Tuesday, 18 January 2011

Day 178 in Japan - Happy Birthday, Mum!

Today was Mum’s birthday, and I thought about her all day. I told all of my classes that it was her birthday, and made them all say “Happy Birthday!” to celebrate. It was a pretty frantic day at school, because I had to use every spare moment outside of class to prepare for this afternoon’s Science English class. Today, we had to give our example talks about scientific topics, and the other teacher decided at the last minute that we should make them Powerpoint presentations to encourage the kids to do the same. Mine was on “Arsenic loving bacteria”, and I found it hard to keep my pace slow and even when giving a presentation on something scientific that I like. I also had a lot of marking to finish, marks to record, internet to sort out (our internet stopped working because we didn’t fill out a form that we didn’t know about – the perils of not being able to read the language of the country that you are living in), and then my principal asked for a meeting in the middle of it all. Whoa!

After all of that, I was ready for a rest when I got home. The weekends chores still remained largely ignored, as I sat under the kotatsu and watched 5 episodes of Castle back-to-back. I called Mum, heard all about her birthday in Gerringong (and imagined going along with them for lunch, swimming with her in Boat Harbour pool, helping to fix the canvases over the broken roof at Werri), then probably beat her to bed, despite Japan being 2 hours behind Australia.

Food Highlight of the Day: We had KFC for dinner after Sam came home from his Japanese lesson. We figured that if the Japanese eat KFC to celebrate the birth of Christ (KFC is a traditional Christmas food here), then we would eat it to celebrate the birth of Christine (my Mum).

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