Kaidan (stairs)

I've decided to start a tradition of writing companion pieces to Miss Nemesis' posts. A few days ago, she said something about pasta. My next post was about pasta. Yesterday she posted about Chinese New Year. Then I posted about Chinese New Year. Today she posted about stairs. Now I'm going to post about stairs. This is not to be seen as attempted one-upmanship or flattery. I'm doing it for two reasons: 1) Her funny stories always remind me of something, and 2) I can't decide what else to say.

I could talk about the ancient legislator who stood up and gave a sacrament meeting talk (i.e., really long, droning, boring, and no one was listening after about thirty seconds) today in the House, or I could tell about the lovely tomato bisque I had for dinner. But that would be boring. Also, it wouldn't take very long, because I've just covered them both in the last five lines.

Instead I'm going to talk about some red stairs. In a foreign country. And a really embarrassing thing that happened to me in connection with them.

It was the second week of my exchange student experience, and I was getting used to attending a Japanese high school. The one thing that was troubling me during the hot, humid days, was the fact that my feet would sweat like crazy on the way to school, and then when I would get there and have to take my shoes off and walk to my slipper locker in my socks, my feet would leave sweat marks on the carpet. This was embarrassing. And gross. So I had a thought: I'd put some talcum powder on my feet before I put my socks on, and it would soak up all the sweat, and then I wouldn't be gross.

So I did. The morning after my epiphany, I dumped a bunch of talcum powder in my socks, put them on, and left for school. On my way to the front door, I had to walk down a flight of red-carpeted stairs. When I got to the door, I turned around to put my shoes on, looked back, and saw about twenty little white-powdered footprints coming down the stairs.

Mortified, I crawled over on my knees (my shoes were already on) and tried to brush the footprints away. No go. Then I realized that I'd probably be the first one home after school, and I could take care of the incriminating marks at that time. If I worked at it any longer that morning, I would have had to take my shoes off, and I would have been late for school. So I left.

Once I got to school, I was hoping the sweat and talcum powder had worked together to cancel each other out. No luck there, either. Huge white footprints leading to my locker announced my shame to the entire student body. The student body was nice enough not to speak of it.

By the time school was out, I had almost forgotten the experience. The boy who sat next to me in class was really, really hot. Think, that general guy in "Mulan." Whoa. It took me ten months to get him to kiss me, but I digress.

Anyway, I got home, and the front door was open. That was a bad sign. The father of my host family was in the entryway, looking perplexed and a little scared. I can't remember if there was a police officer there at the time, or if they had already come and searched the house. This is probably because the minute I looked over "Father's" shoulder and saw the white footprints, I started to hear a loud buzzing sound in my head, and my vision went a little blurry. So they questioned me about the footprints. At first I pretended I couldn't understand what they were saying. Actually, it wasn't pretending, because two weeks in I only knew about fourteen words, and "footprints" wasn't one of them. Even now, after two and a half years of living there, I'm still not sure what the word for "footprints" is.

After a couple of minutes the dumb act wasn't working, because there was also a lot of gesturing and stuff, which really crosses the language barrier quite efficiently in situations like that, especially when you have something like powdery footprints right in front of you to point at. So I finally admitted my guilt, and then I had to hear about how they were scared to death that a robber had come into the house, blah, blah, blah, and I shouldn't put talcum powder in my socks anymore.

Basically, I just wanted to go to bed after that. Fortunately for me, the mother of the family had a nervous breakdown a couple of weeks later, and I got to go spend the rest of the year with a different family who didn't remind me how stupid I was every five minutes.

Sheesh. You'd think the richest businessman in the city would have been able to figure out that there was only one set of footprints coming down the stairs, and nothing leading up. Which leads me to question: do Japanese burglars remove their shoes before breaking and entering?