むさしぶり！

Now it's time the time that you've all been waiting for: Karen's Random Thoughts! Well even if you weren't waiting in anticipation you get to read it anyway.
So I walked into a restroom in the Sendai train station and the women's side was pink (of course) and the walls had hollow plexi glass panels filled with pine cones and the men's was blue (no surprise) with twigs in the panels. I just marvelled at universal symbols. That was so much more effective then those stupid stick figures, they can be misleading...but that's another story for another time. A week or so ago was the anniversary of the Beatles first visit to Japan so they spent the whole day playing Beatles on the radio. This made everything seem very surreal, a little like a Murakami book. Then, since our school is a Catholic school, we pray every day before and after school, but they always pray for mundane things like doing well in the chorus competition and passing the English exam tomorrow. As far as I'm concerned, assuming there is a god and he can hear them, don't you think there are more pressing matters for him to attend to? The best part about this whole experience is our 国語 (kokugo) teacher. Kokugo is Japanese classical literature. The closest thing that I can think of in English would be like us studying Shakespeare, but they're actually learning all the grammar, too. So imagine learning how to conjugate verbs with thou, but ten times more complicated and you have something like kokugo. Anyway, the teacher that teaches it reminds me so much of Mrs. Daniel. She has a habit of taking long pauses in her lecture and either staring out the window or just walking out of the room. If she asks a question she just randomly calls on people to answer it. When she reads she totally changes her voice and kind of sounds like an actor in the bunka theatre, which I guess is appropriate for the subject. It's so interesting to sit in her class. It's one of the few classes that I actually understand what's being discussed most of the time. The worst class is by far Home Economics. The teacher has decided that I don't exist, so I have no textbook and can't really follow anything that happens in that class. I think they were talking about the economics of having children today and what ages the kids should start learning what. I get the impression that almost everyone in my class is thinking Who cares!?!? In one of the many English classes that I got stuck in, one day a vocabulary word happend to be dominate , when the teacher asked if anyone could explain the word the class quickly deteriorated into a discussion about SM. Yea, sexual tention from seeing only girls every day. And Sendai looks so much like Denver sometimes, I even saw some Mormon boys on their bikes with their helmet (which stand out in Japan) and their suits (which don't).
Anyway, Japan's rainy season is living up to it's name! This past weekend I met my new exchange student and her family and we visited her mother's home town. We went sight seeing in the area. The mountains are so lush and there are so many ponds and lakes because of ancient volcanic activity. They kept apologizing about the weather, but I loved every minute of it.
- 鴻
PS- Grampy, I found your next hobby! On TV just now, there was a group of old guys that hold competitons to see who can pull the most weight using suction cups on their nice shiny heads! So keep working on that bald spot!