Under House Arrest

Ah my week of 'quarantine' has finally come to an end.

I suppose 'house arrest' is a bit severe a term to describe what I went through during the week. Basically because I was in a foreign country for 3 weeks I had to stay at home and not go out as much as possible in case I got swine flu. Funny - because I would consider someone from Japan a bit more swine-flu-susceptible than HK. Meh. Full list of swine flu cases, country by country.

I did leave the flat a few times, when insanity and boredom and beautiful weather drove me out of my pajama pants and into the sunny streets of this little yakuza-infested town.

When I was at home, though, I did quite a lot of cleaning, reading, cooking, facebook stalking and project runway catching-up-ing. I will certainly miss the feeling of slowly rolling out of bed at 10am , seeing all the other ALTs' bikes are no longer in the bike shed and thinking they were all driven out 2 hours ago and are now parked quietly outside their respective schools, whilst I contemplate how to slowly waste the day away without being too unproductive.

BUT tomorrow morning (Saturday - weekend) I actually have to get up early(er) and meet a couple of students and help them practice their little speeches for the annual English Speech Contest. Oh why oh why. Lord have mercy and graciously spare me some grace. Indeed one of the last things on my want-to-do list. And the irony is that I actually volunteered. I could've totally bailed out on it. But when I think about how unprepared these poor girls are, and also about how bad I would look in front of the other ALTs for being responsible for under-training them, my fingers just started tapping away at my cellphone - and before I knew it an email was composed and sent to the English teacher about how worried I was and how much I want to help. I do want to help. Just hoped it was a better time of the week and day.

I'm a kind person, really.