Quarantine

So my board of education apparently has a strict policy of no school/work for 5 days when you get the flu. Tomoko, my boss, texted me after a coworker saw me walking my dog to let me know that I needed to stay at home as much as possible. That meant, no walking Zuma. I could go to the store if I needed, but with a mask. Oh, and the kicker: my leaves would be treated as Special Leaves.

I've been officially quarantined. I have had exactly one visitor since this happened, who was a friend that already caught the flu, so had no qualms about visiting. Beyond that, I have been stuck at home for a whole week. Thankfully, the weather has been nice, and I've been reading in the sun for a little bit almost everyday. Other than that, I keep myself occupied via computer and food. And laundry. Oh, and cutting my hair.

For some time now, I've been cutting my own hair. I think I've visited the barber once in the last 4 years. I mean, I watched how the barber cut my hair to layer it, and it looked easy, so I started doing it myself. What's nice is that my hair is curly, so if it's not cut perfectly straight, you can't see it anyway. Also, this gives me yet another option when I want to style my hair differently. A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to try bangs. So I did. You can see them in this picture:

This is a hippo lantern, one of many spectacular lanterns at the Nagasaki Lantern Festival.

Well, this week since I had lots of time and more energy than a sick person should have, I decided to cut my hair. On Tuesday I trimmed it since the ends were a little dry. I decided to wait until summer to cut it short. Thursday I decided I wanted it shorter, since the weather was so nice. So I cut off about an inch. Then Friday, today, I decided I didn't much like the shorter look, and that what I really wanted was a short look. And this is what I ended up with:

Now, I myself have never cut my hair this short before, so I'm pleasantly surprised at how well it turned out. Woohoo! So now I have short hair, that I cut and that I like. I also realize that I cut my hair three times this week, and that's rather odd. But hey, being at home for 5 days can do things like this to a person.

So that's how exciting my life has been these past few days. Not much to report, other than that I feel ok. Unfortunately, I'm still sporting a runny nose and my throat needs some clearing, but beyond that I'm basically healthy. I can say one good thing about this episode: I've done a lot of catching up on my Japanese study. I have workbooks with monthly tests I have to mail in by a certain deadline, and I almost missed the last one. But I think I'll be back on track after this. When I make it back to the real world, I'll be trying to say things like "you don't need to drink that", "after swimming, I usually read a book", and "let's run while we eat" in Japanese, all of which are new grammar structures I've learned this week.

Oh, and I also made tiny origami dragons. I made 4 of these in all:

The Flu

No beating around the bush with this one. I've got the flu, and I'm definitely not proud of it. I shouldn't be surprised. For the last 2 months, I've been watching students, friends, colleagues, and some parents come down with this insidious winter virus. I even went to karaoke with someone who had the flu, and only found out afterward when my friend caught it from him. For two months, it felt like a battlefield, and I was somehow immune to the flying bullets.

How naive of me. Me! a person who manages to catch a cold twice a year, regardless of precautions taken. Me! a person who gets sick with something every time she travels. Me! a person of questionable health despite checking "no" in every health question box on the medical form.

I think this is what my body does:
"Hey, wait. Does that include coughing and a runny nose? Yea? How about a fever? Yes!? Sign me up!"

Oh corpus idioticus. Little did you realize how truly evil this one would be. It started Wednesday afternoon. My throat hurt, as though there were a single scratch at the back of my throat. That was it. The board of education was coming to observe the lessons that day, so I reserved my voice for that class and hoped it would get better the next day.

The next day. Nope, not going to school. I woke up with a fever, cough, runny nose, and a primeval desire to SLEEP. So it was a sick day. Fitful sleeping, 3 hours of waking existence, followed by more sleeping, and feeble attempts to communicate to my boss to make a doctor's appointment. The doctor's thing never happened.

Friday. Wow. I'm awake at 8. I feel like eating. I feel like doing things. My tissue supply is disappearing pretty fast, but I actually have energy. This is usually the sign of a recovering victim. In my experience, the following day is usually a pretty good one, even a healthy one.


NOT SO! The scourge that was the As-Yet-Unidentified Flu decided to mess with me. It was Saturday, and I had plans, man! I was going to host somebody traveling through the area, then go snowboarding the next day (likely just take pictures after being sick for two days, but still). But no, AYUF decided to hit me with a fever again. Once again, I had no energy, little desire to eat, my ear hurt (?!), and I had to call the girl I was hosting to warn her against coming. Fortunately, she had a friend who could help her out. So it seemed I could safely haunt the house alone in my unhappy condition.

Then comes Sunday, and I'm feeling a little better once again. I do my laundry, cook food, make a run to the grocery store. Things seem like they'll turn out fine. Until I go to bed. At exactly 10 o'clock, I lie down, and within a minute, I'm running a high fever. I can feel it. Good grief. I decide I'll go to the doctor first thing in the morning. At 11:30, I can't sleep, and I'm shivering and I can't stop for 10 minutes. This has never happened to me before, and I'm seriously worried, so I call my boss to please take me to the hospital. I take tylenol to stop the shivering, which it does after 15 more minutes of it. At the hospital, they don't say much. It doesn't look like a disease. Ok - so not pneumonia, I guess. They say I should see a doctor during the day for more specific results. Thanks. After 2.5 hours they send me home with medicine for fever. Poor Tomoko, sitting through that. But I'm glad she was there. I was a bit scared.

Were my worries unwarranted? You tell me. I have a sickness that comes and goes almost at whim and I have a 25 minute shivering fit, not to mention different symptoms every time the fever comes back. It didn't look like anything until I looked at all of it. So Monday I went to the doctor, and Tomoko called them in advance to tell them the history of my illness. Then I explained my new symptoms (my ribs hurt and my upper jaw, which I can only describe as a headache), and wait for them to do their thing. Flu test. It's the flu. Stay home for 5 days, take this medicine. Do your best to get better.

