I've been teaching English in Hiroshima since October 2008. It's impressive, apparently, that I found the job after arriving in Japan (August 2008) and settling down in Yoshida. (Yoshida, Akitakata City, is roughly 45 kilometers from Hiroshima, close enough to commute but still far enough out to surprise anyone living in the city. As the number of languages in the link might indicate, no one is too surprised to see a foreigner here - no more than "hey, a new guy.") The commute is anywhere from 75 minutes (train + taxi) to 90 minutes (train + bus on an average day), but on Friday evenings it's 110 minutes (train or wait time + the 9:45 bus from the bus center 20 minutes from the office). The one thing I really don't like about the job is the commute. I gave serious thought to living in Hiroshima City (rather than Hiroshima prefecture), and there's a few apartments in Kabe that would do, but then I'd have to live apart from Rachel. So I live in Yoshida.
(Kabe is the suburb that serves as a halfway point between here and there - it's technically in Asakita Ward, but given that Kabe Station has a longer Wikipedia entry, I find it easier to just call it all "Kabe". Which is inaccurate, but oh well.)
I find the job itself difficult, with a ridiculous commute that only makes my frequent stomach problems worse. No, the work itself isn't hard, and I can count on one hand the times I've had actual problems with students (and even then, they're my fault). I enjoy working with my coworkers, and talking to people/students from different walks of life. But I have trouble adjusting to another person's pace - their likes/dislikes and interests, their rates of speech, their ways of thinking, etc. - and so my lessons tend to vary wildly in usefulness when there's more people. I can adjust fine to 1 person, up to 3-person groups, but any more and it gets difficult. Throw in a spread between the abilities of the highest and lowest students in a group (this is, very occasionally, a large gap, through no fault of the students), and I tend to start lecturing or speaking faster, to try to cram in as much lesson as possible in 40 minutes. Result: one of the main complaints against me is that I speak too quickly, and this is the main reason used to fire me...
(The full story behind February 14th being my last day is: My performance isn't as high as it needs to be, and while my circumstances include good reasons to keep me on board, after a year of plateaued improvement, it's easier to cut me than continue to employ me. ...which should come as no surprise to anyone I've talked to in the last year or so. I was originally going to be fired, and my last day was going to be Jan. 31st, but I tendered my resignation at the same time. I wanted to end on Feb. 28th, they wanted to fire me on the 31st - we compromised, and my last day is Feb. 14th. No surprise, no acrimony; it's my best "firing/quitting" yet.)
It also became a worry of mine that students weren't actually learning anything new in my lessons. About 6 months or so into the job, I started making an effort to make sure everyone learned something new. (Correcting pronunciation/sentence structure/etc. when possible, explaining the use of language in the textbooks rather than just teach it straight or through repetition, write and leave lesson notes with as much detail I can manage - the theory being that, even if I speak too quickly, someone can learn something from what I wrote... Whether or not the notes work isn't clear to me, but it's something no one's ever complained about - my handwriting notwithstanding.) People paid money to talk to me; I have to try and make sure I'm worth it.
Bearing in mind that I'm usually not very good at social things, I think I've done pretty well overall. The job has forced me to work with people, and I think I've grown considerably because of it. I look back fondly at the people I've met, and while I've always had trouble finding past successes (I can find my failures with ease, however), I at least know they're there. I have improved as an English Instructor in the time I've worked there, but I realize I don't have the innate talent to be a good teacher. I doubt if I'm a bad teacher, though.
It's actually started snowing as I write this. About what you'd expect for a town in the mountains (altitude: 120 meters?), but it's been unseasonably warm this past week. One more post coming up soon...
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japan. Show all posts
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Heat and Humidity
10 months in Akitakata WHOOOOO! And now it's summer. Seattle isn't very humid, so we're having some trouble coping. I can take the heat by itself (Rachel can't).
Not much has happened. Strongly considering looking for a new job. Teaching English isn't easy for me, since I'm not good with people at all, but it's pretty lucrative. I lose 3 hours per workday to the commute, and the stress of the job itself... I worry too much about whether they're learning or not, and if something goes even slightly wrong I feel it.
Also, I've begun to have some sort of physical reaction (nausea) to the teaching floor, which is bad. So after lunch I'm going to the local Hello Work (job placement - can't quite tell if it's gov't funded or not) to see what's available. Probably nothing. ("Probably" = "Probly", which is a fun point to teach. Heh.) I don't really have any skills aside from 10-key, touch-typing, and English. Worst-case, I suck it up and keep teaching English until next spring or so.
I wonder why our school has so few students now? We've had days where I get 8 one-student/man-to-man lessons. Bad as I am, I can't possibly be solely responsible for this. (This is, incidentally, related to my tendency to react more strongly to small mistakes than large ones. Small mistakes, one person is usually to blame, and they can add up faster than they can be fixed. Large ones, it's usually more obvious at first glace how possible they are to fix, and if they're broken beyond all recognition you throw up your hands and start over.)
Listening to Senaka Goshi ni Sentimental now, sung by the mysterious Miyasato Kumi.
