For the last couple months, business has been booming at the medical school -- I think I've gained four or five private lessons just lately. This makes at least four one-hour lessons everyday, and that's not including the university classes and the free tutoring sessions I do for the medical students. If you add in prep time and the proofreading work I do for doctors at the medical school, I'm basically at school from 9 AM to 9 PM every day.
In a way, this is a good thing. I like my job, and I certainly don't want to be sitting around with nothing to do. As long as I'm living by myself in the middle of the Japanese countryside, it's best to keep busy.
On the other hand, all of these new lessons mean that I literally have no time to eat dinner until at least 9 at night Monday through Saturday....although on the bright side, once I come back to the states, I'll probably be a lot thinner.* Maybe I can become a super model.**
* Or fatter?? Isn't eating right before you go to bed supposed to make you gain weight? Or maybe my occasional late night snacking will be canceled out by the fact that sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of the floor without eating anything at all.
** Shoot..forgot that I'm not over six feet tall...
Anyway, suffice it to say that with the sudden deluge of work since the first of the year, I haven't been able to write too many blog posts lately. :( But as usual, there's been plenty of stuff to write about. Here's a quick rundown of the most exciting non-work related events of the past few weeks:
Since I went to Okinawa last year, I've been a bit obsessed with the sanshin, a three-stringed banjo-ish instrument that people play there. It's a little hard to describe what it sounds like, but people play it at festivals and dance to it, so it's rhythmical and fun...maybe you could call it Okinawan-style hoe-down music??
Anyway, in Okinawa, I bought a really cheap sanshin for practice, and figured that if I ever got good at it, I could switch to a better one. Real sanshin are made from wood and covered with python skin, but my cheap one was made from a tin can. (After the bombing in World War II, Okinawa was completely devastated, and there were no materials to make sanshin, so people made them out of whatever they could find -- mostly scraps of wood and empty cans. Now the cheapest sanshin in souvenir shops are still made that way.)
Unfortunately, my sanshin was a little too cheap (or maybe I am stronger than I thought.) I was tuning it one day, turned one of the wooden tuning pegs a little too hard, and broke the peg in half. I glued the peg back together with wood glue, but it was never quite the same. :( Lamenting the loss of my sanshin, I mentioned to my parents that I wished I had a real one, and they surprised me and ordered me one for Christmas. And two weeks ago, my new sanshin finally came to the medical school. The new one is beautiful, and the sound is sooo much better than the tin can. :D
The day after my sanshin came, I checked the mail again and found a postcard with results from the Japanese proficiency test I had taken last December. (The test is for foreigners who are studying Japanese, and there are four levels depending on how long you've been studying. For my level, I had to know ~2000 Japanese characters and ~10,000 vocabulary words, so all November and December, I was studying characters like a crazy person.) My postcard was kind of small, and since a small envelope usually means bad news, I figured I must have failed the test, but I opened it anyway and found that I had actually passed! I hope no one was watching me because I was so surprised that I kind of did a little jig up the stairs to my apartment.
The following day, the postman brought me yet another surprise -- another postcard from Nodo Jiman (the American Idol-ish TV show) inviting me to audition for the TV show again. The audition was last weekend, and I decided to sing an Okinawan song and play my sanshin.
Unfortunately, this time around, I didn't sing terribly well and didn't make it on TV, so there's no videotape, but here's a still of me and my beautiful sanshin:
Just like last time, the rest of the auditionees (250 people total) were very entertaining, so despite the fact that I wasn't able to make much progress in my quest to become a Japanese pop star, I was glad to have gone to the audition.
My English student's sister came to hear me sing, and after the audition was over, she invited me to spend the night at her apartment instead of taking the hour and a half long bus ride back home.
In case you're wondering how I know my English student's sister, I suppose I'd better catch you up on a little background information. Last fall, my English student, Yumi, took me to see a big festival in her hometown and introduced me to her whole family. Here's me, Yumi, and her sister, Hitomi, next to one of the festival floats:
See that gigantic pole I'm leaning on? At the festival, the men put the poles on their shoulders and carry the float and bounce it up and down. About five minutes after this picture was taken, the manly men from the float next door decided they wanted to have a fight with our float and started charging towards us. Fortunately for me, Yumi and Hitomi realized that we were about to be sandwiched between two enormous pieces of wood and we all ran to safety in the nick of time.
...but I digress....
Here's Yumi, me, and Hitomi's five year old son, Yuuto, at a little safer distance from the action:
Yuuto is absolutely hysterical. When I first met him last fall, he was really scared of me because he had never seen a foreigner before. (For the first hour or so of the festival, he kept saying, "I don't like foreigners. I hate people who speak English!!") But after a bit, his curiosity got the better of him and we became pretty good buddies:
During dinner, he kept running over to sit on my lap and ask me questions like, "What does your grandpa look like?" and "Are there dogs in America?"
Ok, so back to Nodo Jiman day... After my audition, Yuuto was apparently really excited that I was coming to stay at his apartment. When I walked in the door, he pulled me inside and immediately gave me the grand tour, saying, "I've been cleaning house all day to get ready for you. Doesn't it just sparkle??" And then we played and played all night long...with board games and play money and video games and picture books...it was the first time I had played that much in a long time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. :D
Later that night, we went out to dinner, where Yuuto told me the whole story of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and then to the public bath. Yuuto insisted on coming into the women's side to play with me, and then almost dragged me into the men's side too when he decided to look for his dad later on. (笑)
When it was time for me to go home the next afternoon, we did one more jigsaw puzzle and then sadly parted. Yuuto told me to come back next Sunday and he would be sure to clean the house for me. I think I'm in love. <3 <3
This is the view from the shack where my jazz band practices. (Yes, it's really a shack. You'll see in the next picture.) The shack is literally in the middle of nowhere -- nothing but rice fields all around.
And yet for some reason, our shack, smack dab in the middle of the Japanese countryside, is covered with graffiti. (>_<); 
The inside of the shack...
...and the kerosene stoves that keep my lips from freezing to my trombone in the freezing cold Toon-shi winter.
My friend Michiko and me posing outside of the shack before practice. I don't quite remember what we were doing when this picture was taken...flashing gang signs?? (No, I didn't graffiti the shack. ;)
What could be happier than eating ice cream with friends at Tokyo Disneyland??
