So, I managed to get sick again. One of the English teachers at O. Junior High told me her throat was sore last week, this Monday I felt the tickle in my throat, and by Wednesday I had a full blown frog in my throat. Demon-frog maybe, from the way I sound... Weird part is, that's really all that's wrong. Sometimes I get bad headaches or feel exhausted, but I think that's just a normal part of life now. So I haven't missed any work or anything, which is kinda fun because EVERYONE has been commenting on the way I sound. The students, the English teachers, the other teachers...even shy O-Sensei who literally runs in the other direction whenever I attempt to say "hi" to him.
Hoping this goes away soon, since I'll be rotating to B. Junior High on Monday. They haven't seen me for a couple months, and sounding like a creature from the abyss isn't really the impression I want to make.
We had the obligatory work new year's party last night with the Board of Education. This is a typical yearly work party, called a "shinnenkai" in Japanese. You pay a bunch of money, eat lots of food, and drink a lot. Usually people get quite drunk at these things, and it's okay because the slate is wiped clean at work come Monday. It really kind of is "what happens at the enkai, stays at the enkai." (Enkai is the general term for these work parties.) Anyway, I wasn't drinking much since I didn't think that would help my throat. I didn't really even want to go to the party to begin with, but by the end I was glad I went. One of the highlights was teaching some of our BOE co-workers how to do strange hand things (like where you twist your palms together and wiggle your middle fingers, or when you make it look like you've pulled the tip of your thumb off...I'm not sure that makes sense. I don't really know how to explain what I'm talking about...), which then devolved into making animals noises. One of our more intoxicated co-workers tried to mimic all the sounds we AETs made (since of course as trained English-speaking monkeys, we were the ones leading the animal-noise cavalry). When he tried to do the elephant noise he puffed his cheeks out and...I don't know. It was just hilarious. And then he showed us a picture of his son on his cell phone, and took his own glasses off his face and put them up to his son's face on the phone screen to show how much they looked alike... Haha, it was good times. And then when we left, one of our supervisors told us to be safe on the way home so that we wouldn't "get touched by boys." Direct quote.
Ah, yes. Life in Japan. And those are the most recent adventures in the past week of my life. :)
Get well soon!
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