Not much has happened. Strongly considering looking for a new job. Teaching English isn't easy for me, since I'm not good with people at all, but it's pretty lucrative. I lose 3 hours per workday to the commute, and the stress of the job itself... I worry too much about whether they're learning or not, and if something goes even slightly wrong I feel it.
Also, I've begun to have some sort of physical reaction (nausea) to the teaching floor, which is bad. So after lunch I'm going to the local Hello Work (job placement - can't quite tell if it's gov't funded or not) to see what's available. Probably nothing. ("Probably" = "Probly", which is a fun point to teach. Heh.) I don't really have any skills aside from 10-key, touch-typing, and English. Worst-case, I suck it up and keep teaching English until next spring or so.
I wonder why our school has so few students now? We've had days where I get 8 one-student/man-to-man lessons. Bad as I am, I can't possibly be solely responsible for this. (This is, incidentally, related to my tendency to react more strongly to small mistakes than large ones. Small mistakes, one person is usually to blame, and they can add up faster than they can be fixed. Large ones, it's usually more obvious at first glace how possible they are to fix, and if they're broken beyond all recognition you throw up your hands and start over.)
Listening to Senaka Goshi ni Sentimental now, sung by the mysterious Miyasato Kumi.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Half a year in Akitakata!
Wooo. It's been fun. Feel a bit cut off. Can't watch Watchmen until much later.
Not much has happened. I'm getting used to the job, but it's starting to look like my contract won't be renewed - which is unsettling. I bought stuff to send home, but I'm too lazy/depressed/apathetic to send it. I've picked up some new manga, which I'm considering sending back. Maybe.
It snowed yesterday, but otherwise has been warm in the way early spring gets. Snow up here (we're 40 kilometers or so from the sea, 150 meters up, and surrounded by mountains) isn't very lasting or heavy, so it's no big deal. Just enough to get in the grooves of my shoe soles.
I bought "the best of fantasy 2008" recently, and it's uplifting... is the best word I can come up with. I felt bad about my level of writing recently, but now I've got a benchmark to compare it with. Seems my ideas are almost not surreal enough, and my writing is about two drafts away from publishable - my style is somewhere between too descriptive and too brief, which is good. This is good, but I wanted the "SF 2008" instead - that comes out "sometime in March", according to the bookstore guy.
So yeah. I'm fine, Rachel is fine. Hopefully all will go well.
Not much has happened. I'm getting used to the job, but it's starting to look like my contract won't be renewed - which is unsettling. I bought stuff to send home, but I'm too lazy/depressed/apathetic to send it. I've picked up some new manga, which I'm considering sending back. Maybe.
It snowed yesterday, but otherwise has been warm in the way early spring gets. Snow up here (we're 40 kilometers or so from the sea, 150 meters up, and surrounded by mountains) isn't very lasting or heavy, so it's no big deal. Just enough to get in the grooves of my shoe soles.
I bought "the best of fantasy 2008" recently, and it's uplifting... is the best word I can come up with. I felt bad about my level of writing recently, but now I've got a benchmark to compare it with. Seems my ideas are almost not surreal enough, and my writing is about two drafts away from publishable - my style is somewhere between too descriptive and too brief, which is good. This is good, but I wanted the "SF 2008" instead - that comes out "sometime in March", according to the bookstore guy.
So yeah. I'm fine, Rachel is fine. Hopefully all will go well.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
I have time to post. How 'bout that?
Here we go, the long-awaited post about my trip to Okayama, and subsequent first weekend at work. I've been very busy this past week or so, and it's only now that I can post this.
Monday the 6th started early for me. I got up at ...too early an hour to really remember. There's a site that'll calculate the fastest route by train between two locations, and because the company wasn't too thrilled to have to pay for a Shinkansen trip (at least 12,000 yen), I got to suffer 4 hours inside of the train system. Not a terrible fate, and food/restrooms are easy enough to find, but 4 hours in transit'll take something out of you, especially if it's 4 separate trains. I did eventually get to the Okayama station, and the hotel was close enough that I could leave my luggage there – except there are two Toyoko Inns near the station, and the staff had maps on hand for my benefit. I wasn't able to get into my room at the time, but they checked my luggage, so I got some lobby coffee – sorry, that should be “Lobby Coffee”, if you know the sort – and headed to the Okayama-station NOVA school. Whereas the Hiroshima-eki school had the impression of being stuffed into 2 floors, the Okayama branch felt a little more spacious (and if someone from work is reading this, I challenge you to contradict me), and actually felt like a school, albeit one with cubicles for classrooms. There were three others getting trained at the same time, two Canadians and an Aussie, the latter of which works at my branch. The first day was fairly uneventful until we tried practice lessons on actual students, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've let someone down as much as then. We got out at 9, and the hotel room turned out to be about the size of a large dorm room – the “single” picture on the website is remarkably misleading. Still, it had all the basic necessities, and I remain suitably impressed. Good Internet connection, pretty good breakfast (missing only the heavy protein I was expecting), hot water dispenser on the first floor and a boiler in the room. The bathroom was the same modular design as the one in the hotel we stayed at our first night in Japan (see below), but comfier when not sharing it with someone else.
