above: those two little girls totally would have been me and Maggie back when we were kids. Oh, who I am kidding: that's still me.
Please excuse the video quality, I know it's not great. Apparently, much better video WAS taken that night by a news crew: the week after our vacation, one of my students excitedly burst into class convinced that she'd seen me dancing away on a television travel program about Gujo Hachiman. Though no one else has confirmed it, I do remember seeing the film crew and Kimiko, my student, was able to tell me what shirt I was wearing and how I had my hair, so I have a sinking suspicion that the flailing
gaijin she'd seen was, in fact, me. Once the flames of horrified middle-school-esque mortification abided somewhat, I did start to think that it was kind of cool that I have quite possibly been on TV in China*, Vietnam** and Japan now. I know, compared the to the rest of my family, that's nothing, but, still, three times isn't that bad for the camera-shyest of all the Tokuda-Halls :-) And that pretty much wraps it up for our vacation, which was too short and lots of fun. Now I can go back to writing about our day to day lives, which means, these days, about how insanely painfully horribly inside-of-a-supernova hot it has been for the last month. On bad days, it gets to be about 96 degrees Fahrenheight in our kitchen, which makes doing anything - blogging, writing e-mails, studying Japanese, cooking, wearing clothes - feel like an unthinkable ordeal. Fortunately, on Wednesday night, the skies opened up and we got to feel our first typhoon. Iain and I jumped our on bikes and rode down through the pouring rain to the river - past cars uneasily navigating the suddenly flooded streets and the frank stares of the few remaining pedestrians wrapped in full-body raingear. It was *amazing*.
* when I was interviewed at the beginning of our summer camp back in Hai Ning in July 2009. I burbled a lot about teaching children how to express themselves, unaware that I would spend the next four weeks holding up flashcards of farm animals and then allowing the kid who responded fastest to fling a beach ball at the bullseye drawn on the board. They loved that game.
** when Noa, a soon-to-be-coworker, and I were interviewed at the American Club's Big Day Out back in May 2008. This video may not have aired, thanks to the fact that neither Noa or I had any idea what Big Day Out was and were thus unable to provide any sort of meaningful insight - I'm pretty sure my interview was just me going, "You mean it's like, a thing? In Australia? Not just an excuse for expats to drink cheap beer in front of a giant kangaroo poster?" Incidentally, this was the same day I later met Iain! Fortunately for me, I managed to be a bit more articulate then.
