A month in!

So I had a whole post typed up, and then I lost it through my own silliness. Its late and I don’t want to retype it just now! So here (hopefully) is a video of my house which will have to do for now. By the way, the previous video seems broken, Im not sure why just now!

Settling in

So busy! Plus no internet at home means it is very hard to write blogs! Oh well, a week at a time will have to do.

Last Thursday we had a bit of excitement at my school, a couple of the sannensei kids came in screaming about a kitten who was trapped under the building. It ended up being tiny, could not have been older than 5-6 weeks, if that. One of my JTEs (Japanese English Teachers) decided she wanted a cat, so after about an hour in a box trying to calm it down a bit, she took the rest of the day off to take it home and settle it in. I actually havent seen that teacher again since then yet, so I dont know how it’s going! It made me miss my own pets a lot too, hehe. A few other JETs are trying to talk me into getting a cat and passing it on to someone else when I head home but I think changing owners every couple of years would be way too harsh on a cat.. Ill probably just get a goldfish or something instead.

Thursday night Kat and I were treated to dinner by our Adult conversation group at a Chinese/Japanese restaurant. It’s an awesome group of people and I can tell the group is going to be quite a bit of fun. Since I cant drive yet and the group actually runs in Kanan, I was picked up by a man named Saito, a 70-odd year old guy who recently retired as an education bigwig in Kanan, and who (despite having almost the best English I have heard from a Japanese person so far) continues to tell me that his English is very poor and so fourth. I had what they call a ハンバーガーセット, or a Hamburger set. Only thing was, it was nothing like a Hamburger! Was a beautiful meat patty thing with really nice sauce, salad, and a plate of rice. Strange Hamburger, but I can’t say I was remotely dissapointed having ordered it.

Like almost everyone here, I was pretty much the first person Saito-san had seen who was either as tall or as big as I am. It is really, really funny to watch people’s reactions, and for some reason everyone seems to think I play a lot of sport and that I have really strong muscles! Every new kid I meet at the school, the very first question they ask me is “What sport do you play?” Very strange! Of course since soccer is popular here, when I say I used to play soccer as a goalie they all get really excited, it’s funny stuff.

On Friday I went out for the day again with my supervisor to visit the last of my schools, and more importantly, to organise my insurance for my car. I am keen to get full coverage because as I said in my last post getting into an accident in Japan can get extremely expensive, but what I hadn’t counted on was that the insurance I will need to be comfortable is going to cost about 100000 yen for the year, or about $1000 Australian dollars! Running cars in Japan is ridiculously expensive! I thought it was going to be quite cheap but in the end I think owning my own car will be almost exactly the same price as Kat’s car in Kanan (the town next to mine) – she is paying about $200 a month to rent the car in total, and mine is going to be about $2500 for the whole year – only she doesnt have to worry about taxes, insurance, or anything else! On the flip side, I think it is quite a bit more expensive to have an accident in a rented car even if you do have insurance. Oh well! Since most JETs pay about $500 a month in rent, about $200 a month for a car is a good deal even so, I think.

Friday night was the welcome party put on by the Kiwi Club in Ishinomaki city, which is another conversation club but one that is taught by the JETs who live in the city itself. The party was at a small restaurant thing in Ishi, $45ish for all you can eat/drink – these two hour all you can drink parties really give you that feeling that you have to drink as much as you can in as short a time as you can to get your money’s worth! Something Ill have to get used to, they seem pretty common here.

On Saturday Kat and I headed back into Ishinomaki to meet up with Mike (another new ALT) and an ALT in her second (third?) year named Jane, who kindly offered to show us around some of the better shops in Ishinomaki. Before we went to meet up with them we headed to Aeon, a big shopping complex about 20-25 minutes from my house. Lots of cool shops but the highlight of the day is that I was able to find shoes that were actually in my size! Amazing. All that worrying about shoes (I ended up bringing over 6 pairs of various types), and I really could have bought a lot of them here. I bought a new pair of sneaker type shoes that cost me about $40, since the ones I brought had half of the dirt from Elcho Island still attached to them.

After that we met up with Jane and Mike. First off we headed over to a wonderland known as Daiso, the hundred yen store. It’s kind of like a $2 shop only it’s more like $1, and the range of stuff they have is absolutely MASSIVE. I bought a bunch of western sized glasses (I really hate the glasses which let you drink maybe 1 mouthful of water at a time), as well as some wrapping paper and bags, a couple of extension cords and power boards, a few housy items and some other stuff which I forget now. The majority of this stuff was $1 each, a couple of the bigger things (a clock, and the powerboard) were $2 each.

