Today was a very relaxed and fun day! First of all, for whatever reason we only had 50 minute periods (Wednesday’s schedule,) so it was shorter than usual. Anyway, zeroth period was English which is always fun. Then we had World History, but since the Teacher was absent today we basically had a free period (theoretically we were supposed to be doing World History Homework.). I brought out my Khakhras and shared them with everyone and they were a huge hit and finished very quickly! After that, we had our Cross-Cultural Understanding class, in which we played the games Human Knot, 2-Word Taboo (you had to trick people into saying yes and/or no), Heads Up Seven Up, and Fruit Basket, which I had played before but never knew the name for. So, that was very fun. Then, we had lunch, and after that we had a long home room (apparently they have one every Friday) but our home room teacher, the world history teacher, was absent to instead we played 人間のバスケット, the exact same thing as Fruit Basket except in Japanese. BTW, in Fruit Basket everyone sits in a circle and one person stands up, and say something, and everyone who that applies to stands up and takes a seat, and the last person standing is in the middle. So, in the Japanese version, in addition to the fact that it was all in Japanese, instead of sitting in chairs we had to pair up (it only works with an odd number of people) and if the pair breaks (AKA if the statement applies to either person in the pair) both people have to find new partners. If someone ended up in the middle three times in a row, people got to ask them questions and they had to answer honestly (like who do you think is the cutest in the class — I got asked that because at the end we just had an open session of asking questions.). I guess part of this game was like the American Truth or Dare, without the Dare.

Anyway, after that we had two periods to do a mass clean out of the whole room. Everyone changed into their PE clothes, put everything either into their bags or lockers, and piled their bags outside the class. We then took out the doors and moved all the desks out into the hall and piled them up neatly enough that there was a small aisle way to walk (and remember, all kumi’s were doing this, not just ours, so it was pretty cramped.). Anyway, after that we kind of inherently spread out, with some people sweeping the floors and others wiping the windows (inside and outside, washing the balcony out with water, cleaning the blackboards, etc. (BTW we also moved out the bookshelf and teachers desk, so the class was literally empty.). I helped with the high up windows, even though even I had to climb onto the ledge to reach them. And boy, were they filthy! The silks were black with cakings of dust! I was surprised it had been cleaned only 6 months ago! (They do this kind of cleaning half way through the year snd at the end of the year.) After that, we got huge buckets with soap and water and started scrubbing the floor with sponges to get all the black dirt streaks out, which was, honestly pretty hard. After than, we all moved out into the narrow hallway while three students waxed the floor. We left the desks out since the wax had to dry, so we will bring them in on Tues (Monday is a holiday, the Day of the Ocean, all over Japan!)

BTW, I was explaining to some kids in my kumi today how in America kids do not do school cleaning except as punishment, and they said, “But cleaning is so fun!”. I realized then that not only is cleaning very very fun, but it is such because the kids enjoy it, see it as an opportunity to socialize while working, and, most importantly, take pride in how their class looks! They do not do it because they are for Ed to, but because they want to (I mean they have no choice in doing the cleaning, but they do have a choice in the quality of the cleaning.)

After we had finished cleaning, which took about two hours, I went to Teack again, which was very fun. We had a much easier day today, kind of like a recovery run (which was interesting because they hadn’t run at all yesterday.). Basically, we ran (jogged in lines) around the park behind the school for 40 minutes, and then ran two sets of 5 100 meter sprints. It was very fun, and we played a Japanese Game called Shiritori while running, which is a word chain game where you have to make a word starting with the sound the last word ended with, without repeating a word. It was very fun, and I was able to play pretty well! (I only got stumped a few times but the other students gave me hints.). Oh and they were all shocked that the drinking/smoking age in America is 21 (right?) but the driving age is 15.5 in CA 🙂

So yeah overall it was a great day. When I came home we had a fabulous dinner of a corn-soup sort of thing, regular soup, salad, rice, etc. it was very very yummy!

BTW, about superstitions, I just realized that today is Fri the 13th which Americans would have found unlucky. It was funny because today during our run I picked up a 5 yen coin from the ground, and everyone told me how lucky I was, because a 5 yen coin is great luck (but terrible luck if you step on it.). So yeah, widely different superstitions…

Ok, goodnight!