A Day in the Life

This may be an atypical day in its positivity but it still hints at the average day.

I woke up at 6:15, got to sleep in a bit since I was getting a taxi to school, made some breakfast and studied japanese for twenty minutes or so. The 10 minute taxi ride was a relief after my usual 30 minute bike ride. Once I get to school, Sakagawa Jr. High, I greet all the teachers with an, "Ohayo gozaimasu," and a bow, and the the students with, "good morning, how are you!" My mug of hot ocha(green tea) is sitting at my desk and I sip it as I look over the lessons for each class I will be with this day. I am teaching a third year in first period and we go over passive sentence formation and some other rather dry stuff. Second period is a first year and we have a good time with pronounciation and the alphabet and whatnot. Third period is prep time for me and I throw together a game to teacher my 4th period second year students about is/was and are/were.
Then there is lunch. I eat with the kids and try and get them to speak in english but I also practice my japanese. Lunch was hamburger(something made with groundbeef not an acutal hamburger) and a potato/carrot curry stew and some cabbage thing and rice and milk. Pretty good as per usual. Then, and I think this is something I would always like to follow lunch with, we played a wicked game of badmitton.(sp?) After the post-lunch time there comes cleaning time. In Japan there are no janitors and the teachers and students all clean at some point in the day. Today I wiped the floor down while teaching the kids to say, "whats up" and "clean." As far as cleaning goes it was pretty allright.
For the final two periods I basically oscillated between emailing people and studying Japanese and trying not to fall asleep.
Here is the best part. I had been invited to "join" the track and field club and today was my first day. -Every student is required to be in an after school club, mostly sports. Often a students day, especially highschool won't end until late in the evening- We started the run and were going to slow for me to even stand so I started passing kids and then the teacher and two boys and three girls pulled up ahead with me. I found it was actually pretty easy to communicate running ideas to them and we did some sprints and talked about the beautiful country hills we were running through and if I owned a turtle and what japanese food I liked and what were their names and it was great. It was the most english I have heard from any students and I now know all their names and I am stoked to do it again tomorrow.
After the run I grabbed my stuff, threw on my IPod-which has been so unbelievably useful-and rode back to my apartment. I worked on some writing, took a shower and then rode over to my friend Gene's place where I am currently writing this. We are going to have some Yakitori and maybe go out to Mal's later.
Not too bad of a day.