off to the mainland

It's Thursday evening and at the moment I am listening to an old Coalesce album while putting off the small amount of packing I have to do for my trip to Korea tomorrow afternoon. Though it was only four days of work, this was a long week for me. On Monday, I was unfortunate enough to discover that my school lunch contained ground up peanuts, which I am severely allergic to. Thankfully, I didn't eat too much before realizing that my throat was closing up and that my thoughts were becoming delusional as I started to sweat profusely. Anyone with a serious food allergy may be acquainted with the post-ingestion feeling of impending illness and, in my case, anaphylaxis. But, I know the drill. After teaching elementary kids about insects and school subjects I was fortunate enough to be able to go home and lay down as my histamines slowly returned to their normal state. Not the best way to start off my week.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended one of my schools that has some serious discipline problems. The abridged version of the events that happened on these days is that a 7th grader got pushed down a stairwell on Tuesday and had to go to the hospital to receive six staples in his scalp. I won't go into details about what happened to him the next day when he came back to school, but I will say that he was not spared from the other students' bullying just because he had split his head open the day before.

BUT, today was a really good day and I taught some of my favorite kids at Naru-chu and that always improves my spirits. My Japanese lesson went well and I am always impressed by how fast two hours will go if you're in the mood for learning. I'm lucky to have a teacher who enjoys cheesy English-to-Japanese puns because I come up with that stuff all of the time. I was also impressed recently when Miori sensei's husband was daring enough to try my quinoa-vinegar-basil-nutritional yeast dish that i've made for countless people while living here:




They both seemed to like it a lot but we all still ate enough sashimi to fill us up either way.

So it's the end of a week that really tested my nerves but tomorrow at this time I will be in Seoul- a year and one week after I was in Korea last October. I'm happy to get out of Japan for a bit but I think I'll be glad to come back as well...so far that's always been the case.