After that we headed over to a recycle shop. The recycle shops are totally different than op shops in Australia too – probably the best way to describe them would be upmarket… everything is in great nick, all shrinkwrapped, and some really really nice stuff! Ill probably buy a printer from here (you can get simple inkjets there starting from $20), but all I bought this time around was a massive Toy Story clock for my house, which cost me 500yen.

Finally we headed to a shop called Yamaya, which is sort of like a massive alcohol store combined with a western style food store (actually, I think it is mostly Mexican food but I didn’t really look at that section…) I still havent started sorting out my photos yet but if I had this is where I would insert the photo I took of the FOUR LITRE bottle of Whisky which I just had to buy. I havent even opened it yet but I am sure it will taste aweful, since it cost about the same as 1.5 litres would in Australia. Alcohol is insanely cheap here, which I guess is why the social drinking culture is so strong. Someone ask Ian to read this and tell me how much his beer costs to brew, I would be interested to see if it was cheaper to buy in the store here than to make in Australia!

We had planned to go to Aeon again because we wanted to look in the pet shop which Kat and I had somehow missed previously but it was already getting late so we headed to an Izakaya instead. Izakaya are strange places.. kind of like a Japan style pub+restaurant combined into 1, but obviously nothing like an Australian pub . We didnt drink this night since we were heading back home soon after but we ordered a bunch of things including Gyoza, balls of octopus stuff, a really strange tasting ceaser salad, a couple of types of bbq chicken skewers, and more. Came out quite cheap, around 1000 yen each.

On the Sunday I had been invited to an awesome festival thing at my school, which is going to be a bit hard to explain without photos. Basically, a few of the teachers and all of the third year students caught the bus about 10 kilometers down the river which runs behind my school to a part of it that runs through a neighbouring city. From there we all went down to the riverside, donned life jackets, and jumped on board a 52 meter long log raft, and proceeded to float down the river back to school over the course of about 3 hours. I didnt count or ask but I think there were about 150-200 of us on the boat. As well as the raft which was cool enough as it was, we also had a bunch of canoes and  motor boats which people were taking rides on, as well as 3 massive blocks of polystyrine wrapped in plastic tarps which the kids were surfing on, and finally a bamboo bike boat – basically the back wheel was covered in fins, so that when the person riding it peddled, they (at least in theorey) paddled the boat forward. In reality all the paddles did was spray water all over the back of whoever was paddling – hilarious when the first kid did it. The water was really warm and only about waist deep, so I and a lot of the kids went swimming, and I also had a ride in one of the motor boats. It was great.

Following straight on from that, we had Somen for lunch. Somen is basically a big bamboo contraption where water runs down a bunch of chutes and people stand at the high end feeding ramen down the chute. People stand along the length of the chute and catch the ramen as it passes, dip it into a bowl of sauce and eat it. As far as I could tell with my limited Japanese, the only point of it is for the ambience, which I admit was pretty awesome! Saturday night Yasko invited me to come to her house for Dinner again, and afterward we went to another fireworks show in Kahoku, where she lives.

Monday through Wednesday we had the Miyagi training in Sendai, which was great. Lots of workshops on how we will actually go about teaching which were the most useful workshops so far I think, but more importantly we got to meet up again with the other people around Miyagi a week into our stays – lots of people have new contact information, lots of socialising planning going on, and so fourth. We also got to meet the people that came in group B, a week after I did, which was cool as well. I have come home from it with extraordinarily sore feet – like almost everyone I think! Not many people took Gym shoes to the orientation, so the first night when we spent about 3 hours playing soccer and basketball in the gym most of us played in socks or bare feet – blisters galore! It was great fun though.