The second day was more of the first, only with some free time in the morning. We started at 1:20, so that left me plenty of time to get some tea and eat hearty. Again, I crashed and burned during the student sessions, but felt a little better about it. Since the company picked up the hotel tab, I ended up with more money to spend than originally planned, so I had enough to eat out for each meal. I had to eat cheap, but 15~2000 yen a day isn't so bad. Got out at 9 again, went back to the room, surfed the net and went to bed.
Day three started early, at 10, so I had enough time to pack up and eat before training. It went better than the first couple of days, but not too well. I couldn't find my game with more than 2 students at a time. Still, I wasn't crashing and burning too badly, and the trainer assured me it would get easier. We got out at... 5:40 or so, and the first of my two trains back left at 6:09. The wait time between them was about 10 or 15 minutes, and I still got back at 10:00 or so. Rachel picked me up from the station (again, about 8 km from home – why?!) Went straight to bed and fell asleep.
My peculiar work schedule left me with a day off inbetween the training period and my actual work. During the interview, I let slip that my circumstances were such that, were I to be hired part-time, I would prefer working as few days as possible – full, 8-hour days, of course – in order to cut down on transportation costs. By bus, it's 960 yen one-way to/from Hiroshima, so even over the course of a 3-day work schedule this comes out to 5760 yen a week. Still cheaper than owning/renting a car, though. I can't take the train (840 yen one-way) because it transfers the costs to Rachel's gasoline budget, and because it's rough on her too. The primary advantage of the bus is that it basically leaves and arrives right in front of our apartment building, for which the cost is an acceptable tradeoff. Also, the bus pass system here (as far as I know) is such that, if you put up 1, 3, or 5000 yen, you get a 110% bus card – so 5000 yen gets me 5500 yen on the bus. Which means that it could actually cost me 5260 yen per week, compared to 5040 yen plus gasoline by train. BUT, back to what I was originally talking about, I have a Fri-Sat-Sun work schedule, and essentially get paid around what I got at Retail Lockbox. (1600 yen per lesson) x (max of 8 lessons per day) x (3 days per week) = 38,400 yen/weekend. Minus 5260, and that's 33,140 per week. We get paid monthly, and that works out to... enough for the two of us to live fairly comfortably, given the increased cost of living (this is something I'll talk about in the future).
Thursday, aside from some last-minute panic regarding my dress shirts, was uneventful – oh, and we got our Internet connection that morning. We worried about it at first, because it came with an instillation disk (my computer doesn't have a CD drive), but as it turned out, all we have to do is plug in, and we've got 100 mbps at our disposal. So yeah, things are better now.
I got to work on Friday at 1:20, left on time, and rolled into bed at around 11 PM. I still felt like my best game was in one-on-one (we call it “man-to-man”, something that doesn't quite make sense when 80~90% of our students seem to be female unless you know that “man” isn't as gender-specific in Japanese as it is in English – look up “Super Sentai” on Wikipedia and note how many of them use “-man” as a suffix), and was almost hopeless in 5-person groups. Still, I got through the day, and no one faulted me. Because I didn't have the time to do it myself, I had to ask Rachel to iron one of my shirts – she was nearly done with the second one when I got back. Actually, since I got to Hiroshima a good 3 hours early, I took my time eating an egg sandwich in a station Cafe – I've never quite had an egg sandwich like that, where the sandwich is 3 cm thick, half of which is egg. Had to scoop up more than I ate as a sandwich. Started a new story idea too, one that's been in mind for years, but until I looked up “Mobile Suit Human” on TVtropes I didn't think it was feasible – it apparently IS. W00T!
Saturday was more of the same, except I started earlier. This meant getting up earlier, but wasn't too big a deal. I talked Rachel into giving me a ride to the station – she's not a morning person like I am, so she made it very clear to me that I ought to be taking the bus – and made it to work early enough to prepare for lessons. I had to run to the station to make the early train back after work, but ended up missing it by 20 seconds or so – they'd just closed the doors when I got there, and the driver had already blown his whistle. Rachel was a little more annoyed picking me up, because it was so late, which lead me to...
...Take the bus Sunday morning to and from Hiroshima. It's bumpy and annoying and it makes it impossible to do anything other than look forward for most of it if I want to arrive not-carsick. That aside, work was a little better, and after a lesson with four higher-level students I'm finally starting to feel like I can do this job. (Because of my specific background, I'm fairly good to have around, both from a student and corporate standpoint, and I suspect that's partly why I'm even working for them now.) So I'm pretty confident, even looking forward to the job.
