Super-san and my fairy godmother

I could quite possibly write an entire blog just about Super-san (a.k.a. Mr. Ikeda, my official Board of Education supervisor), but I just don't think it would do him justice. Remember the scary, mean, unhelpful, non-English speaking supervisor that my imagination was absolutely certain would be waiting on the other side of the baggage claim doors? Mr. Ikeda is about as far from that as possible, except for the amusing circumnavigation he has to do to get a point across in English.

After I got over the terror of the first 30 seconds of meeting my new boss, I realized, this man is ridiculous. A little under 6'0” and fragile looking, he bobs around, making a dive for this or that bit of paperwork, swaying a bit before dashing off to get something, and twirling my pen so fast it flew out of his fingers. He has the attention span of a 5 year old, but luckily he over compensates with patience, as demonstrated by the fact that he is in charge of getting every Kanazawa ALT a cell phone, a process that is 1.5 hours/gaijin. Yikes! As we were attempting to navigate that particular obstacle course, I struck out twice trying to set up autmatic payments, even the Japanese bank book didn't work. When we finally managed to get my debit card (yay Paynesville Credit Union!) set up with the phone account he started to hum the basketball warm up theme playing on the loudspeakers (Seriously, Japanese background music is out of this world. I was buying cabbage the other day to gangsta rap.) and put both hands up for a high ten. Fabulous.

Also fabulous is Murakami-sensei, my supervising teacher whose desk is next to mine. I thought that she was about 4'11"... then I realized that she wears 2" heels every day, which makes it even more adorable when she can't remember a word in English and just repeats it emphatically in Japanese. She stands there looking up at me as if she is saying "Voila!", firmly believing that one of these days she will magically endow me with the ability to speak Japanese, right there in the grocery store between the "noodle sauce" and dried fish shavings. I wouldn't put it past her. If only you could have seen the wonder in her eyes when, after dragging me through every aisle of the supermarket identifying such things as dried red pepper, sesame oil, and dashi stock trying to understand what I meant by "vinegar", we finally arrived at something suspiciously familiar. I pointed. "Vinegar?", I asked. "...inhale..." She spread her arms wide to capture the moment, "VINEGAR!"

I felt like I had just won the Tour de France.

This photo only catches a tenth of her adorableness, but you can see why she is basically my go to for, well, everything. After taking me grocery shopping my first afternoon and witnessing the poverty of a recently arrived JET (noodles, unidentified sauce later identified by Murakami-sensei as "noodle sauce", instant coffee, and orange juice to ward off scurvy) she worked her fairy godmother magic and showed up the next morning with tomatoes from her grandmother's garden and a frying pan. Halleluiah. Since then, she has showed up at work with more tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, potatoes, and onions, all from the garden. I owe her a SERIOUS thank you note.