Okay, I've had a nice little run of bad luck since yesterday afternoon, so I need some good luck soon. Yesterday morning was the opening ceremony for the fall semester. The students were all back from vacation finally. I was told to prepare a short introduction in Japanese for the students. I got to school extra early to make sure I was prepared, since I was a little nervous. I was wearing my nice suit in the 38 degree celsius weather. What fun! The assembly happened in the gym, which is also not air conditioned. Another JET told me that a girl passed out during her assembly from the heat.

I was told to wait in the teacher's room but everyone else went to the gym. It was all the same to me, but it felt a little weird to be all by myself. Maybe they wanted to spare me from the Japanese speeches and the stuffy gym atmosphere. Finally at 9:15 someone came to get me and brought me to the gym. All the teachers were sitting on one side of the gym, with the students sitting on the floor in the middle. In front of everyone was a small stage with a podium. The head kyoto-sensei (vice-principal) led me to the opposite side of the gym from all the teachers. So basically I was on the other side of the stage, with some students between myself and the teachers. Then he left me sitting there in a chair by myself. Soon the kocho-sensei (principal) got up to introduce me, and apparently I was supposed to go up with him, but no one signaled me or anything. I was pretty determined to stay fixed to the chair unless someone told me to move. So finally someone motioned that I should go up on stage.

The speech went fine. I didn't feel very nervous about talking in front of everyone, even though there were 1200 students. I even gave a short version of the speech in Spanish and the whole thing again in English. The kids were paralyzed with fear. I asked them how they were doing and they just gave me blank stares, even when I repeated it. My supervisor told me they are told not to say anything during speeches normally. Oh well.

Shortly after the speech, the assembly ended and I went back to the office. Right around 3:20 my supervisor comes into my office and tells me he wants me to teach lessons the next day. I was pretty floored since I asked him all last week if I would be teaching lessons and when. He responded that he was not sure and would let me know later. He told me yesterday to ask the second year teachers when they wanted me to teach this week. It turned out they are just doing tests this week. So I went back to my supervisor and he said that I should teach third year students this week instead. I only do self-introduction type activities for the first lesson for each class, so that is not a big deal, but I did not have enough of it ready.

So I'm stressing out about teaching a class tomorrow and I go home to make dinner. I open the refrigerator and it is really hot inside. The freezer is completely melted too. All the food I bought was spoiled and had to be thrown away. It was really frustrating. So I thought about the lesson for the next day and cooked dinner at Victoria's place instead. At least that way the leftover food from cooking could be saved. Plus it is nice to have someone to commisserate with.

This morning at work it took me a while, but I got someone to call the city hall about the fridge. The refrigerator is a loaner from city hall, so they are expected to fix it for me. However, their response was less than ideal. They are having someone come out and look at it tomorrow evening. However this person is not going to fix my refrigerator, just get an estimate. Then sometime later the city hall will fix or replace the fridge. Maybe if I am lucky I will have a new one by Friday. When this happened to me in the US in June, it was fixed the next day. How I miss that type of easy service.

I had about two hours this morning to get together some pictures and a little quiz for the students about my self-introduction. Then it was showtime, but the students were late getting to the classroom because they were outside. So the class did not last the 45 minutes it was supposed to. It was closer to 35 minutes instead. Things seemed to go pretty well though. I think it was a little boring for the students. I was surprised that many students did not understand what was going on at all. Their English can be pretty bad sometimes. There was not enough time to finish the quiz, so I do not know if it was too hard or if it was just the short class.

Tomorrow I am supposed to teach the same lesson to 2 different classes, so maybe I can improve it some.