Also, we went to a little island off of the coast (10 minute ferry) colloquially called Miyajima (it's the right link, trust me) this past Monday the 13th. Deer walk around freely and eat paper, something one of Rachel's NZ coworkers rather amusingly confirmed – the official English site notes that “Deer may eat paper and cloth. Please be cautious of approaching deer. JR PASSES WILL NOT BE REPRINTED OR REPLACED.” We had an okay time. There's a park there, where the beach isn't a beach so much as an accumulation of broken shells and coral, and Rachel had a good time there. We took an uphill path back to the ferry dock, that felt a bit like a hike through the Olympic National Park, then made our way through a tourist-trapy souvenir village on our way to the gates – the “torii”, one of the more famous examples in Japan, as it's built on tide flats and thus has the appearance of “floating” on the water during high tide. We got our photos, waited for Rachel's coworker (he has a knack for either getting lost or somehow ending up where he isn't quite supposed to be, mostly due to his not knowing much Japanese – he's pretty good with Chinese, I understand, and can pick his way through Kanji though) then got back on the ferry and made our way home. No one at the ferry took our tickets, so we basically got a free ride back. On the island, I discovered a love for “Nikuman”, poofy steamed bread with beef in it, and learned at a mainland 7-Eleven that I was greatly overcharged for it. We had dinner at a restaurant in the Hiroshima station (Rachel's coworker couldn't join us, as he's a Vegan and can really only eat out at Buddhist/Indian restaurants, both of which are in short supply) and I made sure to get a glass Coke bottle this time. We had dessert before getting back on the train at a little station shop. My pudding came in a little glass cup, a bit larger than a shot glass and with a lid, which I kept. Rachel had cake.
I'm not a great cook, but I know how to use a stove and related appliances. We've had this “Shrimp Pilaf” more often than we probably should, but it's mild enough for Rachel to eat so we have it at least once a week. I can also make Corn Rice – eggs, corn, and rice, all fried together – and Miso-shiru/soup, so we're in no danger of starving. Sandwiches are daily fare for us now, especially when ham goes on sale, and I've been eating frozen vegetables as a snack (try it – it's pretty good, especially on a hot day). Our only problem is that, if we want something to keep, it's going to be cold the next time we eat it, since we don't have a microwave. The stove itself is the size of a largish briefcase, with a small oven intended for fish-frying, so it's the bare essentials we need. As I've said before, if you turn the gas on medium here, it's like turning an electric range to its highest and then frying a lit match in gasoline – it's freakin' powerful and the fan is adjusted accordingly.
It occurs to me that Japanese music is incredibly useful in learning how to speak it. Not so much in grammar or vocabulary, but in stress. For that, kid's music, the kind of Tokusatsu songs I listen to, is good – they can't have them learning the wrong stresses, can they? Plus, they sound good. I'm listening to Engine Sentai Go-Onger's OP far more than I should be now. I recommend it, if only for the guitar riff and horns at the beginning.
Monday the 6th started early for me. I got up at ...too early an hour to really remember. There's a site that'll calculate the fastest route by train between two locations, and because the company wasn't too thrilled to have to pay for a Shinkansen trip (at least 12,000 yen), I got to suffer 4 hours inside of the train system. Not a terrible fate, and food/restrooms are easy enough to find, but 4 hours in transit'll take something out of you, especially if it's 4 separate trains. I did eventually get to the Okayama station, and the hotel was close enough that I could leave my luggage there – except there are two Toyoko Inns near the station, and the staff had maps on hand for my benefit. I wasn't able to get into my room at the time, but they checked my luggage, so I got some lobby coffee – sorry, that should be “Lobby Coffee”, if you know the sort – and headed to the Okayama-station NOVA school. Whereas the Hiroshima-eki school had the impression of being stuffed into 2 floors, the Okayama branch felt a little more spacious (and if someone from work is reading this, I challenge you to contradict me), and actually felt like a school, albeit one with cubicles for classrooms. There were three others getting trained at the same time, two Canadians and an Aussie, the latter of which works at my branch. The first day was fairly uneventful until we tried practice lessons on actual students, and I don't think I've ever felt like I've let someone down as much as then. We got out at 9, and the hotel room turned out to be about the size of a large dorm room – the “single” picture on the website is remarkably misleading. Still, it had all the basic necessities, and I remain suitably impressed. Good Internet connection, pretty good breakfast (missing only the heavy protein I was expecting), hot water dispenser on the first floor and a boiler in the room. The bathroom was the same modular design as the one in the hotel we stayed at our first night in Japan (see below), but comfier when not sharing it with someone else.
The second day was more of the first, only with some free time in the morning. We started at 1:20, so that left me plenty of time to get some tea and eat hearty. Again, I crashed and burned during the student sessions, but felt a little better about it. Since the company picked up the hotel tab, I ended up with more money to spend than originally planned, so I had enough to eat out for each meal. I had to eat cheap, but 15~2000 yen a day isn't so bad. Got out at 9 again, went back to the room, surfed the net and went to bed.
Day three started early, at 10, so I had enough time to pack up and eat before training. It went better than the first couple of days, but not too well. I couldn't find my game with more than 2 students at a time. Still, I wasn't crashing and burning too badly, and the trainer assured me it would get easier. We got out at... 5:40 or so, and the first of my two trains back left at 6:09. The wait time between them was about 10 or 15 minutes, and I still got back at 10:00 or so. Rachel picked me up from the station (again, about 8 km from home – why?!) Went straight to bed and fell asleep.
