Takai yasai.

It rhymes. It means "expensive vegetables." It doesn't rhyme in English. In an attempt to vary my diet and boost my immune system, I decided to buy some fruits and veggies today. I spent about the equivalent of $20 for the following: a 250 g bag of frozen strawberries, a 250 g bag of frozen blueberries, 4 apples, 3 carrots, 5 bananas, and 5 oranges. Takai, ne? (Expensive, huh?)

I'll stop bitching, because in actuality, most food in Japan is nearly the same price as its American counterpart.

Anyways, today I taught an elementary school, as opposed to the usual yon-chu junior high. It was a lot of fun! My first two classes were 5th grade students (probably 11 or 12, a year younger than the youngest at my junior high). These classes were alright. We played "Verb Bingo" and I used some flashcards I made to teach them "run, walk, eat, drink" etc. The other 3 classes were 3rd graders (8-9). These kids were all totally awesome. Cute and funny, and actually, I think if I taught these kids regularly, my Japanese would be improving much more rapidly. See, these kids know little to no english, so no matter how many "wakaranai"s (i don't understand) that I gave them, theye kept talking to in Japanese. For the most part, I communicated with them pretty alright. It was fun. These kids learned the body parts and we did "head, shoulders, knees, and toes" and played a game where you pass a ball around with the body parts I yelled out. It was a good time. The last class even gave me tsuru (cranes, like the birds) oragami and one girl gave me a sunflower seed with red ink on it neatly wrapped in a little piece of paper. Cute but random! Also, after every class all the kids wanted my autograph. It was hilarious. I mean every kid in 5 classes of 30 kids each. I felt like a freakin' celebrity, and I really wowed them when I showed them I could write my name in katakana (the alphabet used for foreign words, company names, etc).

I ate lunch with the last class I taught, the third graders. What's great about Japanese schools is they always play music during lunch time. It's just cool. Today, they played this song that is a super hit in Japan (hell, I even have it on my computer and most anyone outside of Japan would probably make fun of me if I showed it to them). It's called "Daite Seniorita" which translates to something like "Make love to me, seniorita." In other words, perfectly okay for 8 and 9 year olds to be listening to during lunch.

Might I add that the school randomly had two live goats at the entrance of the school grounds. I have absolutely no idea why. They had massively sagging bladder areas, too. Weird.

Now I'm just sitting around, probably gonna go find some dinner soon. I'm almost done with "Flowers for Algernon," making it the fastest 300 pages I've actually been interested in reading.

Finally, thanks to everyone leaving comments. I love them as much as (apparently) you all love reading this blog. I must give delayed birthday props to my brother Wade and the wonderful Lucy. Happy belated birthday you crazy bitches. To the IES kids, hurry up and graduate and get your asses back to Japan. Gerry- hilarious as usual. Nicky and Amy, I'm working on making sure I have the right address before I give it to you for the cereal. But some American cereal would be totally epic. Thanks and much love to everyone!! Just to make it apparent- anyone can leave comments on here, you don't have to register. Okay.

Sorry about no pictures yet again. I really wanted to take a picture of the goats, but forgot my camera today.