Monday, November 13, 2006

忘れ物 Multifarious Friday night

An atypical Friday night.

Getting home Friday, I discovered that Adoni, neighbor and fellow teacher from New York, was overly eager to “go for a drive” with me. I quickly discovered however, that she had forgotten to bring home the power cord from her laptop, and needed me to take her to her school and pick it up. Feeling especially generous, and not having any concrete plans that evening, I decided to help her out. She thanked me by taking me out to dinner.

The drive took about 40 minutes, so we had plenty of time to chat. She told me she loved most of the teachers and students, except for one English teacher she worked with. This man has apparently given her no end of grief. Upset about the Iraq war, and Adoni’s involvement (being an American), he apparently yelled at Adoni one day until she was nearly in tears. The Board of Education visited the school on Adoni’s behalf, and berated the man quite severely for several hours. She tells me things have improved since then, but he still has a screw loose and does nutty things every other day. We arrived at her school and I met some of the teachers she works with, but not this guy. It might have been an interesting conversation.

After dinner with Adoni, I met up with a friend at the local watering hole. While we were there, I ran into some other friends I haven’t seen since March and had a pretty good evening. We later went to karaoke. I met another woman in this crowd that I had apparently met over a year ago. Her name was Natsu, and she said she met me on a camping trip during my first year. I remembered the trip, but I couldn’t recall meeting her at all. She said it was probably because she had put on some weight. She was probably right.

However, she had an interesting job as tour guide in foreign countries. She typically went to China, leading groups through Beijing and Shanghai. But she traveled all over the world for her job, including Rome, London, Paris, San Francisco, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and numerous other destinations popular with Japanese tourists.

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