My peculiar work schedule left me with a day off inbetween the training period and my actual work. During the interview, I let slip that my circumstances were such that, were I to be hired part-time, I would prefer working as few days as possible – full, 8-hour days, of course – in order to cut down on transportation costs. By bus, it's 960 yen one-way to/from Hiroshima, so even over the course of a 3-day work schedule this comes out to 5760 yen a week. Still cheaper than owning/renting a car, though. I can't take the train (840 yen one-way) because it transfers the costs to Rachel's gasoline budget, and because it's rough on her too. The primary advantage of the bus is that it basically leaves and arrives right in front of our apartment building, for which the cost is an acceptable tradeoff. Also, the bus pass system here (as far as I know) is such that, if you put up 1, 3, or 5000 yen, you get a 110% bus card – so 5000 yen gets me 5500 yen on the bus. Which means that it could actually cost me 5260 yen per week, compared to 5040 yen plus gasoline by train. BUT, back to what I was originally talking about, I have a Fri-Sat-Sun work schedule, and essentially get paid around what I got at Retail Lockbox. (1600 yen per lesson) x (max of 8 lessons per day) x (3 days per week) = 38,400 yen/weekend. Minus 5260, and that's 33,140 per week. We get paid monthly, and that works out to... enough for the two of us to live fairly comfortably, given the increased cost of living (this is something I'll talk about in the future).
Thursday, aside from some last-minute panic regarding my dress shirts, was uneventful – oh, and we got our Internet connection that morning. We worried about it at first, because it came with an instillation disk (my computer doesn't have a CD drive), but as it turned out, all we have to do is plug in, and we've got 100 mbps at our disposal. So yeah, things are better now.
I got to work on Friday at 1:20, left on time, and rolled into bed at around 11 PM. I still felt like my best game was in one-on-one (we call it “man-to-man”, something that doesn't quite make sense when 80~90% of our students seem to be female unless you know that “man” isn't as gender-specific in Japanese as it is in English – look up “Super Sentai” on Wikipedia and note how many of them use “-man” as a suffix), and was almost hopeless in 5-person groups. Still, I got through the day, and no one faulted me. Because I didn't have the time to do it myself, I had to ask Rachel to iron one of my shirts – she was nearly done with the second one when I got back. Actually, since I got to Hiroshima a good 3 hours early, I took my time eating an egg sandwich in a station Cafe – I've never quite had an egg sandwich like that, where the sandwich is 3 cm thick, half of which is egg. Had to scoop up more than I ate as a sandwich. Started a new story idea too, one that's been in mind for years, but until I looked up “Mobile Suit Human” on TVtropes I didn't think it was feasible – it apparently IS. W00T!
Saturday was more of the same, except I started earlier. This meant getting up earlier, but wasn't too big a deal. I talked Rachel into giving me a ride to the station – she's not a morning person like I am, so she made it very clear to me that I ought to be taking the bus – and made it to work early enough to prepare for lessons. I had to run to the station to make the early train back after work, but ended up missing it by 20 seconds or so – they'd just closed the doors when I got there, and the driver had already blown his whistle. Rachel was a little more annoyed picking me up, because it was so late, which lead me to...
...Take the bus Sunday morning to and from Hiroshima. It's bumpy and annoying and it makes it impossible to do anything other than look forward for most of it if I want to arrive not-carsick. That aside, work was a little better, and after a lesson with four higher-level students I'm finally starting to feel like I can do this job. (Because of my specific background, I'm fairly good to have around, both from a student and corporate standpoint, and I suspect that's partly why I'm even working for them now.) So I'm pretty confident, even looking forward to the job.
Also, we went to a little island off of the coast (10 minute ferry) colloquially called Miyajima (it's the right link, trust me) this past Monday the 13th. Deer walk around freely and eat paper, something one of Rachel's NZ coworkers rather amusingly confirmed – the official English site notes that “Deer may eat paper and cloth. Please be cautious of approaching deer. JR PASSES WILL NOT BE REPRINTED OR REPLACED.” We had an okay time. There's a park there, where the beach isn't a beach so much as an accumulation of broken shells and coral, and Rachel had a good time there. We took an uphill path back to the ferry dock, that felt a bit like a hike through the Olympic National Park, then made our way through a tourist-trapy souvenir village on our way to the gates – the “torii”, one of the more famous examples in Japan, as it's built on tide flats and thus has the appearance of “floating” on the water during high tide. We got our photos, waited for Rachel's coworker (he has a knack for either getting lost or somehow ending up where he isn't quite supposed to be, mostly due to his not knowing much Japanese – he's pretty good with Chinese, I understand, and can pick his way through Kanji though) then got back on the ferry and made our way home. No one at the ferry took our tickets, so we basically got a free ride back. On the island, I discovered a love for “Nikuman”, poofy steamed bread with beef in it, and learned at a mainland 7-Eleven that I was greatly overcharged for it. We had dinner at a restaurant in the Hiroshima station (Rachel's coworker couldn't join us, as he's a Vegan and can really only eat out at Buddhist/Indian restaurants, both of which are in short supply) and I made sure to get a glass Coke bottle this time. We had dessert before getting back on the train at a little station shop. My pudding came in a little glass cup, a bit larger than a shot glass and with a lid, which I kept. Rachel had cake.