Arg! I should have done this on Thursday. I'd have been better by now. But on Friday I seemed to be recovering so well... Ah well, what's done is done. I take my form to the pharmacy next door and receive 7 DIFFERENT PILLS?!?! You guys are crazy. The pharmacist asks if Japanese is ok. (Right, because if I asked for Spanish, that would totally be an option). I say yes, but slowly please. OK. He explains that the first one is the flu medicine. Take it twice a day, after breakfast and dinner. Got it. OK. The next one is for your nose, the next for your cough, the next for your head pain, the next for your chest pain, and the one after is for your stomach (to make sure the previous four don't explode inside me?), and the last one is the same as the one the hospital gave you for your fever. Oh my. That's a lot. Yes, yes it is, said the pharmacist. Total cost? About $19. (Yay Japanese health care... or maybe they were having a sale... Is this what pharmacies do when they need to make shelf space?!)

So here I am at home, taking more sick days, continuing to rest, continuing to eat lots of Vitamin C. It won't be long before boredom ensues. Do you think boredom is good or bad for recovering from the flu? Well, I will say that I've been a lot more diligent lately about doing my Japanese coursebook work. So I guess there's one upside. But I'm still bummed about snowboarding!

Pics

These are from back in December. It's looking like photos loaded from my phone load onto this blog more easily than photos from my camera. 

The teachers at Yamanishi Elementary did a gift exchange/lottery. I brought some homemade cookies for a gift, and the teacher returned my container filled with candy! A taste of Japanese sweets.

My kids conversation class. They're making origami for Christmas. The girls all wanted to make reindeer and the boys wanted to make stars. The class often splits like th is. 

A close-up of the reindeer and one of the stars. They turned out quite well. My attempt to teach the reindeer to a larger class ended in disaster. It was a little bit too difficult for them. It helps to have 5 students rather than 25. 

The 6-Month Mark

It's a little scary - I've already been in Japan for six months. Yet, somehow I've only been in Japan for 6 months. When February 1st came around, I began to ask myself a lot of questions:

Has it really been six months?

When did using chopsticks become as natural as using a fork? (In some instances, more so!)

Why does everything seem so normal? Wasn't I freaking out about basically everything a few short months ago?

and finally,

What will I do next year? If I stay another year, what will I do after JET?

Well, folks, it's now official. I'm staying for one more year. I submitted my request and received approval last week. I sort of new for a while that I wanted to stay another year, but it was still a strange feeling signing the form. I mean, Japan may be awesome now, but in another 6 months, what if it sucks? I'll be stuck here a whole year longer!

Actually, that's not a particularly big fear of mine. I do wonder sometimes if and when I will run out of ideas for teaching, or if I'll overstep my boundaries. Will this get easier the second time around? Will I actually learn from my mistakes? Am I going to get too comfortable and fail to take advantage of the opportunity to explore this country and learn more about this culture? I think that's my biggest fear - taking it for granted that I'm here, in Japan! Life has taken on such a routine - walk the dog, go to school, make dinner, go to kendo, go out occasionally to eat dinner and sing karaoke. This makes for rather a pleasant living experience, but it has diverged somewhat from my original hopes of exploring this entire country and region.

In sharp contrast to my last entry, this week has been a little off. I've felt tired almost all week, particularly today (I stayed up late doing origami, but the rest of the week I've been getting sleep). When I got to the BoE office in the afternoon after teaching, I found out that Zuma somehow managed to escape. I'm 98% positive that I locked him inside the house this morning. So unless he was very stealthy and slipped past my feet or there's a hole in the house, I don't understand how he could have gotten out. The board members were extremely nice in that they chased him down and used the spare key to my house to lock him inside again. But I was scolded because I haven't registered him yet, or taken him to the vet. And here I became a bit upset, enough that I had to stop talking in order to hold myself together. I was too tired and too upset to explain that calling a vet, finding a vet, talking to a vet, and understanding a vet (or the people who register pets) are all dauntingly impossible tasks for someone who knows so little Japanese. And everyone around me always seems too busy to help me. So this scary task just went undone, because it was easier not to think about it. But now Zuma's gone rogue so I had better figure this out.

And in other news, my Thursday evening English conversation class has moved to a new building where the room adjoins to a kitchen! This obviously means we should do cooking lessons, but to be honest, I barely have a clue where to start or how to run a successful cooking series. Current plan: bring in a recipe for reading practice, go over some key words (bake, fry, cook, cut, peel, pour, heat, ingredients, liquid, etc) and suggest each person find their own recipe to teach. Then we'll have cooking lessons, wherein the person teaching is not allowed to touch the ingredients or speak Japanese, but must instruct everyone else in English. That will be a challenge. We're going to need a good bit of speaking practice before we can carry that out successfully. Hm.

My Japanese study is falling a bit behind as well, although I have made a Japanese friend who has decided that we should text each other only in the other's language. This is considerably more fun than reading the course books, and actually gives me a chance to practice the coursebook material and my kanji recognition. The phone predicts what I'm trying to say and auto-selects which kanji I might want to use. It does NOT predict English words, though, so texting in English is a slow process. Karaoke is also proving to be great reading and kanji practice. I can pick out the simpler words on the screen fairly easily now, and I'm even working on learning a couple of Japanese songs! Now if only my voice would come back...I've been abusing it by singing so much and making weird voices at school. But I'm an English teacher - speaking is my job. I might as well make it interesting.