Fucking French.

Hmmmm....what's been going on since break?

We got another exchange student in granny's house. He's French, and goes to school in Canada. His good qualities? He brought real Canadian maple syrup with him, and he speaks pretty good English. His bad qualities? Well...he kind of invited me to come to his room topless one time, so that was weird. He also likes to talk about how every country in Europe is inferior to France. I mostly avoid him for fear of being head-butted or raped. But the maple syrup is tasty.

I also visited a couple of special needs schools this week with the JET guy (Michael) who works in my office. I should probably talk about him for a little bit, since we've become fairly good friends, he's never asked me to come to his room topless, and he's a fairly interesting character all around. He's half Chinese half Panamanian(?), grew up in Wisconsin, and he's been in Japan for three years now, and it's sort of taken its toll on his sanity. He has an unhealthy obsession with pandas, randomly breaks into song, chews gum at a rate of maybe a one or two hours per pack, and is very proud of the fact that he once cut a table into tiny pieces and threw it away over a month's time in burnable garbage. Michael mostly seems frustrated with the Japanese education system and a lot of the really fake and pointless crap that it involves, and how hard it is to accomplish anything significant. So we mostly just sit at opposite ends of the office, I'll talk about what retarded thing the Japanese want me to do (today it's more origami), he'll talk about how meaningless life is, then we'll both add another piece of gum to the four we're already chewing and overall we're pretty happy with things.

Anyway, the special needs schools. Visiting them has been maybe the coolest thing I've done in Japan so far (at least as far as work related stuff goes). Earlier in the summer I visited the best high school in Kanazawa, and the teachers had to practically beat responses out of the kids. But the deaf kids, the kids in wheelchairs, the kids with leg braces, they're the sweetest kids in the world, and they're making an effort, and they're doing what they can. It was simultaneously ironic, moving, and sad.

Gotta get back to the origami. Back to Nagoya this weekend. w00t.