I'm not a great cook, but I know how to use a stove and related appliances. We've had this “Shrimp Pilaf” more often than we probably should, but it's mild enough for Rachel to eat so we have it at least once a week. I can also make Corn Rice – eggs, corn, and rice, all fried together – and Miso-shiru/soup, so we're in no danger of starving. Sandwiches are daily fare for us now, especially when ham goes on sale, and I've been eating frozen vegetables as a snack (try it – it's pretty good, especially on a hot day). Our only problem is that, if we want something to keep, it's going to be cold the next time we eat it, since we don't have a microwave. The stove itself is the size of a largish briefcase, with a small oven intended for fish-frying, so it's the bare essentials we need. As I've said before, if you turn the gas on medium here, it's like turning an electric range to its highest and then frying a lit match in gasoline – it's freakin' powerful and the fan is adjusted accordingly.
It occurs to me that Japanese music is incredibly useful in learning how to speak it. Not so much in grammar or vocabulary, but in stress. For that, kid's music, the kind of Tokusatsu songs I listen to, is good – they can't have them learning the wrong stresses, can they? Plus, they sound good. I'm listening to Engine Sentai Go-Onger's OP far more than I should be now. I recommend it, if only for the guitar riff and horns at the beginning.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
I'm comfy. Finally!
It seems that I am comfortable now. We just got back from this “fashion store” (think Value Village, except everything is new or close to it) called Shimamura. Rachel has a new futon, so that's 4 total for us – the brown one that came with the room, the brown one we got from Jesse (tallish vegan New Zealand dude, works with Rachel) in exchange for the air mattress, the white-and-flowery one we got from Lacey+Kyle (neighbors on the first floor), and the new green one. Also picked up another comforter, because it's been kinda cold around here for a couple of days, and a couple of food-based pillows. And for me? Sweat pants and actual pajamas, the kind that look like something you'd get in a 3-star hotel. Oh, and because I spend so much time sitting in front of the computer, on a low table you sit cross-legged at, I got a “seat”. It's comfy, it's finally comfy to sit here.
Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).
I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.
Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)
Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.
And that's about it. G'night.
Rachel is sick – started getting a sore throat around Friday, had a fever yesterday, and is in no shape to do anything today (so why are we a little more comfortable...?). Still, she managed to cut my hair before her fever really kicked in, and I look a little more respectable. A little – she did it by reading about it on some website – but she did a good job for having never done something so drastic before. As you can probably tell from my style, I'm beginning to get a bit ill myself. My throat hurts a bit, but that's about it. She'll be able to go to work tomorrow, barely, and I'm starting in on my stash of Rose Hips (she refuses to drink anything but minty tea, which makes things a little difficult).
I've fallen off the AdventureQuest wagon again. I'm weak, so very weak. It's pretty fun – imagine a one-man shareware (flash) World of Warcraft with frequent tongue-in-cheek dialogue, just without the free movement – and not quite as addictive as Star Pirates. Problem is, it requires more in terms of bandwidth. It needs a regular, solid connection to play properly – even dial-up will do fine – so it's a bit hard to really get going here. Still, it only needs a connection before and after scene changes, battles, and such, so I can play around it a bit. Even after getting a new, faster compy (1.3 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM) I have to play at the lowest graphics setting, but it's not much of a drop.
Lately, I've rediscovered certain songs. Tokkei Winspector (opening theme song for the 1990 show of the same name) is good, very good. It's sung by Miyauchi Takayuki, and he's got the sort of tenor singing voice I can only dream of having. The opening guitar riff (is that what you call it?) is good enough that I'd happily listen to it looped, and I like any song that makes timely usage of the strings section. Mr. Miyauchi, unfortunately, does not have the sort of stage presence some of his fellow singers in the genre have (Mizuki Ichiro is the king of this, and probably the best-known besides), but because he has such a good voice, no one notices. (See this for him singing it 10 years after the fact, and this for the same video, only on Nicovideo. My compy actually slows down at about 1:14, one of the things that makes Nico awesome... By comparison, the original theme and title sequence.)
Eiyuu, by doa. There are a handful of Tokusatsu shows in which the opening songs contain no reference to the show (ie: no character names, no mecha names...), and Eiyuu is one of them. It was the OP to Ultraman Nexus, a failed attempt to take the franchise a step towards an older audience. The song itself is awesome, and has a music video. For some reason, I hear it and I think of Firefly, the sci-fi western.
And that's about it. G'night.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Madness? THIS IS JAPAN! *kick*
So here's what happened: between the time that I left my family home in Lynnwood early Tuesday morning, and when we rolled into the Akitakata City apartment, we were unable to find an internet connection, wireless or otherwise, due either to time or money restraints. So I typed stuff up in OpenOffice from time to time, and here it all is. You can tell how awake I was by how I write, I think.
(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.
(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.
But...
Because the first JAL flight to Narita (the main international airport) was delayed, we missed our connecting flight to Nagoya by 10 or 15 minutes, and now we're stuck with a later flight. The staff were otherwise very accommodating and got everything taken care of for us. Originally, Rachel's company over here (ALTIA) was supposed to pick us up at Nagoya, but she got into contact with them and it's all been sorted out. Someone's going to get some overtime this week, and I wish it was me. It's 5:38 PM as I type this, which means that it's 1:38 AM in Seattle, which then means that since I've been awake since 2:30 or so... Yeah, 24-hour day. I've offset it with a few hours of sleep in the to-Japan flight, but I'm exhausted.
