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, April 11, 2010

bored

alright blog,
this being the first week of the new school year, of course i don't have to go to class to teach anything, cause it is all handing out of books and orientation. i have to go to the mountain school in the afternoon, and the amount of work i have to do there varies depending on whether or not the teaching assistant, who comes every other week, will be there. if she is there, she is gonna write the lesson plan and i just have to speak when it is indicated that i should speak, and if she is not, i have to think up some games or lessons or something to entertain two groups of little kids with for 45 minutes each. i have a pretty wide range of ideas to choose from. some of my more reliable games are duck duck goose, which of course has to be called cat cat dog here, as well as simon says, known as Russell says, exquisite corpse, which has to be called "interesting body", telephone, etc. we will see.
this past weekend i took a rainy, lonely drive to the south of the island to see a city called kochi. it looked like a pretty big city. the ride was an hour and a half, and both ways consumed a quarter tank of gas. very windy mountain roads for the most part. i think i will go back with liz when she gets here. i took some pictures. nothing too interesting, i hope.

this picture i took when i was driving. this is what the road looks like. you are right on the edge of a mountain and people live way up high. most of the drive was alongside a nice river. abandoned gas stations and little ramen shops all along the way. a few tunnels.

here is where i had lunch. the mountains are big and up close. that parking lot was very difficult to navigate, as it was full of the slowest cars, and probably 20% smaller, more narrow, than your average american parking lot. there was a UNIQLO behind me where i bought 2 pairs of work pants and a green blue plaid shirt. funny that this is where i stopped because this mcdonalds UNIQLO combination is also an hour in the eastward direction, towards tokushima city. oh well.

but i kept driving past that shopping center just to see what was up in kochi. i thought this bush was nice because it was flowering. that guy on the banners is ryoma sakamoto who helped overthrow the feudal shogunate in japan in the late 1800s and was born in kochi and was an alltogether great guy. now his image has been relegated to banners for pachinko parlors and boxes of snacks.

kochi has trolleys, which i thought was neat.

then i found this statue of an angel lady on top of a building near a shopping arcade. it was really quite large and cool. gotta find it again when i go back.

this is the outside of a bar that i stopped next to at a red light. it is covered in weird flyers and stuff. i guess it looks pretty cool. gotta go inside next time.

oof, there was a big boy too. i have never even seen a big boy in america, so seeing one in japan was a little surprising.
okay this next photo is not from my trip to kochi. it is of the pizza i ordered two nights ago.

so this is the best that pizza gets in japan. i could not decide on which flavor to get so i got the 4 combo. this whole thing cost 1580 yen. from bottom left, clockwise, we have a standard salami pizza that has to have corn on it. little onions too, with parsley. the next section is big pieces of cured bacon and cold potato salad, whcih was quite good and i would consider getting again. then is margarita, i think, which just had big tomatos and some pesto with a different cheese. it was just ok. the last one is the necessary japanese pizza inclusion: yakisoba pizza. basically it was just some yakisoba on bread, with maybe beef pieces, fried noodles, cabbage, yakisoba sauce and lots of mayo on top. also pretty good. it's hard for me to talk about or think about food right now, because even though curry rice is for lunch today, i feel a little food deprived. maybe i will get a big udon set meal for dinner, instead of trying to follow along with cooking with dog who just had me make ketchup spaghetti last night. i think that is about it. i have badminton tonight. what should i do this weekend?
great!

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