Anticipation

Golden week(a week with many national holidays, making it one of the biggest occasions for travel in Japan) is is over and I`m back to a regular work week. You may be wondering why I haven`t posted about my Golden Week adventures, as it was a significant holiday(a three day weekend followed by two work days and then a four day break). Well, there wasn`t much to document as I enjoyed a somewhat more budgeted and low-key vacation(visiting the crater of a volcano, a district of preserved middle-class samurai houses, and a winery, all in the south of Yamagata prefecture) in anticipation of another vacation(starting this weekend). You see, my sister Emily and her husband David are coming to Japan! We are meeting in Tokyo, and after two days of sightseeing in that area move on to Kyoto, Osaka, and finally up north to my stomping ground. We have been making reservations and itineraries and are all three thoroughly excited. I hope to be able to share photos and maybe an anecdote or two in an upcoming post. And although that`s the news of the week, I wanted to share with you a particularly precious moment with one of my students. As you may know, I taught at Kindergarten last year. Well, some of those kids have now graduated to Elementary school. I was speaking with one of my now 1st graders when the following conversation took place: (in Japanese) Yui: Hey, Sensei--you know, when I first saw you last year, I thought you were a foreigner. Me: What do you mean? Yui: Like, when you first came, I though you came from a foreign country. Funny, huh? Me: I did come from a foreign country. I came from America. The look on her face was priceless. An expression somewhere between "you`re kidding, right?" and disbelief that would have been equally elicited had I confessed I wasn`t human. While I would like to think of her response as an unintended compliment on my developing language ability; in which case I would then take it with a grain of salt(and a short reflection on racial consciousness in children) as Kindergarteners are not necessarily known for their eloquence. But the likelihood of the former leads me to conclude that the ambiguity of our conversation might have given little Yui the impression that I come from America every week. If I were her, my brain would hurt, too.