Archive for May, 2008

The Big Snake Tree

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 12, 2008 in Bike. 0 Comments

We’ve just pulled out of a string of national holidays titled “Golden Week,” though “week” is a bit of a stretch. This is my second Golden Week in Japan, and I’m still not sure exactly how many holidays there are or the rationale behind assigning actual days off during the week.

It goes something like this:

April 29 used to be Green Day, but has been changed to Showa Day to commemorate the ruling period of the Showa Emperor (which happens to include World War II and my birth, among other important events).

May 3 is Constitution Memorial Day, in remembrance of the constitution that we made them sign 60 years ago and that officially made the Showa Emperor a figurehead.

May 4 was called People’s Holiday, but is now Green Day. Go figure.

May 5 is Children’s Day.

Some businesses are nice and give employees one or two whole weeks off. Public schools are nowhere near that, they go by the letter of the law. So we got a random Tuesday (April 29) and the following Monday and Tuesday (May 5 and 6). When I lived here a few years ago, the school gave us Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in one of the weeks. That was very stupid.

In any case, when you lump together a bunch of national holidays in a nation where people don’t take Saturdays off, it is inevitable that highways, trains, and planes will be jammed, hotels will be booked solid for a hundred miles around any major tourist attraction, and the prices will be jacked up to match.

Not fun when you suddenly find out that one of your guys is pitching in Hiroshima on the first day of said stack o’ holidays. No tourists there, of course. And I didn’t have to stand up next to an anxious smoker and a redhead with Tourette’s for the entire 3 and a half hour train ride there, either.

I’ve never been smashed into the back of a truck with 20 other people on a treacherous, week-long road to freedom, but it’s easier to imagine now.

Before the Hiroshima disaster, I had a Tuesday off. I awoke with no plans other than to jump on my bicycle and go somewhere. There are some steep mountains behind a beachside town where three English teaching acquaintances live, and I decided to sneak around the backside and barrel down in hopes that the back way had an easier climb.

I was right about the ascent, but the trip was much longer than I anticipated. I found the right roads and wound through tiny mountain communities and pine forests until I got to the end of one numbered road and the beginning of another.

The first road had signs counting down to 0 kilometers, so I thought that I would be in the beachside town by then. I was still looking up a hill when I got to zero, and the new numbered road had a sign in the distance that said “2.4 kilometers.”

That’s what I had hoped, anyway. It was indeed 24 and that was another hour-plus that I hadn’t counted on.

I made it home OK and didn’t ride again until yesterday, my first Sunday ride in weeks due to baseball travels and Golden Week. Everyone showed up and was in fine spirits except the Bike Shops. Mrs. Bike Shop’s mother had been taken to the hospital the night before and the two were concerned and decided not to ride.

We wished Grandma Bike Shop the best and rode off to the Big Snake Tree. Larry had seen an article in the paper about a special wisteria tree that only blooms for a couple of weeks each year. It was in full color at the base of a mountainside campground and we wanted to see it.

I had never been out without the Bike Shops before, and the tone was a lot different. Larry insisted that I ride in the middle of the group and not the back, which put a lot of pressure on me to pedal harder than I wanted to at the beginning of the ride. I usually plan on having enough energy left to get back home.

A vicious crosswind hampered us all the way up the Monobe River, and the guys joked about how much wind I blocked for them. I told them to say their prayers when they try to catch me on my new bike in the future. I like these opportunities to cut up and have a little fun in Japanese.

We turned off the main highway onto the exact same road that I had taken alone on Showa Day. I chuckled and told the other riders, and that got me a turn in the front. Me and my big mouth.

We got to the Big Snake Tree, which wasn’t spectacular, but wasn’t bad. It was a nice little spot with a rushing river thanks to the rain the day before. I had whizzed through there without a second thought just two weeks before, and I’m sure that I would’ve remembered the tree if it had been in bloom.

From there, we passed the 24 kilometers sign and battled tourist traffic all the way out of the valley, over the pass, and down the mountain. Quite a few times we whipped around corners to find two cars at an impasse, and we actually had to scream out at one driver to stop before he drove his car off the side of the cliff!

