Day 144 in Japan - Fletcher is back in Australia!

Fletchy came home from America today! I was so excited to be in a similar timezone to him again, I snuck up to the classroom and called he and Mum on their way home from the airport. He sounded a bit fluey, a bit sleepy, but mostly happy to be back in the land of warm and gum trees. I marked a lot of journals today, and helped to finalise the grades at Akashi kita (the computer program they use for calculating and recording their grades is crazy complicated!), and then had a really long ESS club all afternoon. I got them to analyse the emotions in the recitation pieces that they have to perform in February next year and think about ways that they can express those emotions in the reading. I hope it was useful, but I suspect that they are really just more interested in memorizing the thing. I read the pieces in their entirety earlier in the day (a section from Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing” for the first years and a section from Haruki Murakami’s speech when picking up a literary award in Jerusalem for the second years). One is horribly depressing (I was in tears in the staffroom while reading the firt years piece), and the other is so formal and complicated that I think it will be difficult to put much feeling into. And they are both full of pronunciation traps for the Japanese student (R/L, B/V, TH/TH/Z/S) – it will be a fun few months of preparation…

A journal from one of my students - isn't it cute?

DINNER!

Tonight, I have been mostly catching up on a lot of missed blogs. The photo uploading with Blogger is sometimes painfully slow, but the worst part of the process is normally choosing the photos to use! It has been really cold (tonight it is supposed to be 2 degrees outside), so snuggling in under the kotatsu is definitely a priority. And I got to have a nice long video Skype chat with Fletch once Sam got home from work, so I can go to bed pretty happy, too.

Food Highlight of the Day: Salami and cheese on crackers – real (or close enough) salami is such a treat over here! We found some NZ salami as a special at the supermarket the other day and bought 3 – we ate one tonight, and I am totally heading back for more tomorrow. Pizza nights are sorted until next March (the expiry date).