The Lighthearted Wanderer

A physically exhausting day...started with cleaning my apartment, throwing out a lot of garbage, and moving my extra things to my friend's apartment nearby. I thought the day was going to turn out badly/bad karma when I brought down my first set of garbage and the garbage lady proceeded to chew me out in Japanese because I put my plastics-type garbage next to the appropriate cage as opposed to inside the cage since it was locked. I played the foreigner but I felt super guilty :( But only guilty enough that I went looking for other garbage areas without mean ladies. All of my utilities got turned off one by one and I had to pay all the month of payments I...skipped...or more precisely, didn't bother to pay because I would soon be leaving anyway. Bad karma continued as the water lady quoted me ¥901 but upon calling higher-ups realized I needed to pay for June and July -> ¥5031. I had given her ¥1001 originally, but not having enough smaller bills for it to be exact cha...

(Just because it's fun to remember...and because I got so much help from my friends, I might as well post it here in case it can help someone someday.) The teachers and students were super surprised and super excited that I spoke so much Japanese in my speech. Obviously I didn't write all, or even most, of the Japanese in this speech, but the students and teachers appreciated the gesture so much that I am really glad I just asked for help from as many Japanese-studying/speaking friends as I could.  ------------------------------------------------------------- Mina-san, konnichiwa/ohaiyogozaimasu.  Good morningeveryone!    I have been in Japan and teaching at Ikakita (my school's nickname) for one year, and it has been very enjoyable. Ima made watashi wa ichi-nen-kan Nihon ni ite, Ikakita de oshiete imashita, taihen tanoshikatta desu. It's a shame that I have to leaveIkakita. Ikakita o sarukoto ni nari, zannen desu. Kocho-sensei, Kyoto-sense...

(this is my version of an "update me on your life" email that I've received from some of my friends over the past few months) Dear Friends, I write to you from my work desk at one of the schools I have worked at over the past year. It is my last day of work here, and I feel compelled to update the world about my life in a rather concrete fashion. (Well, as concrete as it could be, posting on my blog with an audience of about 10.) It has been almost one year since I first arrived in Japan, and my time here has been filled since day one. Not simply filled with excitement, but with emotion, reflection, and a lot of evenings at home opting for sweets instead of turning on the stove for a proper meal. Over the past year, I have been teaching English to students at two Japanese high schools in the city of Kobe. One of my schools was very close to my house, and I'd frequently find myself waking up with only a few minutes to get ready before running to wo...

If only the real Himeji castle wasn't in a box... Himeji's Yukata Masturi is an annual festival taking place in Japan's most famous castle town of Himeji. Unfortunately, construction has prevented me from ever seeing the actual castle structure, and so this model in the tourism office will probably be as close as I will ever get (reopens in 2015!).  The festival took place the weekend of June 22-24, with over 800 food vendors and amusement stalls open the whole day--and stage fashion shows, singing, and dancing picking up in the evening.  One of my girl friends who lives in my neighborhood and I, we went to the festival early in the afternoon, when the crowds were thin and we were free to slowly wander back and forth through the stalls. We had a delightful day of eating festival food, fried chicken, soft serve ice cream, tai-yaki, yakisoba, and I can't even remember what else now. There were hundreds of girls in yukata of all different colors, and quite a ...

Ikakita's 3rd year Elective OC Class  Monday, June 25 What to do??????? So I'm still not sure if I'll be able to get those last classes with my first year students, but I did end up telling the first year department chief that, "it would break my heart if I didn't have a real final lesson" with my first year classes. He laughed but seemed to understand why I said that, so all I can do is wait for the schedule. Things are rolling pretty fast, it's exactly 4 weeks until the end of my contract, but I'll stop teaching classes before that. Some of my last classes are tomorrow and Friday actually, so I probably should get to planning and figuring out what to do. --Edit-- Saturday, June 30 So I ended up doing a bunch of cool things actually. First I had the kids do a fill-in-the-blank dash of questions and answers about me, hehehe. Then we did a mad libs activity in pairs (mad libs can either go pretty well or flop depending on the class atmosph...

It's so easy to get burned out. But if it really is that easy, does that mean that I wasn't resilient enough in the first place? It's the final countdown here Japan-side, and my work as an ALT will soon be over. Day-to-day, I have lapses of "gosh, I'm just starting to get the hang of this" and "man, wouldn't it be great if the kids had one ALT for the whole school year for once"...stuff like that. A part of me still wishes that I could have made a read difference. And sometimes I fall into the trap of thinking that I actually did. I'm gloomy today, I think that's pretty easy to tell. I just had one of those classes where it was like there was an invisible wall between me and the students, filtering out only what I was saying. Nothing seemed fun, everything seemed like I was torturing them. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that they were getting someone new next term, at least the excitement of getting a new person can ...

Of course it was an incident at work today involving cultural diversity that is getting me fired up enough to write a post about this. Just as I am forgetting about the little things here in Japan that make me tilt my head and go, "Huh?", something else comes up and it's like I can feel the invisible atmosphere of suppressiveness closing in. It doesn't make much sense, no one really cares here what I think about these sort of things. Okay that's over-exaggeration, I think it might be a generational sort of thing. I'll explain more in a moment. This particular eye-opening spit-choking moment had to do with a translation contest. One of the English teachers at my school told me that over the summer, our school's English Speaking Society (ESS) will be translating a picture book, Olanna's Big Day , into Japanese. She asked me to take a look and return it to her after.   So the book is about a young student (probably elementary, since the book sa...