Friday, November 27, 2009

Winter in Japan or The Dangers of Peeing

So it seems that I do much better with posts that contain only words, as opposed to words and pictures. Uploading pictures requires time, which I occaisionally have, and patience, which I have a very limited supply of that needs to be conserved for really important tasks such as lesson planning or figuring out where the hell the lightbulbs are kept in the supermarket. At any rate, I hope that for now, my words will suffice.

Yes, so, lightbulbs. I have had three burn out on me since moving here. The first happened the day I moved in to my apartment, but my predecessor was there and had one lightbulb left from his time there so he saved the day with that one. The second one to go was the one in my entryway just as I enter the apartment. I didn't realize how pivotal that one was until I arrived home one night and nearly killed myself tripping over shoes and my own two feet in the dark. Traitorous feet. They had probably been planning this all along, and even arranged for the lightbulb to burn out. No doubt my shoes were in on it too - I mean, they spend all day together, who knows what kind of scheming was going on down there. Anyway, I took myself (feet and shoes included, despite their treachery) to the supermarket.

Now, it required several trips to the supermarket before I was actually successful in buying lightbulbs, because for one reason or another I was always rushed while looking (most likely because I was running late for some event or appointment). The second time I tried, I thought it would be the sensible thing to just ask where they were. Then, I remembered I would have to ask in Japanese. So I stopped and began constructing the sentence in my head, and THEN realized that I didn't know the word for "lightbulb". My whole plan, which I had dubbed "Plan B: Ask a Sales Associate" (because "Plan A: Look For Lightbulbs Myself" had failed last time), sort of hinged on the word "lightbulbs". The next best thing would be to say "Where are the..." and then gesture for what I wanted. But, seriously. Can you imagine gesturing a LIGHTBULB? I had a brief flash of the scene I would create in the middle of the supermarket - it started with the pain of having to gesture wildly to a poor Japanese worker as they looked at me helplessly, and ended with the frustration of stalking off after being unable to communicate effectively leaving the Japanese worker with the reaffirmation that foreigners were still crazy. I wasn't in the mood to cause that kind of confusion. So, I fell back on good ole Plan A, and just looked some more. I did eventually find the lightbulbs, and replace my burned out ones. That's pretty much all there is to this story.

This entry is not supposed to be about lightbulbs. Okay, let me attempt to wrangle this runaway train of thought and put it back on track. Here we go.

It's getting cold! People keep saying that all the inherent moisture in the air makes the chill worse, and I am really inclined to believe it. Scratch that, I do believe it. None of the schools here have centralized heating - or rather, none of the buildings in general. Each room just has an AC/heating unit, but they don't like to turn them on because it's "very expensive". Also, I think there's some sort of Tottori-wide rule (Japan-wide rule?) that the heaters don't get turned on until December. This makes for some very cold schools. The hallways between rooms are the exact same temperature as outside, so yeah. Ugh. Doors are kept closed to hold in heat, and the only heat that's actually being produced is body heat. So I've taken to wearing three or four layers to school in order to feel normal (other JETs are boasting five to six layers, because their schools keep the windows open to "let the flu out" and shit like that - that's a whole other story, we're not even going there today). Well, I had been doing really well warmth-wise. I hadn't felt like my schools were as frigid as other JETs were telling me theirs were, and my schools' administration had enough sense to keep the windows closed. Thank Buddha. Or the kami or whoever deserves the credit for that one.

Well, the weather got colder and didn't warn me beforehand, so I continued taking the same precautions against the chill as I had been. I learned how much colder it had gotten when my hands got cold. My hands are always the first thing to go in the cold, but I had not been wearing gloves because it hadn't been quite cold enough. Well, there must have been a big drop because my hands went from cold to colder to frozen to I-have-lost-all-feeling in the span of three hours. Not fun. I was even shivering. Well, as luck would have it, my high school has a vending machine that vends hot drinks! That's the good news. The bad news is that this magnificent wellspring of heated beverages was on the opposite side of the school. Of course. Meaning, I would have to trek through the glacial hallways (aka the Perilous Fortress of Ice and Misery - PFIM for short) there and back if I wanted anything. Armed only with my two layers of clothing I went out on a quest for hot tea. Now, I didn't really walk there because that would take too long, and it wasn't quite a run. I would say that it was more of a scurry that I did to the vending machine. At any rate, I slammed my money in and got a thing of hot tea. It was SO WARM. My hands tingled with happiness (or was that the tingle of returning blood-flow?) as I clutched it on my scurry back to the staff room.

And I drank that sucker. I had to do it slow enough that I could spread the heat out, and fast enough that it wouldn't get cold. A delicate balancing act. My hands were sad, because as soon as I started drinking the lovely tea all the heat disappeared, and thus my hands returned to their frozen state.

