Forgetting how to count

Here's another, or rather 2, amusing things that have happened to me as of late:

Today I had my first badminton club meeting! It's Tuesday, so we couldn't be in the gym (grr volleyball people), so we practiced outside. We started out by running some around the school. My legs are killing me, ohmygoodnessgracious. Then we played badminton. BUT there aren't enough nets outside for everyone to play at once, so mostly you practice your swing, etc. I learned several new swing styles, which was quite a feat considering the instructions were all in Japanese :) And here's the funny part: At one point, we did a set of drills to the count of "ichi, ni, san, (hai!), ni, ni, san, (hai!)" all the way up to ten. FOR EACH PERSON. Everybody had to take their turn yelling out numbers. We must have done that drill, like, 200+ times, no joke. But when it was my turn to yell out numbers, well... I was tired and totally forgot how to say my Japanese numbers. They were going too fast, alright?! So I started yelling in English. Everybody was startled and got off beat, and then they all started laughing. I was going off in English, and everyone was laughing, and it was great :) I was glad to be able to distract them from the pain of repeating that drill over and over and over again. And it's a little weird- when I say "three" now, I keep accidentally rolling the r, so it sounds like "thu-rrrru-ee", not just plain old "three". I totally understand why the Japanese have issues with English r's and l's now. I'm doing it, too O.o

The second interesting part of my day was that... wait, what was it? Oh yeah, a guy in one of the ichinensei classes came into my class during lunch today, slammed on the teacher's desk, and declared to the world that he would protect me. It was so cute!!! Of course I had to have someone translate the word "protect" for me, but nonetheless, that guy gets brownie points for being nice to the exchange student :)

Something tells me there was something else I just completely forgot, but oh well. I'll have a real update for you guys sometime later. Silver week is coming up, so I'll have a nice 5 day break to compress my past week or so into one post :D The Sports Festival is on Thursday and I'm running a 50 meter dash and am part of a 15 leg race. FIFTEEN LEG RACE. Oh holy dear God.

AH I remembered what the other thing was!!! I got back an English worksheet today, and guess what? I misspelled "laid" as "layed". So did a lot of people, apparently, so then the teacher had to go into this long explanation about "ray" and "raying" and "raid" and it's just so hard here to pronounce the English l right and I wish it wasn't funny to me after being here for 3 weeks. But while it is a little less amusing now, sometimes, I just can't take it. My favorite screw-up was when someone was trying to tell me about the Japanese election. You figure out what it sounded like they were saying.

Okay, that's all for tonight. Miss ya'll, wish me luck at the sports festival! Mata ne!