I love the way sunshine breathes life into a city. I just returned from a beautiful evening bike ride around my little city, the perfect way to close out a great weekend at the beach. On my bike ride I saw more kids outside playing than usual, and lots of people were enjoying dinner with their sliding doors open as a way to invite in the cool evening air. This week has been long for me because I’ve been so exhausted ever since I returned from Thailand. But I’m not complaining. Even though I was tired, I was kept busy and had a great week at school team-teaching with a JTE I don’t normally work with, re-familiarizing myself with the many different kinds of sentence structures for ichinensei test prep, making said ichinensei laugh when I acted out present participles in class, playing jeoparTEA with my sannensei students, and collaborating with my awesome supervisor on an on-going writing project for her advanced sannensei class.
This weekend, I promised myself I would catch up on some much needed sleep and blog my days away about my Golden Week adventures…but then sunshine happened, and all of us Amami ALTs hit the beach and ate ice cream (Saturday was a two cones kind of a day).
I decided to ride home by the water tonight, and I passed lots of people running and walking over the bridge. I imagine that everyone is like me and trying to enjoy their last night of clear skies before the rainy season descends upon us. It’s hard to believe that after a day like today, Amami has 100% chance of rain tomorrow…and the next day, and the next day, and the next day…
Come tomorrow, I’ll be watching the rain from my desk that faces the big window in the teacher’s room, and likely blogging my days away because students have tests, and that can only mean one thing for an ALT: Desk Warming!
Call me crazy, but I’m grateful for the impending rainy days ahead, because at least I’ll catch up on my writing. And when the never ending days of endless rain inevitably gets me down…I’ll remind myself of the good times with this little snapshot of my life on the Amami Islands and take solace in the fact that after the rainy season, it’s going to be an Island Paradise.
The Becca Jar 