10 Things I Love About Japan

I love it when my students attempt to flip each other off and use their ring finger instead. I almost die laughing; I will never correct them.

I love it when I see a boy casually sitting on another boy, or boys primping each other's hair, without caring how it looks.

I love it when we talk about things in class like “Can you find a skiing snowman?” and it turns into “Do you like the dancing girl?” or “the swimming boy”.

I love it when I make sweet rice (rice, sugar, milk, cinnamon) and they act like it is THE SICKEST thing in the world that they have ever heard of. Then, I love it more when I make them eat it as an American Challenge. (One guy had tears in his eyes that he WIPED AWAY as he ate it.)

I love it that my students have no idea that they're carrying around towels that say things like “natural born sex pervert” and they like it because it's in pretty pink cursive script. It makes me wonder what kind of Japanese (Chinese) characters we are carrying around or tattoing on ourselves.

I love it when I bow in my car at people when I go to work everyday.

I love it when I fill up my car and can only say things in Japanese that I know like “Car…I am full…please” and now my gasoline man knows who I am and tries not to laugh. (The town office tells me that the gasoline man is my boyfriend.)

I love that I make an example Show and Tell presentation with a Nalgene bottle and the students are so interested in the example, that we talk about my water bottle for like 1/2 hour.

I love that all of the English speakers are starting to say Japanese English like "See you" (instead of see you soon or see ya or see you later) or daijobu (instead of ok)

I love that I got 2 more schedules this week. I finally figured out how to tell which days are "A" "B" "C" or "Super C", but now there`s apparently another "Super Special Schedule". So in total there`s 11 schedules that I have and counting: lunch schedule, random-schedule-that-showed-up on-my-desk that I don`t understand, 5 daily schedules(A,B,C,SC,Super Special), town office schedule(which has schedules for my elementaries, nurseries and adult class), my monthly school schedule, different weekly school schedule AND English school schedule. PHEW!