Wii and 25% DS. But Pokemon Black and White come out tomorrow, which will add about another 5% to the DS stands. Bought peach flavoured cocktails and Doritos on the way home, then packed for the weekend adventure...