Birthday!

Spring comes to Nagoya

I had the weirdest last day of being 23, let me tell you. It's counselling week at my school again, which means no regular classes, which means that the schedule gave the day a bit of a surreal quality already. I noticed one of my coworkers' new tie right off the bat, but didn't cotton on to my other coworker's haircut until late that evening. One of my students came and gave me gifts, though!

Birthday card, birthday cake, birthday moisturizing face mist!

That's non-wheat flower, by the way. Hah hah I kill myself. Anyway, I got all the way to the subway (a whole 2-minute's weary walk) tonight before realizing that I did not, in fact, carry my purse out of the teachers' room. Panicked, I ran back up the escalator, weaselled my way into the building, waited impatiently in the elevator and burst out of it to find my manager holding my purse - my coworker, whom I was with, had called ahead to make sure my manager knew, because usually the building is locked on the exterior, but I'd met with someone coming out at the same time I was going in. I gave my manager a fright, then tried to calm down the entire subway ride back.

By the penultimate stop I had stopped feeling kinda sick from running and was more comfortable and relaxed, when a guy wearing a dapper business suit and sporting slicked-back hair sits next to me and asks me if I understand Japanese. "Iie," says I, and then he asks me, in bad English, where I'm from. "Canada," says I, and he smiles (people love Canada here), and then asks me - in worse, more broken English - what I do for a living. "Thanks," says I, "but I don't talk to strangers." I ignored him for the next three minutes by pointedly looking in another direction, then got off at my stop.

Now, normally, I am totally cool with random strangers striking up a conversation in English with me on the subway; it's awesome that they're so outgoing and ready to practice English, and I usually have fun conversations with them. So what I told him was in fact a big fat lie. However, previous to sitting next to me, I had stared at this guy as he sat down next to the fashionable girl on the bench across from me and tried to make conversation. She just flat-out ignored him (her bag had a coat of arms on it with "SN OO TY" emblazoned across the top in three small shields, so perhaps he should have been warned). After two minutes of silence, the dude got up, then sat next to ANOTHER fashionable girl on the bench kitty-corner to me. (Snooty and I exchanged "wtf" looks at this, though she then promptly went back to texting.) Kitty-Corner actually answered once, caught off-guard, then ignored him again. That's when he decided to come talk to me.

That is like, the first instance of subway-creeper I have thus far experienced in Japan. Sure, I've seen weird people on the subway, but generally they don't go trying to get weird all over everyone else and keep it to their own personal space bubble. Seriously, I have no idea what he was trying to do - he looked dressed as a salesman, but selling crap by harassing people on the subway is no way to do business, although I actually wouldn't put it past a company in Japan to think this is a brilliant idea. Oh well, I'm not particularly bothered that I didn't find out.

It was raining when I got out of the station - it smells lovely out there. Tomorrow's my birthday - I got a box of yummy puddings, an onigiri cellphone strap, and a cellphone strap with a little gew-gaw that you attach to your phone camera and it splits the picture all funky for max silly picture-taking goodness. I also got some bath stuff and my very own, full-size chopsticks-in-a-case. I feel like a proper grownup!