Thursday Aug. 23rd update!

Hello everyone, thank you for following!
This was my first full week on my own and so far it's been going pretty well besides the 2 year old class that I had on Tuesday. First, two of the kids started bawling their eyes out when they saw I wasn't their old teacher. It didn't help matters when I heard the teacher explain to the kids in Japanese that their old teacher was gone and wouldn't come back . . . but she helped me drag them into the classroom and once they sat down, I started singing the ABC's and everything was dandy again . . . except for when the boy suddenly had a giant puddle on the floor below him. At first I seriously thought that he'd brought some kind of water into the classroom and it'd just spilled. It didn't occur to me that it was something else until my next class came in and noticed that the floor was wet. yeah . . . unfortunately my Japanese ability wasn't good enough for me to explain to the Japanese teachers that a boy had peed in the classroom  . . . the rest of the classes went "swimmingly well" as some people say, whatever that means. Sounds like a good pun to me. Anyway, nothing really exciting happened this week except that my boss invited me to her tea ceremony classes that she teaches. Apparently, the tea ceremony is extremely complicated, even to the type of kimono you wear. My boss said she would give me free lessons, but it might end up being expensive if I have to buy a different kind of kimono each month, so I'll see. I'm interested, but not interested in sitting seiza style for over 2 hours. I'll see, but maybe it will make my boss respect me more and I've always wanted to learn how to participate in a real tea ceremony. Maybe she won't be picky about what I'm wearing. . .
Today (Thursday), I met a new friend named Masayo. She was extremely helpful and we talked for 4 hours! She told me so many things about Japanese culture and things that I never would've thought to be different. For example, I asked her what she did this morning and she acted shocked and explained that to Japanese people, that is strange, but it was okay to ask what she did that weekend or "what have you been doing lately?" I thought that was very interesting though. It was embarrassing when she wanted to switch from talking in English to speaking in Japanese! I really didn't even know how to begin a conversation! I don't know what I'm going to do . . . I might have to bring in the Japanese book that my best friend, Britteny, let me borrow. It was a very stormy day today, so I was glad that we were in the coffee shop the whole time! It was very calming and much better than sitting at home on a rainy day :P
I plan to post again Sunday, Saturday night after work I'm hanging out with Madoka again, then Sunday evening I will see Yurika again so I will be kept plenty busy and hopefully get much better at Japanese! (fingers crossed)