Mom, Dad, and I were riding a bus towards my new workplace, in semi-urban Japan. I asked the bus driver where our stop should be, and she turned back and told me to hang on a second. The bus driver was a gray-haired Englishwoman, probably in her 60's, and she was in the middle of a conversation with someone to her right, near the front exit (come to think of it, the driver was on the left side of the bus, American style, which doesn't make sense for Japan). I was wondering if she would respond to me in Japanese if I talked to her in Japanese, so I thought about how to start the conversation. "Sumimasen" just didn't seem like the right way to get her attention, but I couldn't think of anything else.
We got off the bus at a covered, semi-outdoor pedestrian mall. The first thing that we noticed was that all the people standing and walking around were not Japanese. Some looked more central Asian, some Indian, some European. Didn't ever quite figure out why that was.
Somehow I had gotten a large rusty-red rectangular sign off the bus and took it to the local school it belonged to. The school had a two-story brick façade maybe 10 yards from the road. The outside of the school wasn't in very good shape (but then, neither was the sign). There was a brick sign-holding structure right next to the road, perpendicular to it so that each side of the sign could be seen when driving past in opposite directions. I don't recall exactly, but I guess the sign had white neon lettering that said something about the school (in fact, I recall the sign saying two different things, one possibly being a memory of what it used to say). The opposite side had white neon lettering in cursive that said "Go! Go! Go!" and then a little subtitle below that.
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