Upside Down and Backwards

I’m really bad at this updating regularly thing.

The last few weeks have been good. I went to Thailand for a week, to visit my girl, Kaitlyn, from uni who is studying abroad in Bangkok this semester. And I know I’ve already mentioned this trip, but I’m going to talk about it again. Because this is my blog, and I can do what I want.

When I walked into the airport Bangkok airport at five a.m., I realized that I literally knew no words in Thai. I couldn’t say hello, I couldn’t say thank you – and that had never happened to me before. Every country I have visited, I have known at least a few words in the language. Even when I went to Sweden, I had spent enough time on Swedish websites leading up to the trip that I knew some words. And Swedish is a basically intuitive language anyway. Thai, however, is tonal and therefore not intuitive and also completely unavailable to me. Signs around the airport pointed to bathrooms and Muslim prayer rooms. The airport was strangely divided into floating levels, with escalators and elevators interrupting the flow of every floor and skyways providing views of the floors below. Thai script covered notice boards. The thing about Thai script is that some of the symbols look like English letters, just upside down and backwards, so when my brain saw the marks, it sought to make sense of them through the lens of what it already knew, so I would see English words, just upside and backwards, all the time. Even though they were completely not there. Like some twisted I SPY book, all the time.

Speaking of language, I spent several hours of my school week last week studying Japanese, partially because it suddenly occurred to me how stupid it was not to study at school where I was surrounded by Japanese people who could answer any questions I might have. Duh.

Also, I think I might finally be done giving my self-introduction lesson. I had a few straggler classes that I finished up the last two weeks. One of my ninensei classes greeted my JTE and I with “Good afternoon Ms. Imano and….*mumblemumble* New Teacher!” And then when I told that class that Justin Beiber was, in fact, Canadian, not American, they checked the nationality of every Western artist they knew.

“Beyonce…American?”

“Yes, Beyonce is American.”

“Lady Gaga…American?”

“Yes, she is also American.”

Glad we got that straightened out.

Today I have one reading class with the ichinenseis. I am spending every day this week at Akita High, and I am teaching three ichinensei classes entirely on my own on Thursday. My JTE told me I could do whatever I wanted, and since Halloween is only a few days after my classes, I am going to do a Halloween lesson with them. So I’ve been working out that lesson plan and preparing for it. It’s the first real lesson plan I’ve made, first class I’ve taught on my own, first class I haven’t had a translator for, first everything basically. Wish me luck! I really like the students at this school, especially the ichinenseis, and their English is comparatively better than my other schools, so I think it should go okay. I only have to make one lesson plan that I can use for all three classes, so that makes it easier as well.

In other news, I have only been to the Indian restaurant directly in front of my house three times, but they already all know me there and say hello to me whenever they see me. Which tells me that I am becoming Sandra Bullock in both While You Were Sleeping and Two Weeks Notice, when she calls Mr. Wong and orders way too much Chinese food all the time. I knew it would happen, but I don’t think I was quite prepared for it to happen this quickly. Their Channa Masala is just so good!