I'm still unemployed, for the moment

(Quick note: I wrote this during a dull moment last weekend, and I'll have more up soon.)

Well. It's been a while since I last tried to post, but here I am. The apartment internet has been very spotty, and they're probably disconnecting the router, so for the most part all I've been able to do is take phone calls. Having a phone makes things much easier, perhaps more annoying as well; I'll put up a picture of it, once I finally get around to dumping my camera's sd card.

This last Sunday (9/7), Rachel and I went to a sports festival at the only middle school she teaches at. We somehow came back home with sunburns on various parts of our bodies. In my case, since I was sitting cross-legged, the inside halves of my knees and shins have been screaming in pain for the better part of the week. The drugstore next door (again, think Bartell's) doesn't sell sunscreen or sunburn lotions, interestingly enough, so we got some at the 100 yen store. And it's not even lotion, either; it's milky, like milk. Think of the consistency curdled milk or really warm yogurt has, and that's pretty much it. You rub it on wherever and your hand comes away wet – not slick, gooey, slimey, or greasy, but wet. Still, it seems to have worked – aside from my still-healing knees, I've come away from it with a tan. And speaking of tans, every freakin' kid at that festival had tanned skin the color of brown sugar.

But I digress. The whole idea of a sports festival (because this is fairly clearly a foreign concept to the states) is to get everyone out and exercising. Maybe it has more to do with the sort of population density in the area – again, lots of rice farming in the area, and the school itself was surrounded by them – or maybe it's more of a cultural thing, but those kids all looked within a healthy body weight, if overall a little on the light side. The games (kinda hard to actually call them sports) themselves went from as simple as a year-based baton relay to something involving the two teams (yellow and blue – each year got split down the middle, so six groups all together) to a song-and-dance routine by each time, to fire up the crowd and themselves. Blue got into a circle facing the audience and did a little dance to some pop music; Yellow had the third-years stand in the middle and start something closer to a stretching exercise, ending with the other years joining in singing (yelling, chanting, whatever you want to call it) along to a more traditional tune with a taiko in the background. They fired themselves up, the watching parents and family, and the Blue team as well, so whether it worked or not...

The Saturday before that (9/6), Rachel and I went to a bamboo festival at one of her elementary schools. Everything was as we expected until they started handing out saws to the kids, not even 10 years old, to cut off logs of bamboo just under the width of my thighs. I was impressed at the cultural gap. There were four sections to the festival – take-tonbo (little bamboo rotors attached to a stick and launched off by rolling it between the palms – means 'bamboo dragonfly'), take-uma (bamboo stalks with pieces of wood tied together around the lowest or second-lowest 'joint' to the ground, and used as stilts – means 'bamboo horse'), squirt guns (a thin piece of bamboo with another stick inside it to suck up and spit out water), and... I don't quite know what to call the last one. Take two logs of bamboo, cut to about 15 cm long, run rope through them, stand on them, pull the string to your feet and start walking.

There were contests towards the end, using each section – Rachel and I entered into the take-tonbo contest, mostly to fill out the tournament numbers. The idea was to fly them off as far as possible – and a well-made one, in the hands of the oldster pro showing everyone how to make them that day, will easily fly up into the rafters. The rotors on mine turned out too thick, despite my best efforts (I've never whittled before, so...), and it wasn't too hard to throw the first match. Rachel, on the other hand, made her rotors too well, and even though she was probably trying harder than me to throw each match, ended up getting the (paper) silver medal. The certificate is up on her wall, but we seem to have run out of yellow-tack to put up the medal as well – another thing you can't find over here, at least not in Akitakata.

The nearest train station to the apartment is 8 kilometers away. See, the area has so many mountains that the towns that make up Akitakata are not within line-of-sight of each other – the neighborhoods, sure, but not the towns. In fact, if you were to get on top of the apartment building and look around in a circle, we are very literally surrounded by mountains. There's space between them, of course – they're not mountains in the sense of the Cascades or the Rockies, but more like islands amongst a sea of rice. Or, if you've seen it, they look like those giant chitinous bugs from Kaze no Tani no Nausica, the Studio Gibli/Miyazaki Hayao flick. So, a train station that GoogleMaps claims is only 1 hour away by foot is really more like 2 hours away – 20 minutes by car, if that. Why do I mention this?

(I wrote this next part up before the interviews. Yeah, not having a steady internet connection sucks.)

I have a job interview on Monday. A real job interview, with an English school in Hiroshima. It pays better than my last job scanning checks (I'm still surprised at how much I was paid to do that), and it's right next to the Hiroshima train station. Also, they put up a monthly commuting stipend for full-timers. The problem is that it costs at least 1900 yen round trip to get there by train, and it takes more than an hour to get there. (Assume something like 110 yen to the dollar.) If I get the job, it doubles our income, but I get to see Rachel only 3 or 4 hours a day during the week. There's a part-time option, at 1500 yen per hour, which would erase a couple of those problems but create a couple more – I'd have to work at least 1:15 or so to make up the transportation costs, and would barely come out ahead. Either one would easily pay for the food costs (which is the very least Rachel is expecting of me – paying half the rent was my idea). I think I'd do fine in the job, but having to spend a few hours in the train every day would be a little annoying – wonder if I could take my computer, write a bit on the way? It'd be a good excuse, but I don't know if the other passengers would appreciate it.

I also have another job interview, on Tuesday. Not quite as real as the school one. It's for a – the best analogy would be a sort of Half-Price Books specializing mostly in Manga and Porno, with video games of all ages and CDs on the side. Oh, and maybe a couple of serious books. It's a 10 minute walk, pays a little above minimum wage, and I'd have to learn the really polite Japanese that everyone else waiting on me seems to use. On the education side, I'm probably overqualified for it. On the human interaction side... well, hm. But, the fact that I can walk there makes it really desirable.

Finally went out for Karaoke this last Friday (9/12), too, with a bunch of other gaijin, to celebrate a coworker's birthday. Stayed up until 2. In my case, being really tired isn't at all different from being really drunk (if I'm sitting at my computer, it's not a problem, but I was singing my heart out). It's funny, though – they all picked English songs (leaning towards rap) and I picked old-school tokusatsu themes. My songs, if they were the Opening Theme, had actual visuals pulled from the shows, too, not just the generic video that played for each English genre. And the really cool thing? They had “Everybody Needs Somebody”, from The Blues Brothers. I've seen that movie enough times to get the feel of Elwood's (Dan Ackroyd's) patter, so I figured I could pull it off. I did. I even tried to do the little dance (because, y'know, I'm a dancer), but there wasn't enough room. They congratulated me all the same. I think we did it differently than the other groups – we sang together when possible (so, not during my songs...).

More soon.