A funny thing happened on the way to the ... school

Actually, more than one thing happened and nothing that happened was really funny. But what happened was different. The differentness of my day started this morning because I left my apartment early. Early means 7:30 a.m. Usually, I leave around 8:00 a.m. Why did I leave early? Because one of my neighbors, Moto (short for Motohiro), asked me last week if I'd be interested in walking to school with him. (All of my neighbors either work at the school or are married to someone who does.)

I've been walking to school since I moved from Takachiho to Gokase. I'm not sure exactly how far from school I live, but I estimate the distance is around 2 km, and I need about about 20-25 minutes to walk to school. For the most part, even though there aren't sidewalks along the entire route, the walk is pretty safe. The last 10 minutes are the safest, since during that time I walk along a back road with very little traffic. (Here's a picture of us, on that very back road, taken on December 11.)

Anyway, I usually leave my apartment around 8:00 because I am not required to be at school until 8:30. All the other teachers (and, from what I gather, the entire office staff) are expected to be at school and at their desks by 8:10. Getting to arrive "late" is just one of countless perks I have being an ALT, or assistant language teacher.

Yeah, so leaving at 8:00 to go to school makes perfect sense whereas leaving at 7:30 is crazy. But sometimes craziness is rewarded.

Moto is Japanese. I'm American. Moto is eager to improve his already good English. I'm eager to improve my beginner Japanese. I'm still a bit chicken to speak Japanese with Moto, since his English is so good, but I'm not chicken to ask him the ol' "How do you say (blank) in Japanese?" and I'm not chicken to ask him "What do those kanji (Chinese characters) mean?"

So today, on the way to school, instead of trying to learn Japanese on my own, from one of several books, I learned from a much better source: a human! What did I learn? I learned how to ask "Are you sick?" (Moto was sneezing) and how to say "Who's the girl on the left/right/in the middle?" (we saw several elementary-school students walking to school). And I learned the kanji for "kindergarten" (we passed the bus stop near the kindergarten). Stuff like that. What I learned may not seem like much, but every bit counts.

When we got to school, I had another new experience, thanks to arriving early. I saw four students standing in front of the main entrance to the school, greeting their fellow students as they walked past them on their way to one of the side entrances (since the kids don't enter through the main entrance). My first reaction was, "I guess this has been going on since I've been coming to school, but I never knew it. It's a good thing I came to school early for once to see this!" (I actually arrived at school at about 7:45 the day we went on the hike to Mt. Aso, but that was not a regular school day, so there were no greeters.)

From what I understood, those particular kids had that duty on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week. And I'm pretty sure they'll be there on those days next week, too. But I'm not sure how many weeks that duty lasts. Oh, and they start greeting kids around 7:45 and stop around 8:05 or so, or around the time most of the kids have arrived at school.

What I find a bit odd about the greeting duty is 1) we are talking about kids greeting kids, not the staff greeting kids, and 2) this is a boarding school, which means that the kids are being greeted just moments after arriving from the dorm, which is a two-minute walk away! (The walk is actually shorter for teachers always and for students heading to and from the dorm during regular school hours. For whatever reason, before and after school, when the kids walk to and from school, they have to take a slightly out-of-the-way route. It's a bit hard to explain, but basically, instead of taking a beeline from the dorm to the school, when they exit the dorm they have to take an exit stage right, go up a staircase, walk back downhill to the parking-lot entrance, and then take a hard left to enter the school grounds. There are other quirks like that that I hope to mention some other time on this blog.)

Yeah, and to cap off my morning, well, as soon as I walked into the teachers room, I noticed a few people in there who are almost always only in there for one reason: whenever we have meetings! So arriving early also meant that I had the pleasure of sitting in on a lovely teachers' meeting.

You can imagine how fun it is to take part in a meeting when you don't understand a lick of what's being talked about. Then again, for the most part, the meetings only last 15 minutes at the most and seem to be a great way for the teachers and staff to exchange information. Also, most teachers, including myself, get to sit at their desk during the meeting. So if I'm really bored, I can just study some Japanese or whatever. And before every meeting, the agenda is placed in our mailbox. So I usually grab it and ask someone afterwards if I missed anything important. 99 times out of 100 there's nothing of importance to me. But apparently in Japan it's important enough to attend meetings even if you don't or can't participate. So in a way, I'm did my share this morning.

(Sorry for not posting any pictures to this story. My camera died recently so the only pictures I can shoot now are those that I can take with my cell phone. Unfortunately, the quality of those pictures isn't that great. But soon enough I'll get a new camera. And I do have more pictures to post. It's just that I didn't think any of them really fit this story.)