About Me

Ikawa-cho Miyoshi-shi, Tokushima-ken, Japan
I was recently accepted by the JET program as an assistant English teacher in Japan for one year.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

thought i would get a post up here for you

blog,
what is up? i am just having a great time, stamping english notebooks, getting cups of coffee served to me. my foot is almost back to 100%, i can just about normally climb and descent a flight of stairs. this is three weeks after i hurt it, which makes me think i must have broke or bruised a foot bone. a bunch of other kids are out with the flu again this week. last week it was second graders but now it is mostly first graders. i have two second grade classes to teach (middle school) and then i go to the elementary school in the mountains where i will have two classes to teach. the sumo tournament on kyushuu ended yesterday, hakuho beat asashoryu and got the emperor's cup, setting a new record of wins in a year with 86, beating asashoryus old record of 84. excited for badminton tonight, going to dress properly and get some smash hits in there. oh, i just got a little meat cracker handed to me?i hope it goes well with black coffee.
ran this through the japanese test kitchen last night. it went ok. i really dont feel like blogging about it though.
more i feel like complaining. next friday i have to go christmas carolling. im expected to know when and where i have to go, but nobody told me (anything) and i havent gotten any emails about it, just word of mouth through robbie another english teacher at karate. things like this make me want to be unemployed for years, or at least get away from the office and classroom environment.
i bought a lot of vegetables and meat this weekend: bacon, ham, burgers with cheese already inside them, chicken, jumbo shrimp for tempura, blocks of beef for curry, green peppers, spinach, asparagus.
i have taken some random pictures here and there, so they will be posted in good time. i need to start carrying my camera with me everywhere i go. only two weeks until liz gets here. i should finish up the japanese test, it is incredibly hard but i only have like 35 questions to go. it is due the tenth.

so i hope that within the next 7 months, the dollar gets even more destroyed then it currently is, taco bell comes out with some new wonderful product, maybe unemployment shrinks to under ten percent, and hopefully the economy grows by an possible amount. and all of my friends get places of their own.
so i am also expected to have a "notice" in japanese, about christmas carolling. i JUST got the fowarded email from my friend adam, who was nice enough to include the "someone forward this to russell bc i dont have his contact information" part of the email. i say to them, it says they are going to come here at 11:30. this is not good enough. of course i am expected to have this because they had it last year, i guess when the told my predecessor things. i still get called his name by just about everyone every day. so i guess i can pay that foward by having whoever comes next year, hopefully a girl, get called by my name.
great!

Monday, November 23, 2009

a basic post

about to end my fourth month here, i sometimes still get called Eric, the name of my predecessor at this job, by my students. once this happens, it isn't long before the teachers get confused and call me Eric too. i really don't make an effort to remember anyone's name, becuase there are too many students and faculty, plus i am terrible with names in the first place. but this makes it extra disheartening when i get asked again if i am going to stay on for another year and i say no, because i miss my girlfriend, and because i am homesick. "are you enjoying japanese life?" i guess so, but probably not enough. maybe there is a job in america waiting for me where i will be called some version of my birth name, where i will spend less than 75% of the time sitting at my desk entertaining myself (but hopefully not much less than that). there is also most likely a very interesting piece that has already been written by a dozen people i have never heard of called "english education in japan is a poorly worded, agrammatical joke that makes no sense" which i could rewrite in my sleep, but i wouldn't ever bother to. mayuko did get a 100 on her english exam though, so that made me feel okay. today is tuesday, and i do not have english conversation group (four women chatting in japanese, me talking about my life in english), so i get to relax and finish watching the season finale of curb. being so well paid to do so little here must be doing something bad to my sense of self-worth, to my overall value as a person, but i won't be able to tell until after i'm done here. i do get to watch sumo tournaments, which last 15 days and are awesome. also, i am thinking that i probably broke or bruised one or more bones in my left foot, because wednesday will be two weeks since i hurt it at karate, and it still is not near 100%. i can almost walk, and not quite climb or descend the stairs properly. it is just messed up. hopefully it will be fine again in 3 weeks when liz gets here.
the sense of disappointment that i got from saying i would only stay 1 year is the same as the guilt i was made to feel when i told a woman at my conversation group that liz and i are going to osaka and maybe kobe. nowhere else? that's it? why not kyoto? because, that's why.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

