I have received ten or so cards, mostly from the 1st year kids. They have wished me a 'melly X'smas' and a 'marry christmas' (that may have been a proposal but I'm choosing to assume it's an innocent mistake).
Of course bribery was involved, there have been no spontaneous outpourings of goodwill, the little buggers!
Next week we have 2 days of actual work. Tuesday is a holiday for the Emperor's birthday and then the 25th and 26th there are no classes. Work as usual though. I'm not taking Christmas off since I need the holiday time for January.
Some ALTs have already left for holidays, they're doing the opposite of me and taking extra leave before the holidays start. Mostly heading for Thailand, but tickets to Australia were more expensive this side of Christmas.
January is cold, so it'll be good to miss out on nearly half of the worst.
Last night was Marcus's (ALT for the USA) birthday party at a restaurant in Kiryu. That was cool, about 9 or 10 people went. Marcus and Lida left for Thailand today. Assuming Marcus woke up in time, there's a possibility he's still in bed as I write this.
Marcus recently described me as Hagrid from the Harry Potter books. That is a strange 'giant' who lives on the school grounds in a little house by the edge of the forest. I believe Hagrid also rides a motorcycle and while generally liked is seen as a bit of an oddity by the students. I can't really dispute the basic logic of the description.
Today my single class at the junior high school was rescheduled for the afternoon. That's during my last visit to the elementary, so there are no chugakko classes today. I had to write a short speech for graduation which happens in March. It's due by January 9th (why so early?) so it's done now.
I'm really just trying to think of stuff to type as I'm bored, what I should do is pull out the language course CDs and get started, i'm way behind.
OK, that's it, I've procrastinated enough, it's time to do some study.
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I'm back, I did an hour of study (arimasu and arimasen or 'yes we have no bananas')
Then I went to the elementary school for the final lesson of the year. It went off pretty well, it was grades 5 and 6 making angels, and I did some revision with them about previous classes while we were working.
My supervisor from the shogakko gave me a little tray of imported French cheese, because in class at week I used "I like cheese very much as an example". That was really nice and unexpected, I haven't bought anything for anyone.
I'll have to make it up with omiyage when I get back. That's the gifts that are expected for everyone in the office whenever someone returns from vacation or maybe an overnight business trip. Usually it's something to eat, like lollies or a cookie or a small cake for each person.
So I'll need to find some Australian stuff that's individually wrapped but can be distributed amongst 40 people or so. I guess a bag of bite size cherry ripes or similar. Are they peculiar to Australia? I don't know.
