& The Meandering Chicken

All of my schools are finally finished with exams, and for that I am truly grateful. A sentiment I'm sure I share with most of the students, but for a far different reason: Exams are the most godawful boring time for an AET ever. The kids are doing nothing but tests, so you don't have any classes to go to; and the English exams have translation questions on them that you wouldn't know how to correct (considering how most AETs aren't proficient in kanji, myself included), so that means you can't even help out with correcting the tests. So you sit at your desk aaaallll day...

Which isn't to say that I do strictly nothing -- sure, I work on new lesson plans, study Japanese, update the English bulletin board -- but these aren't activities that are designed to last for seven hours. It's too bad I'm not a novelist -- I coulda cranked out War and Peace by now. >.>

There have been a couple bright spots this week, though. I went to lunch with all of the English teachers from my base school on Monday, so that was nice. Slightly painful and awkward to sit at a table full of people who know English, but don't really talk to you, but meh; it's better than being stuck at a desk. And the food was good. Too bad I don't know what half of it was. >.< That happens to me with startling frequency here, usually when I'm eating with the teachers or at an enkai or something -- food gets put in front of me, and if it doesn't look like sea urchin or natto (two things I know I don't like), I eat it. Hence my experiences with shika sashimi (raw deer -- are you even supposed to eat that?) and shrimp head tempura (which sounds unappealing, but was actually really good -- kind of like...shrimp pork rinds? If that makes any sense...). But anyway, getting back to the lunch I was originally talking about, the good thing was that my old supervisor A-sensei was there, and we got to talk for a bit. I've only been able to see her a couple times since she retired, so it was good to catch up. And while we were talking, we made plans to meet up the next afternoon, which brings me to Bright Spot number two...

...which would be our trip to the Chagall exhibit at the city museum. This was an exceptionally Bright Spot, because 1) I was able to leave work early since there was nothing for me to do, and 2) there was no admission charge since it was, like, city foundation day or something. Heh-heh, I don't even know what it was exactly, but it got us out of paying! ^_^ That also meant that the museum was exceptionally crowded, but I like the idea of crowded museums; the only thing that might be better would be a crowded library, maybe. Anyway, it's a small city museum, so the Chagall works that they could get were mostly B-sides and rarities, but those are cool in their own way, too. I know some of Chagall's more famous paintings, but I've never really studied him in particular, which made playing Guess-the-Symbolism with A-sensei a lot of fun (once I gave her a brief synopsis of the Hebrew Bible) -- wings and horses and goats, oh my! And, of course, the Wandering Jew, with his trusty sidekick, Meandering Chicken. Overall, it was a really good exhibit, and a really nice afternoon. ^_^

Wow. Apparently, I'm pretty chatty this evening; you probably stopped reading ages ago! >.>; Anyway, that's all for now. Here's your random J-pic:



Mata ne!