i have to keep you updated

dear blog,
i feel like i have been slacking. honestly there is not much to say. i live a fairly boring existence here. my life outside of school consists mainly of preparing food and eating, doing laundry, and cleaning my house. i bought a couple prebreaded shrimp to fry up into tempura. a piece of fried chicken i bought at a convenience store after work yesterday basically gave me a heavy allergic reaction; i should have known something was up when pure liquid grease came out after 2 bites.
i just made a reservation online for 5 nights at a nice looking hotel in osaka so i can have somewhere to sleep when i go there with liz in december. i am very existed to do all kinds of walking around and shopping and looking at things and not having to listen to broken english.
a look at the influenza board reveals that 17 students, mostly second graders who were away on a school trip, have the flu. so everyone has to wear flu masks, which is ok because they warm up your face nicely.
monday is the emperor's birthday so i get a day off. i am going to try karate tonight, since it has been a week since my foot damage. i will remember not to do any serious kicks with that foot. it is almost better, and i can tell it should be fine again soon.
great!

Friday, November 13, 2009

60th post

hi blog,
it rained a lot last night.
what do you do when a japanese elementary school student starts crying? you have a few options. some would say that your best bet is to just ignore him or her. elementary school in japan is a tough place and you might want to let these kids adjust on their own. maybe you want to run over, interrupt the lesson, and provide some comfort. when there is another teacher in the room, this usually becomes their job. if you play any kind of game with winners and losers in a 4th grade or younger class, it's basically a surefire bet that someone isn't going to be able to take the heat and is going to weep. but life is tough, and you can't always win, especially at bingo! so i try to not let it get to me, but it does anyway.
i hurt my foot at karate practice yesterday. robbie, another american english teacher, sustained the same wound last week when he got his kick blocked by sensei's knee. so when i went to kick robbie, he "payed it forward", and now i am limping around. I am taking tylenol and keeping some ice on my foot, but i am basically a handicapped person for the next few days. it is good that i dont have to work until monday. i think it will be back to functioning walking capability by then. so don't worry about me. the only problem is that i had this long list of things to do this weekend. let me share some of it with you:
- clean house
- set up kotatsu
- gather recycling
- study japanese
- buy tissues
- put new cds in car
- read paradise lost
the only one of these i can still easily do is study japanese, which is not fun. i can't read paradise lost because i accidentally left it at the elementary school around the block, which wouldnt be a problem if i could walk, and if i knew whether or not the school was open today. i ran out of tissues when i had a cold last week, and a tissue is a very important thing to have in japan. i will probably be able to get some of these things done tomorrrow, which is sunday.
obama is supposed to give a speech from tokyo about american asian relations today. if you catch it, let me know what you thought. i am watching it right now.
great!

Sunday, November 8, 2009

there might be ten pictures in this post

hi blog,
i have two hours to kill here at work, so i am going to tell you thinks and show you pictures. maybe you want to see and hear about the festival that was at the school around the block from my house on saturday. why they had this festival i do not know, from what i can tell it was a generic all-purpose neighborhood festival. it had everything you could expect or want.
you better know they had the brass band from the school down the street to kick things off.

also the kindergartners got to join the parade with their own little shrine thing made out of paper. this was the best shot i could get of them.

there were grandmas making yakisoba, which is delicious.

and lots of little stands selling snacks like yakitori, takoyaki, shaved ice, etc. and even toys too. as you can see here, since there is no right to bear arms in japan, merchants are allowed to sell realistic toy guns to small children, and everything is okay.

