Good news everyone! I am now the proud leaser of a Mitsubishi Toppo! It is not the vehicle I was originally striving for but who cares? It is so nice to be driving to school instead of biking. It was quite cold and windy this morning and I am glad to be through with all of that until spring. I am only leasing it until April because I want it just long enough to be able to drive places when my friends are visiting and then go back to biking in the spring. I know I will want to keep it longer but riding my bike is nice too. Plus, it is the only exercise I get. I got the car down in Nagiso which is at the south end of the Kiso valley where it finally starts to open up again. It was a fairly long trip and we got our tickets wrong so there was a big kafuffle on the train with the ticket guy. Luckily there was a nice Japanese business guy in front of us who explain the whole issue to us. It turned out we had paid too much and they were worried about us getting a proper refund on the amount we paid. That is just another example of why Japan is such a kind place to travel. No one gets more than anyone else but no one gets any less either.
So I got down to the car place in about an hour and 15 minutes and found the place quite easily. This town has a really nice suspension bridge and I took loads of pictures of it. I didn’t get to choose the car, they just presented me with one and told me that was the one I could have. I’m not that picky, the only thing that mattered was that it was automatic. I have never driven on the other side of the road and it took some getting used to. Especially considering that everything is backwards. I frequently turned on the wipers instead of the signal. I also initially confused the gas and brake which are also opposite. I am fine now though and merrily drove to work this morning in my nice heated car. They gave me a “special” parking spot for some reason that is away from all the other cars. (Insert comments about my driving here.)
A strange thing happened at elementary school on Friday. The grade four class’s home room teacher was away at a training session at the board office. They didn’t have to get a supply teacher to replace her because she had left all the work for the whole day on the board and the photocopies at the front of the room in a stack. At the beginning of each new class, the kids just closed their books and started the next thing. They kept the rowdy kids in check and happily worked away. This was insane! I could never imagine an elementary school class capable of behaving themselves for a day and working steadily like that. It was so unheard for me! I told the teachers that that was actually illegal in Canada to leave a class unsupervised. They said it wasn’t necessary and would just give the students the impression that they couldn’t be trusted. This is true if you have this system in place already but just try and have a class independently run six classes in a day with no teacher intervention or encouragement in Canada. Impossible I say!
I had a party at my place on Friday night and it was a ball. There are 5 AETs that have January birthdays so we had a big shindig to celebrate. The neighbours probably hate us now but we kept it down as much as possible. Nothing adverse was fed to the ferrets so I think all is well. Gisela and Declan helped me clean my place the next morning and Gisela even helped me reorganize and ferret proof the kitchen. I love that! I am having a big scrabble tournament with the kids soon so I must go now and finish cutting out all the letters. It should be entertaining to say the least. Please enjoy these bridge and car pictures.