Okay, the website is fixed. It wasn't anything that was my fault, or the fault of my hosting provider. Some router between us had decided to truncate all packets running through it, so I couldn't even get an entry up here, but its all fixed now, or so it seems. I have added the first few photos to my gallery of the trip to Kobe and Kyoto. But it's only the first few, so there will be more to follow at a later date.

pounding mochi

So, I am back in school now. Yesterday was the opening ceremony. I thought it seemed like an overly long and dour ceremony for the first day of school, in the freezing cold gym. Turns out that one of my students went and died over the winter break. Just suddenly got sick and died. He was a third grader and just getting ready to take high school entrance exams. So that's what they were talking about. I didn't find this out until later though, because no one bothered to tell me. I only found out when I asked another teacher later in the day what she had done over winter break, and she said she was at school a lot taking care of things for him. She could tell by my look of complete incomprehension that I hadn't understood the principal's speech, to which I was in fact not even listening, so she filled me in. She couldn't tell me what exactly he got or anything like that though. I still haven't really processed it though. The worst part is, I don't remember who the kid was. I can't recognize most of them by their names yet, and I don't think I ever will be able to. I suspect I will know him when I see a picture. But because I don't know who he was, I don't feel the lass as much as a general freaked-out feeling. I guess it will pass.

Today at school I made mochi with the special ed class. Mochi is this kind of rice paste that frankly I find quite disgusting, but the Japanese think of it as a sweet. Either way, making it is fun, because you get to pound a big goopy ball of gelatinous rice with a huge wooden hammer. When the japanese people look at the moon, instead of the face that we are supposed to see, they see a rabbit making mochi. This is the traditional way to do it which has been almost completely supplanted by machines, except its more fun to do it by hand. It's even more fun when you do it with the special ed class too, let me tell you. There are eight kids at my school who are outside the normal educational track, and they vary in disability from barely below average to slobbering mess. But they are all really cool and they are all good at English names for animals and colors. And they are good at pounding mochi.