Thursday, 4 November 2010

Day 103 in Japan - School Night Karaoke

Today in class, a teacher asked me if I wanted the students to write their stories in past tense or past progressive. Wait, what? I didn't even know that past progressive was a tense. According to Wikipedia "Past progressive is used for describing events that were in the process of occurring when a new event happened. The already occurring event is presented in past progressive, the new one in simple past. Example: We were sitting in the garden when the thunderstorm started."

In the same class, we got the students to each write a WHO, WHERE, WHEN, HOW, WHAT for a story, and then collect all of the pieces of paper, mix them up and then hand them out again to give them lots of crazy setups for stories. It was a good idea, and worked pretty well, but it opened the door for a bunch of the... rowdier girls to make lots of rude  scenarios - "The Play boys in bed last night crazily smoking drugs" was a particular highlight. And the other teacher and I got lots of questions about rude English verbs and adverbs - at least I could pretend to be ignorant when they tried to act out "sexily" or "sensuously", but the Japanese teacher wasn't as lucky.

I found a new way home on my bike - if I ride down the "highway" (which at some points wasn't actually wide enough for a car and a bike to go past at once) I can get home about 4 minutes quicker, and I avoid the very friendly special guy at the bus stop who has taken to trying to grab me off my bike for a kiss every time he sees me cycling past. Although it did take me past an old dude peeing in the street outside the Pachinko parlour who gave me a friendly wave as I cycled past. Ah, Japan - no bare arms, because that would be obscene, but groping strangers riding past on bikes and public urination are A-OK!

Tonight marks a big night for Sam - it's his first day of teaching students all by himself at his new job. He left about 30 mins ago and I am very nervous for him. We had frozen lasagne for dinner to celebrate the new job. It was pretty decent.

OK, now it's later - Sam went quite well at his job, and says the lessons were "OK". I'm sure it's that kind of eloquence that landed him a job as an English teacher in the first place. After he finished work at 9pm, we met up with Mai at karaoke, and had two hours of vocal gymnastics. All well an good for the two of them who finished their jobs at 9 pm, but for me who starts at 8 am, screaming into a microphone until midnight was probably a mistake. They have no consideration for people who have to work in the morning. But it was still awesome :) Sam and I attempted our first Japanese songs at karaoke - "Looking Up While While Walking / Ue no Muite Arukou" (a.k.a. the original Sukiyaki) and the theme song to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Good times.



Food Highlight of the Day: Frozen lasagne.

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