So finally, I called the school and made an appointment with them about 2 weeks ago. No one really speaks any English there, and so I had to just get the basic message across that I was coming to see the school. I mapped and tried to google the school's location. Everything was written in Kanji (Chinese-Japanese), it was useless. I emailed Michelle to give me directions. By the way, GPS really doesn't work here if you don't know Japanese. Our 1998 car with GPS is in Japanese, and there are really no street names, just land marks. This is very typical in Korea too. So Michelle sent me the direction, and it didn't look complicated, so what seem would take only 20 minutes, took me a shy of 3 hours to get there. I had decided in my mind to leave 2 hours earlier just in case something happened. I threw the kids in the back with a movie, and off we went. Well, I don't even have the energy to write everything down that went wrong on this blog. If I did, you would laugh so hard, rolling on the floor as my friend Alex did when I told her the full story on the phone. I didn't quite think of couple things before I left:
1. Although I had a brand new fancy iPhone 4, I didn't know how to call anyone with it, that is in Japan, and every call per min. was 40 yen per min (that is around 40-50 cents per minute) The plans here are outrageous. There is no such thing as an unlimited plan, or a flat rate plan.
2. I didn't have ANY BASIC words down: NONE! I knew couple words: "Excuse me, Good Afternoon, and I don't understand." I couldn't even ask a question. I didn't even know how to say, "where is....., or even the word, "SCHOOL" ...Nothing.
3. I can't read Kanji, but no matter, English is often on the road, but I no IDEA where I was going or what town I needed to be heading away or towards.
You can imagine what kind of things happened along the way: Many, I mean many tried to help, but without even basic skills of either one language, it's useless. Drawings didn't matter because they had no idea what I was even asking. I was trying to say the town, "Maehara" the way it sounds-"May-Hara" well, that confused everybody, and had no idea what I was even referring to. I couldn't even find it on the map because it was written in Kanji. I had nothing to point to. The way you pronounce Maehara is "Myhara".
I wouldn't have known that since I cannot read Kanji. In any case, after running into a group of college students, attempting to explain where the school was, , their English teacher, who we just happened to run into, came to the rescue!(well sort of), he was carrying a bag of fish and MSG. The students told me, "oh, here, wait! our English teacher!" So they told him to run over to explain to this foreigner how to get to Maehara. Well, then I spewed out my English rather with relief, assuming he knew exactly what I was talking about as the other students observed if their English teacher is indeed a true teacher..to my disappointment, couldn't understand most of what I was saying. After playing around with the phone for a long time, I called the school and gave the phone to the English teacher, and explained to me in very plain Japanese, (like signal light means "shingle" which is very similar to Korean too.) how to get there, and I finally arrived almost 3 hours later, with food all over my kids' mouths, tumbling out of the car one by one as I was lecturing them about how to properly behave when we enter the school. It was a long day.
