Tag Archive for 'pain'

Winter Sports Festival

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on January 29, 2009
in Consumable media!, Japan!, Precocious Younglings and Stories from the Edge
. 4 Comments

I attended my Hell School’s Winter Sports Festival on Saturday of last week. This consisted of various snow-related games and activities. The first event was a relay race where three people worked together to drag a tire with a small child riding on it around a cone and back to the starting line before passing the tire on to the next team. The soccer field was completely frozen over with ice that was in turn covered by a thin layer of hardened snow that . In other words, designed in the laboratory of the Creator to be unto me and my history as a resident of the Sunshine State as kryptonite is to Super Man.

I was in the first group for the first race, and only made it about four steps before my feet caught in the snow and I fell to the ground. The rope attached to the tire remained clenched firmly in my hand, and I was dragged a pretty decent stretch behind the team before the two other teachers noticed that I was no longer level with them. The teacher relay team ended up not winning that race, although this was not entirely my fault. It’s cool though: I totally brought it home during the tug of war segment later that day.

I walked away from the race with my hands all scraped up and bleeding from being dragged on the ice. As I was taking stock of my injuries, I walked by a couple first-year girls huddling together to stay warm. “Good morning!” they both said. I waved at them. One of them pointed at my face and had a brief conversation with her friend. A group of Japanese teenagers who have been taking English for a while form a sort of gestalt organism; on their own they’d have a hard time communicating with me, but in a big enough group, they can usually come up with about the same level of conversational ability. This is a process that I am pretty used to by now: a group of students will approach me, and one of the brave ones will attempt to ask me a question. For example, “Where you from?” was popular when I first started teaching. The phrasing may be perfect, or it may be a little off. Either way, the asker of the question will then cock his or her head and say “Eh? Eh?” and will turn to converse with the other people in the group, running through several variations of the question in order to try and form a consensus. It actually is pretty interesting to see them perform these translations out loud because it helps me understand the differences in grammar between the two languages. “You where live? Are? Where are you… where are you live? From? Where are you from?” This can take 45 seconds or more, and I sometimes feel like I ran down the escalator at the subway station just in time to watch the train leave and right then understand that I’ll have to wait the full ten minutes for the next one.

“Red,” she said, and pointed at her face, and then at my face again.

“Ah, yes,” I said, after a moment of blank stares and awkward hand gestures. “My face is red. It is very cold today.” I mimed shivering and rubbing my arms. This was my best guess as to the meaning of their inquiry. It didn’t seem to satisfy them, but they appeared unwilling to take this line of questioning any further.

There was a short period of silence wherein we all stood there without any of us making a move to walk away. That was my cue to start asking them questions in English; both of these girls were in a class I taught and were noteworthy for being well-behaved and good-natured in a school full of angsty hardasses, so I was interested to know what clubs they were in, what their favorite subjects were, that kind of thing. This went on for perhaps ten minutes, at which point one of the school’s English teachers walked by. One of the girls motioned him over and asked him a question in Japanese.

“Blood,” he said, and then repeated it to make sure they had the pronunciation right. “Blood.” She pointed at my face again.

The teacher turned to me, nodded in recognition, and said, “You have blood on your face.” I reached up, and, sho’ nuff, my hand came back with red smears on it from what would turn out to be a few small scrapes on my cheek and upper lip. To their credit, the girls both took it in stride and were able to manage answers to every question I asked despite the sight of a crazed-looking gaijin with blood on his face staring them down. Good for them.

Pictures of the snow relay can be found on this Picasa Web Album. I have started using Picasa after discovering that Flickr limits you to only three photo sets. Hell with that.