I am back from my whirlwind Canadian adventure, without much to say about it. It was great seeing friends and family, Montreal is as amazing as it always seems, Toronto is still the last place I would ever want to live, and Ottawa offers the same comfort that it always does, with me moping about my departure for days despite (or because) not doing anything productive for the majority of the time there. It was interesting seeing people and talking a bit about my past eight months here. Living in Japan, being surrounded by either people who have lived here their whole lives or are experiencing the same expat existence as me, it is easy to forget that most people can't read katakana or have no idea what a Japanese school is like. I will try to be better and actually explain what the Japanese experience is, from the scenery that surrounds me to the random events that occur from week to week, but I wouldn't be surprised if I completely forget this promise during the next month that it takes me to update again. Your best bet is to email me, or comment here about what you want me to say. I think I changed the comments settings so you don't need to have an account to post.

Hopefully my next post will be about the beginnings of the new school (and fiscal) year. I would write about it now, but we had the town welcome party for the new teachers at all the schools, and as a result my car has been stranded in the community centre parking lot. Tomorrow morning I must wake up early and claim it.

AAAAAARG

Aaaaaarg. I am kicking myself today for being silly last week. I did not go into work on Friday since I was feeling ill, and I assumed that I could take a sick day, and not a vacation day for it. However, since I did not get a doctor's note, that is not the case. So I have less vacation days left than I originally thought, which sucks since I like vacation! And I could have secretly taken more but I am too earnest and honest and not sneaky or cunning or forward thinking enough! And so aaaaarg!

On Friday, when I was home in my futon wasting a vacation day, the doorbell rang. Thinking it was my office bringing me food since they felt bad for me, I answered it. It was not my office. It was my new next door neighbours and their extended family, or at least I think so. They gave me a box of detergent. I think it's customary to give gifts to your neighbours when you move to a new place. When I moved in, the attached bungalow beside me was empty, but a single dude with glasses and lots of green pants moved in sometime in November. He rang my doorbell one evening a few weeks after he moved and gave me a raisin cake. I took too long to open it and when I did it was gross. Not that I like raisins anyway. Then one day in January I came home to find a giant van blocking my parking dirt. My neighbour apologized and said a bunch of stuff that I didn't understand but I didn't think much of it, just that he was bringing in furniture that he just got. Alas, that was the last I saw of him. Maybe my singing and talking to myself scared him off. I hope it will do the same to these new neighbours, who could be anyone from a seventy year old man, a thirty something dude or a twenty something lady. Hopefully all three, because the place is so small that they'll want to leave sooner. And not block my spot, which is on the side of a cliff, if I didn't mention before (although for story purposes I may be embellishing a bit). I don't like them much to begin with, but maybe it's because they made me get out of bed and brought me bad detergent and I think were disgusted by the state of my flat. But why would anyone give detergent as a gift to an already residing tenant anyways? I could understand if I was just moving in, because I would need detergent, but I do wash my clothes and I mistakenly bought extra detergent when I already had some so now I have three boxes and I hate them all.

Which brings me to the laundry paragraph. Maybe because I'm about to go home, or this upsetting office surprise, or that last week was terribly terribly cold after a previous warm spell would have had me believe that the frozen toes and seeing my breath inside while the heat's on spell was over, but I'm in a complaining mood. This is not one of those charming animals entries, although tomorrow I may write about the wonderful kids at school that I love. But now on to laundry machines, and detergent, and why my clothes have not been properly cleaned in seven and a half months.

My washing machine, a standard model found in most homes, is terrible. It does the exact opposite of what a competent washing machine should. It doesn't actually succeed in successfully cleaning clothes, yet, somehow, it will destroy them. Every single time. My washing machine does not have a hot water option. All clothes are washed in cold water. Liquid detergent is hard to come by, and I'm adopting the Japanese habit of mottanai by not wasting what I have, so I have (now) three boxes of crap detergent to use up. It's crap because stained clothes stay stained, and those that weren't stained become so, with streaks of white detergent that don't disappear. Tomorrow is graduation day and I can't wear my nice pants because of said streaks. Nor can I wear my nice white shirt, because it's no longer nice and white. Somehow, despite the lack of hot water, a certain red tank top manages to stain all my white and grey clothes, this despite it having been washed numerous times in useful washing machines for the past two years.

So that is partially why I hate my washing machine, and why I (ir)rationally hate my new neighbours. This diatribe is already too long, and I no longer feel so grouchy.