I dunno about you guys, but being cold makes me have to go pee much more frequently than when I'm warm. Such an unfortunate thing. I tried to fight it. Going to the bathroom meant leaving the "warmth" of the staff room yet again. Note the sarcastic quotemarks. I sat there trying to occupy my thoughts with anything other than relieving myself. Food. Ponies. Hell I even thought about working. But that god-forsaken cold just kept seeping in and making me need to peeeeeeee. I wondered how long it would take to order a sherpa. Did they have sherpas on amazon.com and were there any decent COD options? Even if there were, I would have to then provide them with the address of my school or directions on how to get all the way out to the boondocks where I was. All in Japanese. No, a sherpa was definitely out of the question. I would just have to brave the PFIM myself. AGAIN. By that time I was practically squirming in my seat, so I ducked out of the staff room and got my scurry on all the way down to the teachers' bathrooms, which are only minutely closer than the vending maching I would just like to add.

The bathrooms were, impossibly, colder than the hallways. The window, which stood open, caused me to grimace, and the sound of the torrential rain hitting the asphalt outside made me have to pee even more. I bolted over to a urinal and undid my pants.

Imagine my surprise when I grabbed my junk with the frozen block of ice that was once my hand. Imagine me hitting my head on the ceiling as I jumped six feet in the air out of shock. In the back of my throat, I sort of choked and gurgled at the same time time. I churgled. It felt like Frosty the Snowman was taking a bite out of my crotch, and my only saving grace was that there were no other teachers in the bathroom to witness this whole debacle. It really hadn't occurred to me that my ice-cold hand would adversely affect my whole bathroom experience, probably because I had lost all feeling in it and thus any thoughts of it evaporated from my mind. Out of nerve-endings out of mind, as the old saying goes.

So, much like my feet, my hands had tried to kill me. My appendages were rebelling, and what's worse is that they were being terribly clever about it. Well, I resolved right then and there to fix my hands good and proper. I finished going to the bathroom, and then just popped around the corner to the vending machine since it was so close. I bought another drink, which gave me something warm to clutch as I did my little scurry back to the staff room. And then I sat there and got my hands good and hot. And also warmed up my insides by drinking more tea. And several minutes later when it was freezing ass cold again, I had to pee. DAMMIT!

Really, I guess I should have titled this entry "The Vicious Cycle of Peeing" because that's what it turned into. I did start wearing gloves for awhile, but as soon as I did that the weather got warmer again and the frostbite abated. There's also these lovely little pouches that they sell in convenience stores here that you hold in your hands. And you crunch them around a bit, and they start to emit heat. I like them, so I'm going to put a ring on it. They can go for, like, 24 hours, so I'll be doing my part to stimulate the Japanese economy by buying mountains of them for when winter hits for realsies.

That's all I got for now. I know I didn't really talk about anything, but this one goes down in my "lessons learned" file. The last thing I'll leave you with is the list of American TV shows I've been trying to keep up with thanks to the magic of the interweb. So, here we go:

1) The Amazing Race
2) Project Runway (I still have to watch the last episode >.O)
3) Nurse Jackie
4) Glee
5) Dollhouse
6) Eastwick - I know it got axed and it's not THAT great of a show, but they have some fun one-liners every episode. Plus, once my new glasses come in I'll be able to pull them down over the bridge of my nose and attempt to hypnotize people just like Lindsay Price.

Oh, right! I bought new glasses! They cost half as much as my last pair, and I'll just leave it at that. It was super exciting because I got through the vision test and the whole process of buying them by myself IN JAPANESE. Yeah, I didn't understand 50% of what the guy said but by the end of it I came away with a receipt for the correct amount and a date for when I could pick them up. Plus, they sent their only female employee over to me with a lovely cup of coffee on a cute little tray for me to drink while I filled out paperwork. Too bad that kind of gesture is totally lost on me, but the coffee was nice. So I am super excited for new glasses.

Oh, and Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving! It doesn't really exist here in Japan. I missed being surrounded by family and food. But I organized a small group of us to go out to dinner together last night, and that was good - we had some baked potatoes with butter, and instead of turkey we substituted fried chicken. Also there was some cheese-covered mushroom deliciousness going around, french fries, and some shellfish salad. And then we went and got some traditional Thanksgiving donuts for dessert. That's how we roll. We even introduced our South African friend to her first Thanksgiving (even though it wasnt an entirely legitimate Thanksgiving dinner). So, even though I couldn't be with family, I was surrounded by friends and that's all I could have asked for.

Alright, I am really wrapping up now. If I don't stop rambling and publish this entry soon it will never see the light of day. Over and out!