Kung-fu Panda is better than I thought it would be. It's a Jack Black vehicle, so there's a lot of Jack Black beating, something he excels at (see Tropic Thunder, for example – I don't think there's another actor who can replace him in that role, for what it calls for, and for that he's a little underrated). I liked that Po the Panda isn't a terribly good martial artist, but wins the final battle by mostly not fighting the bad guy directly – he has to play keep-away, which he turns out to be very good at. That, and the idea that the other anthro artists have very specific styles that are ineffective in the end – Po's style relies heavily on his bulky, durable physique rather than pure speed or strength, which throws everyone off. The animation is good and fluid.
Iron Man is still as cool as I remember it. The pounding music especially. And that scene where he slaps a dude into a second story wall? Priceless.
(8/22 Thur, 6 AM) And now I'm in the hotel in Nagoya. Happily, I didn't have to hork out the airplane food. After getting off the delayed flight, I discovered that they stamped my passport with a freakin' DEPARTURE stamp at Narita, which lead to a 10 minute delay at Customs. We ended up at the Kinyama Plaza Hotel at 9 PM last night, and fell into bed. Now that I've had time to look around the tiny business-style room...
The bathroom is the most striking – it's a self-contained tiny fiberglass room about two inches off the room floor (to make space for the floor drain?) with a high door jam. The sink faucet doubles as the bath/shower faucet (meaning that, if you try to wash your hands with hot water, you instead get OMG HOT! water), and the toilet is typically Japanese, with two separate flush amounts, heated seat, 'shower' and bidet. (The bath/shower is deep enough for me to sit, knees on chest, up to my chin in water, and the shower is detachable.)
The room has an AC the size of a card table in the ceiling – thankfully, as the temp is routinely 90 F around here during the summer – and a thermos of ice water. I've got pictures (fun fact: the gap in the toilet is just big enough to accidentally drop a hotel toothbrush down). The TV gets one free News channel and four pay-with-a-dispensed-card channels. There's a tiny fridge about the size of a computer monitor, and our beds each came with a yukata. As far as I can tell, there's no internet – we
Rachel received a phone as part of her job. The menus are less intuitive than you'd think, even in English.
(8/21 Thur 7:30 AM) We went out for breakfast at a Circle K 'Konbini' (shortened from 'convenience'). Japan takes its Convenience stores seriously, by the way: they sell video games and battery powered shavers, but most importantly, food. We got a small pile of onigiri (rice balls containing something like salmon or such, wrapped in nori, seaweed) and a couple of sandwiches; cucumber + ham + a little 'onion salad' = delicious. The onigiri were 105 yen a pop, the sandwiches were 250 yen, and Rachel's 500 ml of orange juice (paper container) came to 116 yen – breakfast cost us 1300 yen (plus more for the shaver). Not bad, I think that's about $12.
Japanese addresses are FUN. That Circle K is located at “Aichi Prefecture, Nagoya City, Central District, Masaki third-neighborhood, fifth, lot ten”.
We'll be taking a train to Hiroshima soon.
(8/21 Thur 10:40 AM) No, we'll be taking the damn subway to Nagoya first. Sigh. We left the hotel at 8:00 with a couple of other ALTs with ALTIA – one from D.C. and one from New Zealand – and made our way to the local station (Kinyama, I think). We got there at 9. What should have been a fairly easy trip was exasperated by a) heavy luggage b) rush hour subway traffic c) inexperience with the Japanese rail system and d) plain ol' miscommunication. I brought a full computer bag (old school type – you could carry around a thin client in it and have plenty of space) a full backpack (too full – wouldn't easily fit under any plane seat) and a large (<70>
Which leads to the subway traffic. Japan's subway rush hour is infamous, and I'm sure the locals have 20 different metaphors and similes for it. We actually lucked out in this respect, catching what seemed to be the tail end of it. I actually stepped on a guy's foot while trying to get my bags on board, and he was cool about it, seeing our predicament (three foreigners and ...me, all carrying bags). And eventually we found our way to the right station.
Well. It's not exactly a different station, as you can get to the Shinkansen platforms without leaving the station... but since there wasn't a map, and my companions were not terribly at ease asking for directions, I ended up asking. It's a different line, completely different – it's like getting off a plane and trying to board a boat (which you can actually do in the Nagoya airport). They all had tickets, but somehow the ALTIA people didn't know I was coming, and 14,010 yen later I was running with the rest of them to catch the train.
And the miscommunication... the guy was waiting for us at a clock in the station, in front of the Shinkansen ticket sales area, which we couldn't find. But I'm writing this on the train, so it worked out.
I bought some lunches (bento boxes) and apparently they're 1200 calories (depicted as 'kcal' – kilocalories – here) each. Sounds good. They're cheaper to buy in the station, on the platform actually, by a couple hundred yen.
(8/21 Thur 11:45 AM) Welp, just had lunch. The sauce was the sweet kind you put on pork, but they poured it on. And the best thing? These eki-ben ('station bento'), or this one at least, was actually _branded _ 'eki-ben'.