In the continuing theme of bad grammar and mislabeled dates, in my last entry it looks like I say that my half birthday was on February 16th. That is wrong. It was on the 15^th. I swear I know when my own birthday is, although Blogger will have you believe otherwise.

I feel like since I didn’t do anything recently that involved seeing tame wild animals this entry will be boring. I guess the most noteworthy thing was that I booked a ticket back to Canada. I will be visiting in late March, and I plan on eating a lot of bagels and smoked salmon, drinking club soda, and going to every used English book store.　　Maybe seeing some friends and family too, if bagel-eating time permits.

Since life these past weeks has had that weird feeling of just waiting for something to happen, I will write a bit about school life. Things are going well. The school year, which begins in April in Japan, is closely coming to an end. Tomorrow is the last day of classes for the third year junior high school students. Next week they will write various high school entrance examinations and then in the following week will be the graduation ceremony. There is so much pressure on these kids to do well, and I really feel for them. One of the English teachers was telling me that normally the girls don’t eat a lot, but with the stress of the past tests and the upcoming ones, they are now eating a ton. I didn’t really believe her, but you can definitely see on some of them a noticeable weight gain. As if they don’t have enough to worry about.

Today was the last class with the good elective English class. There are two elective English classes, and for some reason the one on Tuesday is filled with a ton of boys who don’t actually like English. I think they all colluded to take the class together, and it can be pretty painful. But the Thursday class is amazing. It’s mostly girls, but the boys that are in it are awesome. For the last class, Iyo, the teacher, made them bilingual certificates of completion, with a class picture on the right hand side and the student’s written future goal on the left. I had to write their names in hiragana on their certificates, and took the time to read their dreams. Many of the girls had written that their dream was to pass the exam, or to be a beautician or a designer or a careworker, with a smattering of ‘My dream is to make a dream come true’ and my favourite, ‘To go to the Bump of Chicken’s concert’. The boys’s mostly the same. One boy wants to be a diplomat, a couple want to be a public employee or a ‘salaried man’, but there were two that really made me laugh. One kid wrote, in neon yellow highlighter, that his dream is to ‘Go to the sun and finish my life’. I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out if he’s suicidal, or if he just really wants to be an astronaut. I know if the answer is the former, then it shouldn’t be this funny, but I can’t help it. It was just so unexpected, and I just love goth undertones.

The second dream to make me laugh is a bit simpler. This kid, Ryuu, who had been one of my favourites since the beginning, wrote that his dream is to ‘be a burglar’. I’m cracking up just writing that. I can’t think of how he would know the word burglar without having looked it up, since I don’t think the New Crown textbooks really cover that line of work. When I told Iyo about this, she just shrugged it off and said that Ryuu really likes naughty English. My friend Carolyn and I, during our week long Japanese course in September, then again at mid-year in November, would think of dirty pick up lines and translate them into terrible incomprehensible Japanese. So basically Ryuu and I have the same sense of humour and maturity level, except that I’m not a male fourteen year old junior high school student.

Aaahhhh!!

It's been too long without a post, so though it's past my bedtime and I have yet to accomplish any of the things I set out to do today, I will write a short update.

Today is my half birthday! I always liked my half birthday better than my actual birthday mostly because I tend to not be disappointed on this day and I like that it's the day after Valentine's so if you go to the store chocolate is on sale. Although I didn't eat any chocolate today it was a good day. Mostly because I remember my birthday six months ago and looking back I can see how much I and my situation have changed. In a good way. Also, today is fairly cold, but in the good getting warmer sense of the temperature, and six months ago it was still too hot and uncomforatble in the evenings.

I went to Kyoto this past weekend! I took a ferry with a friend from Shibushi, a port town on the east coast of Kagoshima. The overnight ferry took about 15 hours, but we were given futons and blankets and there was a hot spring on board so the time passed fairly quickly. It helps now that I sleep regularly on a futon. I have to admit that the thing I probably miss the most from home would be the amazing bed I had in Halifax, but I do appreciate this sleeping on the floor on futons if only for the fact that now I am a much more flexible and comfortable traveller.

Kyoto was pretty awesome. I met my friend Tim and we went to a bunch of temples and wandered around together. There are some pictures that you can find through his blog, which is linked in my last post. I thought the Golden Pavillion would be overrated, but it is not. It was awesome and amazing and very beautiful. We also saw a geisha, or at least a meiko (I think), which is an apprentice geisha. We were walking on this narrow old fashioned street behind her, and there was this huge crowd of tourists on the other side of the street taking pictures. It was a little crazy. We also ate at this delicious middle eastern restaurant, which was worth braving the rain and the little snow to get to.

