There has been a cold, wet shift in the weather for the last week. Much better than the hot humid days we were having. Summer is far from over though so this probably won't last long, I'm enjoying it though, it hasn't really stopped raining for about 5 days.
Saturday morning there was a Parent Teacher Association working bee that I was 'invited' to attend. We met at 8am and I'd been told it would go till 10. We were there to pull weeds on and around the baseball diamond. It was raining though, so we waited for a while, but when the rain was clearly not going to stop we went out to work anyway.
It was probably around 8.30 that we got started, parents, teachers and students picked up hoes, wheelbarrows and nasty looking little pointy tools to have a go at the weeds.
I had my rain coat on with the hood pulled over my head and got down to go at the weeds. I tried to do the best I could, getting every weed and pulling up all it's roots. We'd only been going about half an hour when they called a stop. Then when I got up to look around I noticed that no-one else seemed to be as fastidious as me. They kind of got the big ones but there were many weeds still left, I guess it was more of a show of support than a crucial job. Plus I suppose the rain cut things short.
I bought a new camera the other day, but I haven't really used it much, there are a couple of pictures of the performing arts hall and one of my first class of students.
Yes, I finally had my first class. I have to do a self introduction to each group of students, so I put a powerpoint presentation together and run it off my Mac. Lots of pictures and various bits of information about Australia, Tasmania and me. It seemed to go over pretty well, the Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) said she thought it was successful and I should do the same with the other classes when I see them on wednesday.
(Today is Tuesday, there are no classes today as the students are having exams. It's only the second day back from summer vacation, sucks to be them.)
It was Andrew's 24th birthday yesterday, we had the monthly meeting of JET participants in the afternoon and afterward went to dinner, though it was tough findng a place that was open fairly early on a Monday night.
My birthday is coming up, I plan to get out of Kiryu and go to Tokyo where I'll probably see a friend for dinner. I'm not keen on making a big deal about it, I'm feeling far too old. The students in my first class wanted to know my age, so i asked them to guess, the first guess was 100. Then it was a random collection of numbers that showed they ad no idea at all. Eventually we got down to higher than 38 but lower than 40, it must have taken 3 or 4 minutes before someone actually worked out the answer.
