Paddy-san Matsuri

THURSDAY, MARCH 17

At the request of Alan, I'd like to let you know that I'm alive. Or was at the time of this posting. Who knows now? After all, even my parents don't keep up to date with my blog. A lot changes in a week.

So, last week on Friday, something big happened and it changed a lot of stuff. I found out that my schools will be changing next year (which starts in April.) I will still be at Kogyo and Nishi, but Koko will no longer be my base school. I'll now be at Hy for my base school. This was quite a surprise. Hy is a bit farther away and has quite a reputation. It's apparently on the rise, but also apparently had no other way to go. Everyone I've told has given a start and one JTE physically recoiled. Even the ALT I'll be taking over from, when I talked to him, took 20 minutes to “put it as nicely as I can” (though in his defense, there was drunken men dancing around burning floats.) It's going to be farther away and it's now my lowest level school. It will be an adventure. I'm really sad, though, that I'll be leaving my favorite bunch of JTEs: Susana, Mountain-sensei, Mama, Mischievous-sensei, Mustache-sensei... It's depressing me.

Also, I have to wake up much earlier now and that will make for an extremely grumpy morning Magda.

I spent the afternoon organizing my desk for Andrew, who will be taking over for me, curse him. I did tell my school that he's a good guy, a good friend, and a vegetarian like me! (I had originally goofed and said pescatarian, but later corrected it.) At least they know how to handle that now.

I was writing at my desk, a lazy afternoon, as all my classes had been in the morning, when my head started to sway and I thought it was just afternoon sleepiness. That is, until my JTEs started reacting. That's when I figured out it was an earthquake. It was very light – almost unnoticeable – and over quite quickly.

After, Mustache-sensei came to me and told me to go outside. I stared at him, stupified as to why such action was required AFTER such a minor quake. In the end he took me and we trooped outside with all the teachers, where we stood around, on solid, unshaking ground, while the students (who had NOT evacuated) called out windows down to us.

After five minutes, we trooped back inside and teachers gathered around computers as they looked it up. I knew something was happening when I heard gasps and “nana!” (seven, on the Japanese scale, which is, I think, the highest.) I eventually grabbed a computer and started looking at the English news. It made breaking news on CNN and I fired off an e-mail to my mother telling her about the novelty of feeling this quake that actually even made the news! Little did I know that it would make EVERY news source. While I'd sent that e-mail mostly as a novelty, it served the important purpose of letting my mother know that I was fine and, from my nonchalant tone, quite unaffected. By the time she opened it, the news making it out of the disaster zone would be of quite a different and much more worrying nature.

Like my mother needs any encouragement to worry.

Mustache-sensei told me that we evacuated because the building is old. If that earthquake were below us, it would collapse and we'd have to crawl out. I relayed this later to Susanna who said we'd be lucky if we could crawl out. We would be flattened like eggs on a sandwich.

I told he we usually say “pancake.”

I left at 4:15 when my contract ended and went home. I turned on the TV in my apartment for only the third time, and let it play in the background while I got ready for my kimono internship. The news was very boring. It showed lots of helicopter views of flooding, but from so far away that no movement was detectable. The voice-over seemed to list cities and times, probably for tsunami watches. It was calm, no damage and no people were ever shown.

My internship went off as normal.

It wasn't until later that night, talking to Indy that I learned that it had actually been very bad and bodies were washing up on the shores. . Yet, here near Kyoto, life was going on as normal. Trains were listed as three minutes behind (though still showed up on schedule), and life seemed to bustle on as normal.

I played tourist in Kyoto on Saturday, touring several museums, a bunch of temples and shrines (as they're often intermixed), gardens, and an exhibit on Edo-period kimono, that was quite fascinating, but huge enough to even hit my kimono saturation point.

Sunday was Sagicho in Omihachiman, and JETs from all over Shiga poured into the city to celebrate at the base of Mount Hachiman. The weather was glorious and sunny and I had to change into lighter clothes twice. The giant floats (each with long red streamers and some rabbit to represent the new zodiac year) were being paraded around by huge groups of men, carring long wooden poles on their backs. The floats looked heavy, because when they fell, the men had a hard time getting them back up. It could also be because they were reeking drunk. And a boatload of Japanese men completely drunk trying to carry something heavy leads to a lot of swaying, a lot of dropping, and the occasional Japanese man jumping up on TOP of the quaking floats. Later in the evening, there was a man on one holding his baby son.

This was the Japanese population at its most uninhibited. They were drunk, their hair was dyed, their clothes less conservative and they were drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk. After the parading, they started crashing the floats into each other, then wrestling them together, turning them, and generally creating giant heaps of drunk men, streamers, wood, and rabbits. Later that evening, they were paraded in one at a time and burned in giant bonfires. Drunken men took dancing loops, joined by the occasional child, gaijin, or Carol, who joined a chain dance. It was a nice time to chat with some other gaijin.

School life has been continuing as usual, although we get more e-mails now from kencho (the school board office) telling us about the situation and how to protect ourselves. It's good information keeping us informed. I've forwarded most of it onto my parents at home to keep them up to date and ease some of their worries.

I've had a lot of free time time at school this week. Exams have already happened and final grades have been entered, but Japanese classes still continue on a half-day schedule. If getting students to participate and behave was hard before, now imagine it when their grade is no longer affected. It's ridiculous. At Koko, I'm doing a lesson on St. Patrick's Day, which only half keeps their attention. Nishi had a lesson on the movie UP, which mostly involves watching the movie and even that only half keeps their attention. Next week, I'll be doing ASL with them, and it'll either work or bomb horribly. I'm terrified it will be the later.

Now, I have wet slippers and I'm watching large downey flakes skirt past the window. I'm possibly going out for Indian tonight, but it will be canceled if it's too snowy and it probably will be. If that's the case, I'm debating between a snowman or an igloo building adventure tonight. Given the lack of snow and how I don't trust kids passing a public park, I should probably do the former. But I miss building igloos, like I did growing up. It's wonderful packing snow. It's also probably late enough in the season that it's a lot of work to put in something that'll melt in the next warm-spell.