Watashi no Migi no Mimi Desu!

Can you say "doctor" in Japanese? No? Neither can I, but that didn't stop me from going today!

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I came down with yet another cold, which explains but doesn't justify the lack of phone calls. Sorry! Happy Thanksgiving! Anyway, yesterday I finally realized that I have an ear infection. Although it feels almost better today, I decided I should go to a clinic for antibiotics like I normally do at home, just to nip it in the bud. Enami Sensei was so cool; she called her favorite clinic and told them I was coming and explained my condition, in order to make the language barrier a little less of a problem. There are English speaking doctors my friends recommended, but where's the fun in that?

Now I was just happy I found the place. Looking at a rough map and for a particular sign when you can't read is always an adventure. But the fun doesn't stop there! I walked in and handed the secretary my photo ID and my medical insurance card. Fortunately I do understand "denwa bango" (telephone number!), but "zero kyuu zero san roku ni san ichi ichi go hachi" is a bit of a mouthful when you realize you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into; so, unable to speak, I wrote it down for her. And then it was another jumble of mixed signals until I finally figured out that she was just asking me to take a seat and wait for my name to be called.

So I waited for about ten minutes, and then a lady came out with several files in hand and called out a few names, one of which was mine. We fortunate few, you guessed it, moved into another waiting room (which I had been staring into from the first one). In the second room, there were still some other people waiting, and we sat on a bench along one wall and faced a curtain that divided the room in half lengthwise. On the other side of the curtain were four dentist-type chairs and several nurses flittering back and forth between patients. One wonders why there was even a curtain in the first place, since the patients had no privacy from each other, let alone those waiting to be helped. But, you know, whatever.

So I waited for another twenty minutes, which isn't bad at all. I've heard nightmare stories about waiting all day for help since you have to bribe secretaries for appointments (not my words). I took a seat and waited a few more minutes for the ancient Dr. Fujimori to make his way over to me, and I sat in horror as I watched the other patients get their nasal cavities pillaged with obscenely long instruments.

Then Dr. Fujimori looked in my ears and apparently recommended a hearing test, so I followed the nurse to another room. I didn't understand one word she said to me the entire ten minutes we spent alone (a phenomenon I've become surprisingly comfortable with), but apparently I passed the test! I haven't done a hearing test since the fourth grade at Mt. Carmel, so I don't know what the kids do these days, but the one I took was way cool! They try to distract you by playing distracting noises in one ear while they test the other. And then the nurse took me upstairs and left me with another nurse who sat me in front of a tympanograph. It was like a tire gauge for my ears, and it even printed out a little graph of their respective pressures (all systems go)!

So I went back to the inner waiting room and waited to be seated again. And then Dr. Fujimori poked at my brain with the same nefarious apparata I had seen weilded on so many defenseless others. It sucked, and now I am more acutely aware of my ear ache, but at least I have meds! I also got to breathe through a nebulizer that reminded me of Harold & Maude's Odorifics, but it wasn't quite the olfactory banquet I had hoped for.

Still, it was a rather exciting day, and worth the two hours of paid time off I took to skip work after lunch!

PS: The title of this blog is "It's My Right Ear!" I can't be clever in Japanese yet, sorry.

Newsflash!

Hey! Did you guys know that just because the sun is shining, that doesn't mean it warms up in the afternoon? And did you know that when you're riding your bike, pedalling faster doesn't warm up your muscles? It just makes the wind feel colder! Winter, man, I just don't know how the two of us are going to get along (and apparently it's been unseasonably warm)...

So it's been a solid month since I last posted, and of course I have about eight thousand stories to share. But I figure I should take this in bite-size pieces because spending hours in front of the computer can be a little mind-numbing. Lets see if smaller quantities yield more posts!

I went to three more Autumn festivals on October 14th (Oshio in the evening), 15th (Nada in the morning) and 21st (Aboshi in the evening). The first two wore me out on festivals because after awhile they all started to feel exactly the same.



That's me with Kevin and Mac at the Nada festival. I love it because we all look so epically dorky. We had the sweetest seats and we got free snacks and alcohol, though; it pays to be a city employee! But this festival was a lot like the Shinzaike festival a week before, with lots of guys carrying shrines above their heads, so it was hard to get excited.

However, the Aboshi festival the following weekend was really cool. All these guys get snockered and smash paper lanterns together. By the end of the night there's paper and wood scraps everywhere, and all the guys are bruised and scraped up from their moshpitting. I just realized I don't have any pictures...only videos (still trying to figure out how to upload them)!

Festival season is over. Whoo! But my friend Cecy is right...it's good that we went to all of them because there are no more until April, and by then we'll be glad they're back. Plus, I realized that I ended up seeing all the local festivals recommended in the Lonely Planet Japan guide without even trying!

On October 28th, we put on a Halloween party for kids in our neighborhood. Due to a scheduling conflict, only about forty kids came (versus over a hundred last year), but it worked out great! We shuffled them around in groups of ten, and they did pumpkin origami, a few different games, and bag decorating for trick-or-treating. We also showed them how to carve a pumpkin! The kids had a blast, but we had even more fun when they left!

I dressed up as a Koryo Junior High School PE student! I told Enami Sensei I didn't have any ideas for a costume, and she told one of the third graders (eighth grade in The States) to bring me her PE uniform...white knee-high socks and all! It was too perfect.


Just add pigtails!


Julian, the Pumpkin Master.


Allison the zombie pirate trying to eat my brains!

But the best part was when a few of us moved the party from Shirasagi Residence to our favorite local pub, Hosannah. I saw one of my teachers there, and he was totally freaked out! At first he thought I was one of his students!


Ahhh, Katsura Sensei, always a good sport.

So, this blog wasn't all that short, but it wasn't near complete, either. Look forward to stories of food that still moves on your plate!

Over and out.