Finally, last night (after getting back from the orientation), my supervisor informed me that the insurance for my car was ready, which means that I can now drive myself around! Which is great, because this morning it is pissing down with rain! After getting all my papers, I headed over to Kat’s house and picked her up and headed to Aeon so I could buy my mobile phone, which I now have! I ended up getting quite a nice phone, but then almost all phones in Japan are quite nice. No SMS in Japan, or atleast it isnt widely used – it is all done by email. This basically means that I can send regular emails from my phone! On the flip side, it’s almost impossible to get by cheaply with mobile phones in Japan, but with the plans I have it should not cost me more than about $45-50 a month, which isnt too bad. Oh yeah, and I can also watch TV on my phone too, location dependant

 

I think that is pretty much it for now! Im not going to deal with photos or the other videos I made until I have internet at home, it’s too much of a pain to upload them from government pcs. I still really have no idea when I am actually going to be able to use internet from home, which is a real pain in the arse. When I leave Japan, the one thing I am going to make damn sure of is that my successor has access to net when they get here, because I think it would alleiviate a lot of the stress of the first couple of weeks just being able to easily contact people from at home whenever you needed to, rather than at work under prying eyes or without the ability to use skype or sometimes even MSN. HOPEFULLY I should have it next week, or at the latest the week after.

Bye for now!

Youkoso Japan!

I’ve been in Japan a week and a half now, and I said that I would try to keep a blog while I was over here. Unfortunately, due to extraneous circumstances, I have only been able to take a very limited number of photos since coming, because my old camera is seriously annoying (flattens batteries in about 10 photos worth of use…), and I managed to lose the new one I bought in Tokyo literally the day after I bought it! No good. It’s ok though, because I still managed to get a few photos before I lost it, and being that this is Japan, despite the fact that I left a perfectly good, new camera on the bus, someone found it and sent it back to me! Awesome!

Tokyo:
Tokyo was crazy, not much like I had expected. Us Aussies arrived on Sunday morning the day before the orientation conference started, so we had the entire day to vege out in Tokyo. My first order of business after the drive through Tokyo to the Keio Plaza was to find my way to Akihabara to buy some electronics stuff (I could not find a suitable adaptor for my pc in Australia, but in Akihabara they must have every cord ever known to man I think.) Did some exploring around the millions of electronic alleys in Akihabara and went to a couple of the multiple story gaming arcades which were kinda cool. EVERYTHING in Tokyo is like 5+ stories high.. shops don’t go out, they just go up. I went to a stationary shop to buy some wrapping paper and stuff and the paper was on the 5th floor, while the tape was on the 3rd floor. Crazy.

We then headed over to Harajuku and walked down the streets around there, where there was an insane amount of people. There are times where being big and tall are a big bonus, and making my way through a Tokyo crowd is one of them… these streets were just nuts, and some real nutty people there too. Headed back toward the station and over the bridge to Meiji Jigun, a temple which had the most awesome wood smell I’ve ever smelt. Pretty sure they had to cut down a forest to make the place but it was stunning inside. There was a poor security guard whose job it was to tell people that they could not take photos from the middle of the prayer bit, but only from the sides ? in the two minutes I was in that room I swear I heard him have to tell at least 30 people not to take photos…

On the way back we had to buy another ticket at Harajuku and although we had worked out how to buy them at that stage, we must have looked like we couldn’t because a guy came up to us and offered to help us out which was great. BUT, he ended up being a con-artist and insisted we pay him for his assistance! Thankfully we only had a couple of yen each in coins so it was just as easy to give them to him, but what a nerve! That is the only experience of a con artist I have had in Japan so far, it was totally out of left field!

The conference itself had its good and bad points. On the negative side, we spent way, way too long sitting in ridiculously small chairs crowded together in a not very well air conditioned room (1000 people with no aircon is not pleasant in Tokyo), and a few of the workshops were ludicrously boring. On the plus side, some of the workshops were fantastic, and everything else about the hotel was really nice. I was on the 33rd floor which offered and extremely good view of Tokyo, especially at night and ESPECIALLY during a Thunderstorm which there was. Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera to record that ? I had literally JUST stepped out of the camera shop, a 10 minute walk from the hotel, when the skies opened and more rain fell in 10 minutes than you see in an entire year in Australia.. Of course, this was after I had packed my bag to send to Miyagi and the only dry clothes I had were the ones I had prepared to wear the next day… real pain in the butt.

Monou:
So we caught a charter bus with all the other Miyagi JETs from Tokyo to Sendai, about a 6 hour drive. It actually wasn’t that bad, since it was air-conditioned and we had at least two seats each. At Sendai we had a little ceremony (they sure love their ceremonies) which involved sitting in an incredibly hot room for a while, and then went off with our respective supervisors. My supervisor is a man in the Ishinomaki Board of Education called Yushi Abe, who speaks pretty good English and is actually in Sydney as we speak with a group of Ishinomaki students. He drove us from Sendai to Ishinomaki (another two hours, but we stopped at Matsushima on the way which was stunning ? it is one of the top 3 sightseeing spots in Japan supposedly). At Ishinomaki we had another small ceremony, only this time they asked us to introduce ourselves, in Japanese! I actually didn’t do too badly remembering what to say which was suprising at the time, but since then I’m finding I can actually get by pretty well with my limited vocabulary!

