Tuesday - Finals Week

Tuesday went pretty normally. Spent the morning grading tests and hanging out at my desk in the staff room. While a lot of people have recently been complaining about all the free time, I, conversely, have learned to appreciate and value the down time with my colleagues. After the work party last Friday (bonenkai, or “forget the year” party), I have actually been on more friendly terms with some teachers I didn’t know well before and I am enjoying the extra time with them. Even though everyone I sit by seems to be dealing with a lot of discipline issued I don’t have t worry about, there is definitely still a feeling of commrodery among all of us, at least while we are boggled down, correcting finals and answering the questions of students. With these small strides, the language barrier is becoming frustrating, but I guess it is good motivation to study.
After school, I decided to go for a bike ride (I am sick so I can’t get back into the running groove just yet). A friend recently tipped me off about the ‘ancient village’ nearby, so I decided to enjoy the daylight by exploring the area a bit.
I biked over to the village, and was excited to find that it was indeed an actual village! How ironic that just a week earlier I directed Katie to the open air museum in Osaka to see examples of ancient and traditional Japanese architecture, when we have our own little museum so close by. What is better, the historical museum that accompanies Osana, the village, is being expanded. I wandered into the museum and just played around for a while. The most interesting artifacts were the mirror discovered on the site that someone had carried over from China almost 1000 years ago, a painting depicting everyday life in the ancient village, and the relics, pictures and information about Joseph Hinko. Hinko was introduced the newspaper to Japan and was the first Japanese person to be naturalized as an American, after his ship was picked up by an American ship. I went in some of the small, grass huts. The interior strongly resembled that of the Sami huts/houses in northern Scandinavia and Russia (like the one on display at Skoevsen) and I was impressed that they were clever enough to take advantage of the earth’s insulation by digging a foundation, of sorts, for each structure. After a while, I checked out the golf range around the block (where you hit golf balls into a lake, or at floating targets for the price of a bucket of balls (only 400 yen!) and called it a day.