Tuesday - Last day of October!

Woke up at 7:00am to another beautiful sunny day – finally the good autumn weather is here. This whole week and next week is forecasted to have perfect weather! Had rice for breakfast and drove to school. Super free day today with only 1 class in period 3. Spent the spare time making my new autumn-themed English board, and checking over lesson plans. Also had a great time talking with the tea-lady about a lot of things, and also with the VP about skiing/snowboarding, which was really nice. Guess the plus about having no classes all day is getting to talk with the staff in the staffroom. The tea-lady also showed me pictures of her house (it’s really big! Guess living in rural Gunma beats big cities like Tokyo when it comes to owning a big house), and some photos of her travels. She said she really likes to travel too and said we should definitely travel together somewhere sometime! She also gave me a bag of cornflakes, because apparently no one was eating them even though she’d left it available in the staffroom. So yay for free cornflakes! I love the tea-lady, she’s just so nice. Had my one class with 2-1 today, and it went fairly smooth but they were maybe a little bit noisier than the usual today. A few girls found the Halloween video scary, so I had to play the tamer one. But then the other kids were clamoring for the “scarier” one, so the girls braved up and were like “You can play the scary video now” which I found adorable. Like the other classes, they loved the Halloween Bingo, mainly cause they were all gearing to collect all the stickers. There was a little scuffle after the class ended, when one of the boys bumped into another one and knocked him down, but the homeroom teachers dealt with that quickly.

Had lunch with 3-3 again and another really fun lunchtime. The homeroom teacher has me rotating between the desk groups/columns each lunchtime, and today’s column was really affectionate and talked to me a lot. They told me about their siblings, their favourite sports (they were practicing “What’s your favourite sport” with me in English – so cute!!) what they like watching on Youtube, and a lot of other random stuff. Spent lunchtime outside playing tag with a whole bunch of 3rd graders. It was a lot of fun! And felt great to be outside running around in the sunshine – I kept forgetting who was in the game though, so I had to ask every kid that ran across if they were in the game or not! Also got stopped by a lot of 1st graders who had to show me the acorns and leaves they’d collected. They were so adorable, saying how autumn is the best season because of all the fallen leaves around that they can pick up. Cleaning time was a bit rough today, so I was stricter and only gave out stickers to the 2 kids who were actually cleaning properly. To the other 4 I didn't reward any, and had them promise to clean properly the day after tomorrow (since we’d both be away tomorrow – them on a school trip, and me out on an office day at another school). Spent the rest of the afternoon drawing and laminating the tree trunk for my autumn-themed English board, and cutting out the leaves for the students to colour in and decorate. Another interesting thing about today was this notice they gave to everyone in the office – it was announcing that on November 29th, the school lunch would start having beef as a menu item on it again! Turns out that in recent years (past 5 years?) there was a disease among cows in England, America, and some other countries (but not Japan) so the schools were being extra safe by not serving any beef in the school lunch, but they’re finally bringing it back, and even made a notice for it. So Japan.

Got off work at 16:10 and went to the bank to update my bank book and get some cash out, and then went to fuel up and also got them to check the air pressure of my tires, since I’ll be driving to a lot of autumn leaf spots (mountains) this weekend and want my car to be in tip top condition! So after I finished fueling up, the place that I go to usually has a slot thingy at the end when you pay, and I think I’ve actually won something before but it comes out as little slip with your receipt, and in the past I’ve always been in a hurry, so I never bothered to check it. Well today I actually did, and it turns out I got a free maintenance/engine check! That was cool! Waited inside reading some novels that I had downloaded the PDF of before, since the check took around 20 minutes. After that I popped by the convenience store to get some milk, so that I can actually eat the free cornflakes that tea-lady gave me! Had vege and pork nabe tonight for dinner.