It's the little things that stick out in a foreign country (like, for example, what they call a 'quarter pounder with cheese'... I need to find out what that's called here, actually). The easiest example is probably the vending machines (jidou-hanbaiki – 'automated vending machines', however redundant that may seem), especially since they're so different. In the states, emphasis is placed more on the brand, Cokc or Pepsi or maybe bottled water, than the actual drinks themselves. In Japan, the sodas drink YOU... er, no (actually, there was a Pepsi truck version of Optimus Prime...). The style seems to be to let the drinks, or other dispensables (if you can name it, there's probably a vending machine for it somewhere), speak for themselves – if they major companies need ad space, they can get it elsewhere... and it will be at least a building tall and in neon.
But back to the train. The Shinkansen, the famous 'bullet trains' (personified by the 300-line), are at least as expensive as a plane flight, but with the advantages and drawbacks of trains. If you want the scenic route, then by all means yes, the Shinkansen is for you. If you want to get there without stopping every 20 minutes, then maybe not. There's no real reason to buy lunch on board – they're more expensive than the eki-ben generally – but it's part of the experience. Taking it, you see very quickly and easily how Japanese towns are set up. They're cramped. The houses mostly don't have yards (which, on the flip side, means less need to mow the lawn) and the apartment buildings are built up, not out, to the point that the stairwells are often exposed and have the appearance of being 'attached' to the side of the building. Not sure if that's more or less reason to know your neighbors. Japan being famously earthquake prone, there are no hill-mounted townhouses like you'd find in Seattle or San Francisco (I think? never been there). And if there's no reason to build on a hill, there's no reason to raze the trees on it, so since 10:15 we've seen lots of trees – it looks, in places like I-5 before Bellingham. I need to get ready to leave.
(8/22 Fri 4:08 AM) Yay insomnia! No, I've actually adjusted pretty well to the new hours here, and I think it's because of that night shift I worked at QFC – biggest mistake of my life at the time, but hey, my body seems to have learned something from it. I'm sitting in the new apartment right now, and it's a weird feeling. It was 'unfurnished' when we got here (meaning that the only things it came with were the kitchen and bathroom sinks) but Rachel's work set up a gas stove (two flames and a fish-frying itty-bitty oven) and a fridge (comes up to my shoulder, wide as my shoulders). We have gas and electricity and water. The WiFi is currently being stolen from a neighbor who inexplicably left their connection unguarded and named a 12-digit set of numbers. They also gave us two light fixtures, which work out to being two really bright fluorescent rings and a tiny 'night lamp' in the middle.
The town itself is small and kinda in the sticks. Akitakata 'City' is about an hour's drive from the Hiroshima Shinkansen station, during which we passed many, many rice fields on plots about the size of an average house – planted in between houses, as a matter of fact. Land is apparently cheaper out here, and farming is more profitable than in the states thanks to price controls and Japan-produced quotas, so we saw some ridiculously large houses here and there. Like, not big by Japanese standards (and they were), but American mansion-sized. Not much of a yard, though, as always.
We are on the third story, and there's a fairly large balcony two rooms wide by a my shoulder and a half length long, with bars for clothes and futon drying. The complex was built a plot away from what we would think of as a drugstore, called 'Wants' – yes, really, in English and Japanese. They have a big lit-up sign that goes out after they close – a nice change from f-ing Best Buy, where I could almost read by their sign's light at night, back in the old apartment. The apartment has 3 12 ft. by 7 ft. (or so) rooms, a dining table sort of room (10 by 10?), a kitchen (with a freakishly low doorway – my head clears it by 2 inches), a bathroom (same sort of bath as the hotel, but with its own room separate from the toilet and sink), a toilet (no seat amenities but with the common feature of having a 'sink' at the top of the tank, so that the water comes out of a faucet before going into the tank proper through the drain – again, separate from any actual sink), three assorted closets, and a gas system that talks to us. If we want more hot water for the bath (this is Japan, where the bath is a sort of tiny god) we press a button on a panel in the wall, it talks to us about it, and presto, hot(ter) water. Overall, it's bigger than our last apartment, something of a shock to me seeing as how the rent is lower. The floors are linoleum in a wood-paneled scheme, and they don't creak. At all. Happily, the electrical outlets are polarized 2-prongs, with a few 3-prongs tossed in here and there (although, in this room, the one 3-prong is just high enough off the ground that, if I plug in my laptop adapter, it'll hang just above the floor), so the adapters Rachel brought fit (and laptop power adapters are built with variable Watts and Amps in mind). The room we're using to sleep in has a screen door and a typically Japanese-intelligent AC/heater, which is nice.
I think that'll do for now. I am actually tired, and I'll get some photos up soon. So yeah, we're here, we're safe. Also, one interesting feature about the roads out here is that there aren't many street lights – I look out into the dark, and all I can really see are house lights and some blinking red construction marker lights. It's different and a little creepy.
Upcoming posts: Ritualized Japanese speech, Shopping in Japan, Cars in Japan, little annoyances, culture shock, food, etc.
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