today in Tinytown, Kansai
The sun woke me up at a quarter to seven. I got on YouTube, went through an instructional viddy a few times over, and in about 20 minutes did up the sari that the C-village women made for me all by my onesie.
Went about my business like that all day. The office ladies accosted me before I could get past the shoe lockers at the front entrance; teachers exclaimed; students braved the threat of personal interaction to come up and admire; and I got my very first CAT-CALL, totally out of the blue, from two young guys in a truck at the bottom of the school grounds hill.
On the way back from work I stopped in at the little corner store whose proprietress loves to prattle at me in local dialect. She hasn't seen me since well before Christmas, so I updated her on the ever-growing list of world-hopping experiences. She said something along the lines of "Oh honey, I only know the world from TV. I get a lot of bits 'n pieces of the TV-world here in Japan. But you go to these places and you walk there, and see and touch, and then you come back to my little shop out here in the sticks and I get to see glimpses of the real world! That's really wonderful."
And after hearing that, despite having had all I can take of shared office space and uncooperative homeroom teachers and the insider-outsider mindset that throws up intangible, impermeable walls long prior to nearly every encounter I have in this town, I'm starting to feel a little better about this last term.
Went about my business like that all day. The office ladies accosted me before I could get past the shoe lockers at the front entrance; teachers exclaimed; students braved the threat of personal interaction to come up and admire; and I got my very first CAT-CALL, totally out of the blue, from two young guys in a truck at the bottom of the school grounds hill.
On the way back from work I stopped in at the little corner store whose proprietress loves to prattle at me in local dialect. She hasn't seen me since well before Christmas, so I updated her on the ever-growing list of world-hopping experiences. She said something along the lines of "Oh honey, I only know the world from TV. I get a lot of bits 'n pieces of the TV-world here in Japan. But you go to these places and you walk there, and see and touch, and then you come back to my little shop out here in the sticks and I get to see glimpses of the real world! That's really wonderful."
And after hearing that, despite having had all I can take of shared office space and uncooperative homeroom teachers and the insider-outsider mindset that throws up intangible, impermeable walls long prior to nearly every encounter I have in this town, I'm starting to feel a little better about this last term.