Our daughter is now leaving nursery school. From her birth to my wife’s maternity leave to my paternity leave, from building a new house to finishing a doctorate to switching jobs, from one daughter to another (who’s a completely different personality…) and increasing sibling rivalry, it’s been a long ride.
“But we’ve only just begun…” 🎶
It’s the end of February, and our oldest daughter is nearing the end of her nursery school experience. What a ride it’s been.
Now she and her classmates are learning the “goodbye, our nursery school,” song which they will sing at the graduation ceremony in March (yes, like every school at every level of Japanese education, nursery schools have graduation ceremonies…verrrry different from US nursery schools).
The song refers to yet another rite of passage for 6 year olds: the “Dutch backpack” of Japanese elementary schools.
One aspect of bathrooms in Japan that surprised me at first was the water everywhere around the sink. I mean, everywhere. Not having a habit of waiting for people to wash their hands in public lavatories, I found it a bit of a mystery: the faucets were always soaking wet, and there was usually water all over the counter and on the floor as well.
It took me a while to figure out that visitors to the bathroom were deliberately dousing the faucet with water after they used it. The point was that, after you do your business, you are touching a faucet with dirty hands. So rinsing the faucet with water is sort of a polite thing to do before the next person uses it.
The Japan Times Mainichi Shimbun
Taking Leave 