So from Ishinomaki I was picked up by my Monou supervisor and a teacher at the local Chuugakkou (Junior High School), named Saijo-san and Yasuko-sensei respectively. Yasuko-sensei speaks fantastic English and invited me to her house for dinner that night, which was really great. My first experience of eating at a sit on the ground table! I think mum would be shocked at some of the stuff I have eaten since coming here…

Since then I have spent most of my time at Monou Chuugakkou, my base school. Two days though I spent with my supervisor, who speaks almost ZERO English, which was petrifying! Somehow I have so far splashed my way through, and he has managed to set me up with a Hanko (personal stamp/seal), bank account, phone, and coming soon are my alien registration card, mobile phone and INTERNET! Thankfully I can use the internet as much as I like at my school, else I would be going crazy by now without it!

My little town is great. My house is less than 5 minutes walk from my main school (where I will spend Mondays and Tuesdays), but most of my other schools I have to drive to. Here’s a short video of the walk from my house to school:

My other main school (Kanan Higashi Chuugakkou, or Kanan East Junior Highschool) is actually about 20 mins or a bit more drive away, but it is in a STUNNING position. The school is on top of a mountain (maybe not a mountain, but certainly bigger than a hill), and it has a clear view over the whole surrounding area. Really stunning views from up there! I feel sorry for the kids there though ? they have to park their bikes at the bottom of the hill/mountain and walk up every day, and some days here by 8:30 in the morning it is steaming hot. Thank god I am not further south is all I can say, Monou’s climate seems perfect ? it is bearably hot most days, some days (like today) are too hot but I survive, and in winter it is going to be freezing cold but not Hokkaido style cold.

I don’t have a car just yet ? I have one parked outside my house but ownership can’t be transferred without my having my foreigner registration card, and I can’t get insurance for it. Apparently in Japan blame for traffic accidents isn’t black and white ? you get assigned a portion of the blame ranging usually from 90/10% upward, which means that even in the lightest of crashes you are going to be up for some money. So, I definitely don’t want to start driving before I have insurance!

My nearest proper shops are about 10 minutes walk away, or a bit more. I have all the necessary stuff; supermarket, hardware shop, electronics shop, and a couple of convenience stores. Prices of stuff here are really strange. I won’t say Japan is more expensive than Australia or visa versa, but certain things in Japan are super expensive while cheap in Australia, and the opposite is true as well. Drinks here are really really cheap unless you buy them at a restaurant ? for example, you can be cans of alcohol and stuff for less than $2, but at a restaurant it’s more like $5-6. Bread is like $5 for about 5 slices, whereas rice is about $5 for 5 kilograms.. It’s really back to front compared with Australia!

My house is awesome, I think most people reading this saw photos already, but soon (when there isn’t crap everywhere) I will make a video of it that isn’t sideways! It’s not quite as big as it seemed in the photos but it is still plenty big ? I think just the fact that I am so tall makes it seem smaller to me. I hit my head on every single doorway in the place! Lots of bumps on my head in Japan so far. It has two tatami rooms, one of which is my bedroom, and the other is a storage room and also houses what is apparently the Miyagi JET library ? tonnes and tonnes and TONNES of books in my house. Everything from lonely planet guides to Japanese books to Harry Potter. If any Miyagi JETs want a book, come see me! Then, I have a reasonably sized Loungeroom with two big opening door style windows, which means that when I come home at night and my house is a sauna I can cool it down quickly. Attached to that is the kitchen, with a couple of sliding doors meaning that I can combine the kitchen and lounge areas, though previous JETs have taped one of the doors closed to make room for a microwave and stuff. Also, obviously, I have a toilet and a bathroom/laundry type with.

My house is on a street with a bunch of identical teacher housing, so the teachers go home over the weekend. It makes for a very quiet weekend if I want to stay in, which I don’t mind at all! I live next door to the Vice Principal and another teacher, and the Social Science and Science teachers are in my street as well!

Well, this is an extremely long entry so far so I might leave it there for now! More photos to come now that I have my camera back!