Hello October.

You know what I realized today? That pantyhose are worse than high heels and thong underwear combined.
But, besides that, I realized that there are not 31 days in September. That means, today is the start of October. That means, we're 83.3% done with 2011. That's right. I did math. And I used a calculator. Don't hate.  Back to my original point...that means, it's getting cooler!! And I love it.

It was also brought to my attention how soon I will be losing my co-NET (the other American teacher at my school). He's leaving in December and I'm freaking out. He's been here for two years and knows everything! I don't know what I'm going to do without him. I'm not ready to take responsibility for things that go wrong. I like being the new girl. In fact, I like being the only American girl. Things are about to change. I'm sure the new girl will be perfectly nice, but I was really hoping that when we opened the packet today, there was going to be a picture of a hottie American man. And there wasn't, so I am a little disappointed. Maybe we can be friends....

Last weekend I took a walk downtown with Mary, Valerie, and my coworker. We met up with the other teacher from the Shizuoka school and we went to an arcade. After losing twice in a row at Mario Kart, I concluded that either 1) I'm forgetting how to drive or 2) I was never a good driver. Then we took super cute photo stickers.

Aren't we precious?

The mailman has been very generous this week! I got a very sweet letter from a dear friend as well as a heavy package full of delicious goodies, of which almost all of them are gone, except anything containing a black licorice flavor. Why does this flavor exist? Nobody likes it except my mom. Black licorice is like the band Nickelback. It's awful, but it's still sold in stores. And just like Nickelback, black licorice is unheard of  in Japan. I wish I would have filmed the Japanese teacher's reaction to eating the candy. You would have thought I poisoned them. I think one guy is still trying to get rid of the taste it left. 

Funny Teaching Moments:

As native English teachers from America, it is our responsibility to teach English the "American" way. Meaning, we steal words from other languages and make them our own. Since we're all pretentious douches, we teach these children that "karate" is now an American-English word pronounced as "kah-rah-tee", when in actuality it is a Japanese word pronounced as "kah-rah-teh". You say toe-mah-toe, I say you're wrong. 

Today in one of my lessons, we started a new unit that teaches the language pattern, "What's the matter?" "My ____ hurts." While I was drilling the response, saying, "My stomach hurts", one of my students says to me in Japanese, "If your stomach hurts, then you should really try going to the bathroom. You probably have to poop." Thank you Japanese Immersion Program. I would miss so many funny comments from my students if you didn't teach me elementary Japanese. Until next time! またね!

If anyone has any suggestions for new music to check out, that would be greatly appreciated. I've been listening to the same 48 songs on my ipod for two months. For those of you who don't know my taste in music, I'm a Glee meets Ludacris kind of girl. Thanks!
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New Vocabulary:
~十月  jew-gah-tsu   October
~まずい  mah-zoo-ee   tastes bad
~バカな  bah-kah-nah   stupid