The final plunge into the coastal town resembled a big snake more than did the wisteria tree, and moist weather and cover of trees had aided the growth of moss on the road. One of our riders went down very hard around a hairpin turn and luckily came up with just a deep scrape on one leg.

Carefully, we continued, and a few more riders slipped and fell, but each subsequent slide was funnier than the last because we knew they were coming and were taking it very slowly. Nobody else hit the pavement, but a retired veterinarian with a huge face nearly wiped out a small shrine sandwiched between the road and the face of the mountain and let out a hilarious scream in so doing.

We gathered at the junction of Kochi’s PCH and took our last break before we would all start to take our own routes home. I leaned over to ask Pretty Guy what his odometer said and was shocked to learn that we had already eclipsed 65 miles. All told, we rode 80 miles to see a tree.

What surprised me even more was that I had done this by myself beforehand and didn’t know how far it was. Or how dangerous. Thank God that it was dry and that tree was sleeping when I went out the first time. I would not have handled the cars and the mossy downhill roads as well without my friends in KCTC.

There’s No Substitute

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 10, 2008 in Funnies. 0 Comments

Substitute teaching…oh man, raise your hand if you’ve tried that.

It’s a good precursor to a career in teaching, and equally good for making a little extra money during the day, catching up on reading and crossword puzzles, and trolling the district for young, single teachers.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the junior high and high schools in my home town. The job was never short on surprises or little life lessons. I’d recommend it to anyone who is not in a hurry to join (or re-join) the rat race.

Watching the original Lord of the Flies about fifteen times, conducting a junior high brass band and a high school choir, and tackling gigantic autistic kids are among the highlights of my brief substitute teaching career.

As far as I know, Japan doesn’t have substitute teachers. Quite a few educators are part-time or teach at multiple schools, but I’ve never seen anyone who bounces from school to school, teaching math one day and social studies the next.

This presents a problem when a teacher wants or needs to take a day off. That in and of itself is interesting, because teachers have vacation and sick days, but they are discouraged from using them because of the inconvenience their absence would cause the rest of the staff.

Nobody teaches from periods one through six, and conference periods are many. Teachers aren’t supposed to teach more than four classes a day and usually have about 16 per week. This gives them time to wear the other hats bestowed upon them by the school.

Played tennis in junior high school? OK, you’re the badminton coach. Made the call to a suicide hotline when you walked in on your friend holding a knife to her wrists? Guidance counselor. Constructed a miniature model of Tokyo Tower with nothing but matchsticks, a rotten apple, and a tube of Moroccan toothpaste? Master scheduler.

Then there are the committees. I don’t think they do much, but of course committees have to have meetings and meetings are a very Japanese thing to do.

So when someone wants to take the day off, not only is a math teacher gone, but so is the Athletic Director and the vice chair of the School Rules Committee.

Only one English teacher has ever asked for time off, and it’s usually to take her son to the doctor because he keeps getting ear infections.

The teacher’s classes are covered by other teachers in the department. Even though I don’t have a Japanese teaching credential and therefore can’t legally teach a class alone, I took a few of her classes on those days and handled them just fine.

Some departments only have one teacher. At our industrial school, music and fine arts are just there to keep the PTA quiet about requirements, so there’s one art teacher and one part-time music teacher who is pregnant and misses a lot of days.

Her classes get shuffled around the staff, and I always hope that they’ll ask me to do it because I think I’m up to the task. I drop hints about it and I’m on the piano every day at lunch, but so far no dice. All I’m good for is English.

The responsibility landed on Coach Napoleon last week and he tried hard to pawn it off, but nobody would take it. The usually gruff softball coach showed a weaker side, whining about how he couldn’t read music and didn’t know what to call all of the “toys in the box” (percussion instruments used for teaching rhythm).

I took a peek at one of Coach Napoleon’s music classes, and it was comically awful. He stood before the students with a defeated look on his face and pointed at the blackboard while the students clanked castanets, shook maracas, and lamely tried to produce the rhythms written on the board. I imagined that he could be further out of his element only in an English class.

It’s an interesting system. We have uncertified people teaching classes for the day on both sides of the Pacific in completely different ways.

