Through the Eyes of a Vagrant

Ever have one of those days?

Last night when I went to bed, I saw on the forecast (on the internet) and it said that there would a be chance of rain (80%).  So I thought to myself, “Ok.  Well I’ll just remember to bring an umbrella with me tomorrow morning.”  I woke up and got to the school with no problems.

When I arrived at the school, after a couple periods had passed, the teachers suddenly held an emergency meeting.  Someone smashed the glass on one of the doors to the school.  It was the door leading to the sports equipment room so they believe it was the baseball club.  I went to check it out and it looked like the glass had been struck by something thin and hard at least seven times.  In this meeting, the teachers were each given photos of the current state of the door so that they didn’t have to take a look at it, along with a form to fill out with any information that they had about the incident.  The Japanese sure are thorough.

Last night I was making the new website so I went to bed late.  My mind wasn’t 100% there.  As I was filling out the answers to the tests of the correspondance course I’m taking, I ended up putting the answers for book 4 on book 5’s answer sheet.  Great.  So I had to rewrite my essay again and attach it to the paper I had made a mistake on.  With only one week left to submit these, I couldn’t afford to damage the answer sheets, and I hated wasting time on things that were already supposed to be completed.

During 5th period, half of my English class was cancelled because the students needed to have a check up by the doctor that was visiting the school.  In Japan, there are no such things as general practitioners or family doctors.  Instead, a doctor comes to the school a few times a year to check the students with a stethoscope and measures their height and weight, etc.

Also, because the glass door was smashed, my 6th period English class was cancelled too and the school needed to hold an emergency meeting in the school gym with all of the students.  I had nothing to do at this point, so I headed home early.  The bus comes infrequently at this school, so knowing when to leave is essential.

As I went to leave, the nurse said to me, “Are you going to be OK?  It’s raining pretty hard out there and the wind is pretty strong.”  When I checked the forecast last night, the forecast failed to state something like chance of typhoon.  To my great delight, the same typhoon that hit me in Sendai when I was on the school trip hit me again back in Hokkaido.  We flew past it to the north, but it felt like following.  To those that don’t know, a typhoon is the same thing as a hurricane.  They just call hurricanes that originate in the east here typhoons.

I arrived at the bus stop 15 minutes before the bus arrived, but it was a long 15 minutes.  The rain was not falling on me, it was running into me.  Clinging to my umbrella for dear life and trying very hard to protect the answer sheets for the tests I had just filled out I waited.  Finally the bus arrived and I stepped onto a much more crowded bus than usual.  I took a ticket which quickly got soaked through and fumbled through my soaked backpack for change.  The seats were sopping wet and as I sat down I was greeted with a nice squish.  Nice.  My clothes were soaked through too - down to my underwear.  As I looked up at everyone, it seemed that everyone on the bus was wearing rubber boots and a rain jacket.  Was I the only one that didn’t know about the typhoon?  This typhoon just brushed us however.  Were it to hit us directly, I have no idea how much worse it might have been.

To top things off, when I took my electronic dictionary out of my drenched bag, it no longer worked.  If I can’t get it replaced on warranty that’s $250 down the drain.  My MP3 player also suffered some minor damage (dead pixels).  I’ll be sure to buy a waterproof case next time for both.