Japanese contests

Japan has some rather interesting festivals. Take this one that was on the news today - an annual competition in Kyoto where competitors strain to see who can lift heavy mochi (sticky rice cake) for the longest time. For women these are 90 kgs and for men 150 kgs. They showed this on the news.

Other interesting festivals include the baby crying contest where poor little sproglets are handed over to hulking great sumo wrestlers so people can watch them cry. The baby who cries the loudest wins. It's good luck for the babies. Apparently.

I've also seen various food eating contests (noodles, doughnuts, hot dogs, etc), face pulling contests, more food eating contests, etc on the news here before. Maybe we should have more things like this in the UK!

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I am currently waiting on this week to end (roll on final class on Saturday) so I can avoid human contact for a bit. After my stormingly good start to the week (see Mondays entry) things couldn't really go that swimmingly, could they? So, okay, I'm PMS'ing which means any arsewipe becomes a double-arsewipe as far as I'm concerned but today really did it for me.

Another teacher almost had me in tears this afternoon after being an utter cunt to me. Now this particular teacher has been ruffling more than a few feathers previously but my relationship with him, to date, has been to keep out of his way as all he ever seems to do is whinge about everything, complain about everything, look miserable and create an atmosphere. Sure, everyone has moments when they are dissatisfied with things; but he never has anything positive to say. About anything. Last week he made the receptionist walk into my room in the middle of my teaching a class as he wanted to check a page number in a text book. Extremely rude and unnecessary, in my opinion.

Today I asked what unit he was using in a particular student book (because there's only one copy and I have a small room with a small table and the teachers book takes up twice the space of the students book. These books are ring filed so easy to whip out units, which is generally done whenever a book needs to be shared between classes - but didn't actually get any further than asking what unit he would be using) and was so disgusted at his response. Nobody has EVER spoken to me so rudely before for no discernible reason. He's got a fucking screw loose. I was so shocked I almost burst into tears and would have done, if I hadn't left the school at that point. Luckily (for him) there were no students around. He's shouted in front of students before with another teacher.

Update: He did this to another girl a while back, apparently, and they didn't speak for four months afterwards. Nice guy, huh?