From the students’ perspective, the Japanese teacher is someone they know and trust, but the students also know that this person isn’t cooking in his own kitchen. The American kids never know for sure just what the sub knows, but also have no idea who the person is. Anyone with a college degree can stand up there and do it - prospective teachers, wafflers like me, or complete weirdos.

This one is too close for me to call. Both ways work, and either way it would be better if the real teacher were there. I don’t like the pressure to avoid taking days off here, and I don’t think that the teachers do, either, but I’m just a temporary guy and they are here for life, so they accept it.

An Intervention

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 10, 2008 in Lessons. 0 Comments

The bikers had a mini-intervention with me recently about getting a new bike. Pretty Guy asked when it was happening, and I gave my usual answer: “When I win the lottery.”

Then Larry stepped in. Larry is about fifty years old with a square, tanned face and salt-and-pepper hair. He rides 150 to 200 miles a week and wins races in and out of his age bracket. He looks exactly like a Japanese version of an American biker and family friend named Larry, hence the nickname.

Larry is so much faster than everyone else that I only see him when he is climbing a slope for the second time in order to keep moving on our Sunday rides. I usually say “good morning” to him and he’s out of earshot before I can say “wait for me!”

So I was surprised that he even knew my name, let alone my situation with The Club of bikes. He said that a new bike for me would be an invitation to the front of the pack. Then the others chimed in:

“It’ll change your life!”

“It’ll change your body!”

“YOU will have to pull US up the hills, Mac!”

Before I knew it they were around me in a semi-circle and I blushed at the attention. My man-crush on Larry increased when he picked up a strawberry I had dropped on the ground during the intervention and ate it, stem and all. What a man’s man.

A new road bike is not in the budget as far as I can see, and I’ve learned to use the tools that I have to keep it fun on Sundays. I accept that I have to try harder and work slower than everyone else and make adjustments to narrow the gap and really be part of the club.

I wonder why I’m OK with that while I’m intolerant of anything of the sort in all other areas of life. My computer is slowing down and twice a day I’m ready to chuck it into the canal. Lesson planning at work is still incredibly inefficient and it takes everything I have not to get upset at the silly system.

Could it be that I’m actually HAVING FUN with something? Trying hard and sweating at something without going completely AGGRO about the tiniest setback? Realizing that something isn’t a competition and detaching myself from the results?

I’m saving up for a road bike, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull the trigger when the time comes. The situation is too good now and I fear that a faster, better bike may introduce some of the enjoyable, fun-for-everyone elements listed above.

Or perhaps I can grow up and leave those in my dust as I pull the rest of KCTC up and down the mountain roads of Kochi.

Bhutanese Buffoonery

Published by Bob Sanchez on May 6, 2008 in Fun Facts. 1 Comment

Somebody said that the Bhutanese sultan or king had two hot daughters, and in thinking seriously about the comment, I realized that I knew nothing about Bhutan and wanted to see what it was all about.

Because, y’know, if I’m going to try and marry into Bhutanese royalty, I ought to know a thing or two about the place.

To my trusty online encyclopedia I turned, and while I got no stats on the girls or their powerful daddy, I did run into this gem:

Bhutan’s national sport is archery, and competitions are held regularly in most villages. It differs from Olympic standards not only in technical details such as the placement of the targets and atmosphere. There are two targets placed over 100 meters apart and teams shoot from one end of the field to the other. Each member of the team shoots two arrows per round. Traditional Bhutanese archery is a social event and competitions are organized between villages, towns, and amateur teams. There are usually plenty of food and drink complete with singing and dancing. Wives and supporters of the participating teams cheer. Attempts to distract an opponent include standing around the target and making fun of the shooter’s ability.

Did I read that correctly? Why on earth would you stand 100 yards away from somebody holding a frickin’ bow and arrow and taunt them? I’d do it right in his face, close enough so that I could punch him or pull his pants down before he could get a shot off.

Far more distracting, I would think, would be standing behind him and yelling PINECONESINYOURASS or pouring a pitcher of lemonade over his head as he draws his arm back.

However idiotic, this is something that I would pay to see, so now I want to go to Bhutan, hot princesses or not.