New Glasses, New Job???

So I am pretty excited about my new glasses. I think they rock! It is all a part of my new "style". Hehe.

Last week, my friend cut my hair. She did exactly what I had asked her to do, but my hair came out a lot shorter than I had anticipated. But rather than crying over cut hair, I decided to roll with it. I started parting my hair on the side (where as before it was in the center) and for today, I straightened it. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, in addition to the changing of my hair, this weekend I added a new element: the glasses. I went to Sapporo this weekend to go to church and see some of my friends there. I ended up staying a day later than I had planned on. On the first day, I went with my friend Christy to the supermarket. At this store, there is also a clothes store, bakery, and eye glasses store all inside the same building as the grocery stuff. She and I want to chat with the eye doctor there, but he was busy so we started looking around. They were having a crazy good sale. All of the frames in the store were on sale: some 30%, some 50%, and one table was 3900 yen (which is about $35 US). That included frames, lenses, and an eye test. I decided that it was about time for me to get my eyes checked anyway, so why not do it cheaply? I was pretty happy that Christy was there. I could understand some things that the lady helping me said, but there were some questions that she asked me that might as well been Greek for all I knew. Of course, it was Japanese, and honestly, I was excited that I could understand and respond to as much as I did. So with Christy's help, I took the eye exam in Japanese. It could have been a reading test! The E chart, as I like to call it, didn't have an E on it. It was all in Japanese hiragana. Praise God I can read hiragana. After the test, they gave us hot tea to drink and asked me to come back the next day to pick up my glasses.

The next day, I went back alone. Christy had to work. But, it was a good day. God gave me the courage to go and I didn't even feel a little panicky. I showed my paper to a saleswoman and attempted to say something like, "I came here yesterday and they asked me to pick them up today," but it came out more like, "Um... Yesterday... um..." Fortunately, she understood and I was asked to sit at the table where someone, again, brought tea for me to drink while she sized the frames to fit my ears. When she was finished, she sat and chatted for a while. It was pretty exciting for me to get to practice Japanese, although most of what I said was stuff like, "Is that so?" and "Oh, really?" These kinds of phrases interspersed throughout conversation to give both participants an active roll are actually an important element of politeness in Japanese, so it wasn't a waste of time for me to practice them.

Anyway, yesterday was the first time I wore my new glasses out in public. I wore them to school last night. A fellow teacher said that I look like a school teacher. One of my elementary school students said that I looked like an eye glasses model. I laughed at that! But, after class, the other teacher said that seeing my new glasses made her want to get new ones too. Maybe this new style will create a new career for me as an eye glasses model. Do you need a college degree for that?