here is more evidence of the sale of real-looking toy guns. i had a lot of fun explaining to everyone that these can't be sold in america, because some people do have real guns, and if the cops see you with a realistic fake one they will probably kill you by accident. also, two of these boys have hot dogs.

do you know about mochi? mochi is a very thick, sticky goop or paste made from pounding rice for a very long time. when japanese people look at the moon, they see a rabbit pounding mochi instead of a man. there were guys making mochi at this festival. with each smash of the hammer rice particles and water would go flying everywhere, and after every three smacks a fourth guy would zip his hand in there with water and manipulate the mochi, each time narrowly avoiding the hammers.

the kindergartners, with their amazing hats, seem to enjoy watching this.

and then, unbelievably, in what must be the creation of a lifelong memory, the kindergartners were given a chance to pound the mochi, three at a time. it was wonderful to watch.

here are some happy elementary school girls.

i ate a hotdog, two sticks of akitori, and then this bowl of udon. i was very full.

i have more pictures but i thought these were the best and they are all i am uploading for now.
i have badminton tonight. i get paid this week. i should probably clean the house soon. liz is coming to japan in mid december and staying until january. i think we are going to go to osaka and just hang out and travel, we will see. it will be good to get off this somewhat boring island.
great!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

a post about what i am up to

dear blog,
hello. did you know that it is getting very cold in japan? well, it is. and this is enhanced by the facts that my house has no central heating and no insulation of any kind! so i asked my predecessor how to work the big gas heaters that are sitting in the closet. he said something about getting the blue tanks outside filled at the gas station, and then using a pump to get them into the little metal tanks in the heaters. also he said they smell when turned on, but mrs kiuchi who speaks okay english said she got used to the smell of gas heaters and now likes it. i found a kotatsu in the closet yesterday too, it is a big table with a blanket over it and a heat lamp underneath that you plug in and sit with your legs under it so it heats you up and winter is bearable. i have a half day today because i worked on sunday, so i am going to check out the gas heater situation. maybe i need to get a new pump at the hardware store. maybe i need to go to the gas station to fill up the gas tanks. also, i have karate tonight, which is good because this saturday there is a karate meeting and then we are going out for nabe, which is a big japanese soup pot with many different ingredients.
my girlfriend is coming to visit me for a few weeks in decemeber, so i have to ask the principal for those days off. maybe we will go to a hot spring. maybe we will sleep in the main room with the regular heater because the gas ones are weird. i dont know any of this yet. i do know that i am excited to eat a lot of gyoza and have some company.
i have some cool pics to show you. the first one is from the day all of us foreign teachers went to northern tokushima highschool for halloween lessons. some people dressed up, and the students were cool, but i only took one good picture, and it is of the river as i went over it in a train.

this next cool picture was taken after i heard loud yelling and carrying on outside my door one day over the weekend. i went outside and saw this, so i ran back inside and grabbed my camera to document it.

basically what you see here is a shinto procession where they carry a golden house shaped shrine box, in this case "the biggest one in tokushima" (said a guy to me) from one shrine to another. it transports a little god and they have a competition where they ram these things into eachother, or something. it was crazy. the streets were lined with little paper things as you can see here, in a picture i took as they went by.

here is what an auditorium full of japanese middle school students wearing facemasks look like, incase you were wondering what was really up in japan all of the time.

notice the extremely cool looking uniforms for the boys. these pics are from the sunday i had to work, when we went to the next town over to see a kyogen play, which is a farcical comedy type performance usually given between more serious noh plays. i didn't understand much as it went on, but it was somewhat entertaining. here is a picture from some of the action during the second act.

there you go. tomorrow there is another team teaching demonstration in the next town over, so i have to come back here to get a ride to it after teaching at the elementary school in the morning. i can't figure out what lunch is today. it says a piece of bread and milk, and also mayonnaise, ham and egg.
great!