I won my kids, but lost to lunch.

No, I did not LOSE my lunch, but, for the first time since I got here, I pretty much turned my nose up to everything on my plate save the rice and the milk…

You see, we had a strip of tire. Yellow tire… with tread still on it… it tasted kinda like what you’d expect a tire to taste like (Well, what you’d expect a radial to taste like, I figure all-weather snowtires taste slightly different, depending on the vintage…).

This strip of yellow tire came complete with a splattering of green somethings that were pickled in vinegar and then fed to an animal to be regurgitated (Okay, so maybe the last part isn’t very accurate…) It did, however, look exactly like what Luna would puke up if she had eaten grass… It tasted worse, however… (To be honest, I have never tried to eat what Luna could not, but I can safely speculate that this was worse). This was with a side soup of rotten pterodactyl eggs and spotted Nautili parts soup (Straight from the Jurassic periods…)… except it was minus a broth… (What IS a soup if it comes in a bowl but isn’t liquid?).

So, after trying everything (Yes dad, I DID try it… I was hungry enough that I even tried to eat it after I really decided I didn’t like it…), I gave up on the Blowout Surprise and ate the rice and moved along.

But that was totally offset by my kids.

I love my kids, they love me, it’s a wonderful thing.

First, Ms. First Year had to go to CapialTown for some reason (I don’t really know what that reason was)… But, of course, the first I hear about this is when Mouse-Chan and Direct-Kun nearly kill me running me down in the hallway.

Direct-Kun, as much as I love him, still has not figured out that I can’t understand him when he talks at normal speed in Japanese… and at this point he’s agitated, which means I REALLY can’t understand him.

He wants to know where Ms. First Year is, because it’s time for English class (This is not on my schedule, so this is news to me).

I say I’ll go find out, and I hunt down Mr. Second Year. He didn’t know our intrepid pair had class today either. But that’s okay, because Ms. Home Ec. is going to be taking over the class for today.

I happily note that’s awesome and I didn’t know Ms. Home Ec could speak English.

…She looks at me blankly.

Uh oh… Okay, back to Japanese: I tell her I have no classes this period, and would she like me to help her with the English class? I see a grateful smile and she enthusiastically says yes… And with Mouse and Direct in tow, we head back to the class.

We are doing numbers, 1-10 , then 11-19, then 20-100 (Because you only need to explain once that 21 is Twenty and One...) And to practice this, we are playing a game called “Karuta”.

Karuta is slap, pure and simple. You lay out cards on the table (In this case with all the numbers in question on them), then someone (Ahem…) calls out the numbers and you slap the card. The ones with the most captured cards at the end of the game, wins!

This is great! Except that we only have two kids in this class… and -I love Direct-Kun- but Mouse Chan can wipe the walls with him…

So I’m kinda dreading this…

Except Mouse Chan actually can’t… She doesn’t know her numbers. I’m floored. Completely floored. She spends the entire class struggling through 1-10… Direct Kun and I play by ourselves (Ms. Home Ec. works the entire class with Mouse-Chan…). I close my eyes and point to a number in the textbook, and then… well, I sorta let Direct-Kun slap the cards. I’ll capture a few cards to make sure he feels he is getting the upper hand.

He won all three games. :)

I gave him stickers that Dad sent me of the Statue of Liberty and such. He was seriously proud of those stickers… (He got three of them, after all :D)

I could have cried, I swear.

Then Mouse Chan gets up from her work and without saying so much as a single word, conveys to me everything about how disappointed she was to have not managed to beat Direct Kun in one single look with a “What can you do?” smile (I have decided that to make up for her inability to speak properly, this girl is developing ESP). Direct, of course, is rubbing it in (No matter how much I tried to discourage him for it).

I gave her a Liberty Bell sticker, and told her to notice that the bell is cracked… That cheered her up.

But only a little.

Even though it's depressing that Mouse lost, it was a good class. Does that make any sense?

Then I go to my FAST class, and we play Battleship. Well, as usual, my 3rd years are asleep, so there wasn’t much happening there. But my second years come in and we have a recitation test. This is still something I find to be rather odd, but it is something that they do here. They recite a piece of dialogue from somewhere in the book, they have to memorize it and everything.

So I divide the class up and Ms. Team Teacher takes the left side, I take the right.

I get to the first girl (She’s one of my star pupils, I’ve decided, she’s pretty sharp), and she recites the piece. Perfect (She’s a star pupil, I expect no less from her). So I pull out my Shinkansen (Bullet Train) stamp, but like the kids in Bill Cosby’s skit, she has seen that I have stickers… she wants a sticker instead. I shrug (These aren’t my American Stickers, these were purchased here) So I put one on her record sheet. She’s shocked. She tells me I’m pretty darned cool (Which makes me nod knowingly and compels me to say things like: “Stay in school” and “Don’t do drugs”… which sort of makes me worry about myself, really…). I move to the next girl (Whom I love dearly, but isn’t as good as Star-Chan). She does a passable job, and so I go for the Shinkansen stamp…

“Um… Sensei…” She nods subtly toward Star-Chan’s page. Right… I get it. I give her a sticker too… This is totally going to mess with Mr. Second Years’ setup… They are supposed to have the record sheets signed or stamped… But it’s Mr. Second Year, and I think he’ll be just fine with it.

A half a sheet of stickers later (The boys were okay with the Shinkansen… the girls… they loved the stickers… they were shiny…erm... I'll skip the monkey references... my girls were being really good today, and not acting monkey-ish) , I get to one of the other girls, and she does a good job so I ask for her record sheet and she says she doesn’t have it… I say, “Okay, I’ll stamp your workbook, and Mr. Second Year can stamp your record sheet next class.” She looks at me with big brown doe eyes (Which, likely she uses on her parents to get that extra hour to stay up and watch TV) and says, “Sensei, would you please give me a sticker?” It should be noted that I understood every word that little rodent said. Which is noteworthy because when I learned Japanese, I dropped out before we got to colloquial Japanese… So if I understand it perfectly, that means she was using her best, most formal Japanese she could muster.

I gave her a sticker… I’m so doomed when I have kids.

But she was all kinds of happy to get her sticker.

A couple of the boys came up to talk to Ms. Team Teacher, they had their arms around each other (This culture is very odd about that, the boys are very affectionate toward each other. They are as affectionate to each other as the girls are back at home… more so, I’d think.). Anyway, they come up to the desk, and they are standing next to me, so the boy on the far end puts his arm around me too… So I put my arm on his shoulder, I mean, what else can you do?

I was accepted. I’m now officially a part of this school.

I keep hearing that the Japanese are a very closed culture, that they distrust foreigners and never include foreigners into their inner circle… I’m certainly not experiencing that…

Maybe it’s the foreigners’ attitude that causes that feeling? I don’t know.

Today I feel like I’m really lucky. My school is really good.

---Me.