Another Day at School

I won mixed bentou lunch roulette today! I got the school lunchbox and only 1 out of my 5 nibblets was fish and the rest were meat. Hellz yah! Usually it's the opposite of that.

I've felt a lot like a teacher lately, this is my third week teaching in a row, essays are flying in from the 3rd years, I'm being asked to proofread things by the teachers, and the big ALT English competition is coming up so I'm busy trying to organize that. Though of course this is not without intrigue. Today I asked the students to write down two good things to tell their partners (we're practicing congratulatory phrases), and then I walked around the room reading over their shoulders. Most said things like, "I bought a new CD!" or "I got full marks on the English test!" or "I met so-and-so celebrity!" One girl, however, wrote, "I'm pregnant." I'm still not sure whether she misunderstood the assignment or if she's dying to be a mama.

Speaking of class, I'm consistently baffled by the lack of logic and reasoning skills in high schoolers. Sometimes I'll explain things plain as day and they still don't get it. Or I'll be training the kids for the ALT English test and during a game of 20 questions they'll ask, "Do you like it?" Will "do you like it" really be a useful question to help you figure out what I'm talking about? Or sometimes we'll have established that such and such a thing is bigger than a refrigerator and then they'll go ahead and ask if you can pick it up. You're scored on logic too, Kids! God bless a college education.

I'm still pretty sick, but I'm considering going to the Onsen Festival in a neighboring city tonight. I'd really like to stay home and sleep (I fell asleep half strewn on my couch at 7PM yesterday), but it's a festival devoted to near-naked folks running around in subzero temperatures in and out of hot spring water, celebrating fertility. Meanwhile a man and a woman do a dance reenacting sex. Apparently he has a giant phallus strapped to him and in the end she winds up holding a baby. Expect pictures on Facebook.

The City by the Smog

For as natural as Hokkaido is, our city kind of messes it all up by hosting 3 gigantic factories. One of them is the largest steel factory in all of Japan. No wonder it took me 40 minutes to bike around it last fall when I was trying to get to the other side of the peninsula.

A few weeks ago when I was walking out of school and I saw the freshly fallen snow looked a little grey, I thought it was my imagination. Maybe somehow it had been disturbed, but in such a natural way that I thought it was fresh. Then today I noticed it again. My house has white (enough) snow, but it's particularly bad around school downwind from the factory.

Now I know, however, that it definitely fell grey. A few weeks ago a large group of us went out to dinner to celebrate a birthday, and an ALT who lives up on the hill above the factories with his Japanese wife was telling stories. Apparently, he knows a car salesman who refuses to buy any used cars from The City by the Sea because the polution rots them out so quickly from the inside. Apparently the aforementiond steel factory puts out something like 2% of all the polution in Japan (WHAT?) and even so it's three times more efficient and three times greener than any other factory of its kind. Disgusting. It's no wonder most of the City by the Sea looks like the dystopian future of Gary, Indiana.

Furthermore, other than some crows, a flock or two of sparrows, three stray cats, a rabbit, and a seagull, I've seen no wildlife here at all in 6 months - and I've spent a lot of time exploring the beaches and the city limits. I suppose you have to consider that we're on a peninsula, in a city where virtually 0% of houses have yards, but still.

Also, it stinks. Like literally. Partially there's recurring natural sulfur from the volcanoes and their hot spring vents, but generally there's a foul mechanical rotting smell that regularly takes over the city. I guess you can tell which direction the winds are blowing. I'm not really sure how to describe it, but I'd say it involkes mental imagery of rusting steel colored 1970s blue and lung cancer.

For the most part these terrible things can be blocked out, depending on where you spend your time (and what direction the wind is blowing). Things are a lot more natural around the ocean and in my neighborhood, and the factories and train tracks are limited to a certain part of the peninsula. I don't hate it here, but it makes me realize I probably wouldn't want to raise a family in the City by the Sea.