I love coke

Last night and this morning there were two earthquakes. I felt them both but thought vaguely, oh, is that an earthquake? Maybe a truck rumbling down the street? I had my window open at night for the first time, you see. But it was actually an earthquake. Apparently at its epicentre, off the coast of Ibaraki, it had a magnitude of 7. Since I was in bed, it just felt like the floor was shaking gently.

Actually it might've been the night before last... and one of the vibrations might have been a later aftershock... I don't really know, can't work it out, I was half-asleep anyway. In fact I'd forgotten about it until a student mentioned it in class, then I remembered I'd been awake.

***

This morning I woke up and my jaw felt swollen and disfigured. I could hardly open my mouth properly. I thought 'oh no, what's happened to my face?' I wondered if some insect had bitten me during the night. I envisioned a red, swollen mess; when I looked in the mirror it wasn't so bad, just the worst concentration of acne I've had in a long time. I don't know why three red zits suddenly sprouted in that place during the night. Did my best to smother them with concealer.

Anyway, I got to work and the head teacher told me that a photographer was coming in today.
Me: Oh, why's that?
Her: He's from [our building]. He wants to take pictures of the foreign teachers for the [our building] sign.

To clarify: 'the sign' is a huge, multimedia TV screen prominently displayed at the entrance to our building, showing highlights of the stores and restaurants inside. So, this will be seen by every person who works in our building, as well as all our students, and all customers who visit the department store.

Nice day to look like a Clearasil 'before' shot, huh!

***

My beginner's class is not always a particular favourite of mine, but today I had a combination of students - two guys - I haven't had before, and they were hilarious. It helped that the topic of the lesson was 'talking about physical conditions'. We were going 'you look sick, are you okay?' and 'you look really hungry', and so on.

I wanted them to act out a condition and then have the other person guess what it was. This is the kind of direction I usually give without much expectation of it being fulfilled, but they gave it a good effort. Sometimes beginners are unintentionally funny.

So I smiled broadly every time these guys told each other:
'You look really hot.'

The other funny one was 'you look kind of sick'. A lot of beginners pronounce 'si' as 'shi'. And if you don't emphasise the 'ck' sound, 'you look kind of sick' can sound like a different sentence altogether.

Then, sometimes one word can be important to the meaning of a sentence, for example, 'that's'.
Guy 1: I feel really sick.
Guy 2: TOO BAD!

Sometimes they don't know the correct grammar but they can certainly make their point:

Guy 1: Oh, you look really sad.
Guy 2 (waving his arms around crazily): Yes. My dad - DEAD.
(Guy 1 and I both cracked up. Made it difficult to sound sympathetic.)

The next class featured a listening exercise where the main character goes: 'mmmm! Man, I LOVE coke!'
It turns out he's talking about the soft drink, but if you heard him saying it, anybody would be forgiven for thinking he meant the other kind...