It snowed in Chiran! This happened a couple of weeks ago, and it lasted for all but 5 hours, but it was beautiful while it did. I got to school to see that a bunch of students made snowmen. Snowmen in Japan are two-tiered, not three like back home. Very strange, but I guess they don't have as much snow as we do in Canada.

Last week I had a comparatives lesson with my favourite second-year junior high class. One student came up with the sentence 'Michael Jackson has the whitest skin in the world.' To all of you not living in Japan, trust me, this is much more impressive than you think.

Off to bed!

Am I updating twice in two days?

Actually, not really. But as this has become the only place where I consistently write in, I will now produce a short form, maybe list, of the activities I have done since this new year:

l I saw horses! Wild horses! And monkeys! On a monkey island! A few weekends ago, I went to Miyazaki with some friends. We went to Cape Toi, which is home of the wild horses, who are, much as most things claimed to be famous by the Japanese, not actually wild. Well, they let us touch them. And don’t do much. And have really fat stomachs but really skinny legs. I don’t remember the name of the monkey island, but I think the monkeys on it are supposed to be very smart as they wash their potatoes before eating them. However, the dude that drove the boat that took us to Monkey Island said that they just did it once, and it was in front of a television camera. Nevertheless, we saw a bunch of monkeys, who immediately swarmed us as we stepped onto Monkey Island. There was a mother monkey nursing her young! There was an adolescent monkey sucking on clams! I took a bunch of photos with my cell phone, but I don’t know nor do I plan on learning how to upload pictures here. So you will just have to imagine the awesomeness of Monkey Island.

l On the same trip, we also went to a cool shrine that’s built partially into a cave/mountain, and we ate in both a Rastafarian and a Middle Eastern restaurant. And this is why Miyazaki may be the most awesome place in all of Japan. It’s gorgeous, has a beautiful coastline that attracts surfers from all over the world, which is probably why people there seem more laidback and able to break free from the required norm unlike in other places, has delicious food, is warmer than Chiran in the winter, has at least one Israeli living in the city (shakshuka! Shwarma! ), plus the aforementioned wild horses and Monkey Island. Oh! I forgot to say that we also saw monkeys all along the road as we were driving. So not only is there a monkey island, there are monkeys just hanging everywhere! I kind of dislike monkeys as they’re pretty creepy and capable of terrible evils, but I think we can all agree that seeing random monkeys whose habitat in every other place I’ve been has been zoos just chilling is pretty awesome.

l This weekend I went ice skating! We went to an ice skating rink in Ebino Plateau (or Ebino Tableland, as the signs read) which is also technically (maybe) in Miyazaki. It was in Kirishima National Park, which is in both prefectures. At first it was very very cold, and I could see dustings of snow on the mountains in the distance. But then we started skating, and it was the perfect temperature. I forgot how much I used to love ice skating. I think it was the first time I skated without having my toes feel like they would fall off. I also managed to do some crossovers (or “Leg-Over-Leg”s, which is a much better name in my opinion), which I don’t think I ever could despite the skating lessons I used to take. It also snowed a little while on ice, which made me nostalgic for the winters of home and the beauty of the first snowfall before everything becomes grey and a nuisance. It was a very nice day, in a very nice weekend.

l Today I was at one of my favourite elementary schools and after one of the best school lunches ever I was treated to a concert by the 3^rd and 4^th graders with whom I had been eating. They played a song called the Bumblebee Something on these little handheld keyboards that have tube attached that they breathe into. I have no idea what it’s actually called, but it’s awesome. Then they played another song with some of the kids now on recorders and one on an actual electric piano. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen, and I really wish I could have recorded it. It is things like this that make me love my job.

l I have decided to recontract. Last week I signed the papers, and today it was made official. I am staying in Chiran for another year!

Now I am off to a late dinner.

On to Part Two...

Again with the honesty, this is probably going to be short since I don't know if there's much to say about Tokyo. I know that statement sounds ridiculous, but after living in Japan for five months, the novelty of what makes Tokyo more than any other big city has worn off. I'm used to the unreadable signs, the blinking lights, the ugly concrete buildings. There's more than that to the city, but what made it so utterly foreign and overwhelming those first few days in August turned normal by December.

So what did we do? For starters, Tokyo Disney! Actually, Tokyo Disney Sea, which is different from Tokyo Disneyland. I think it’s supposed to catered more to adults. We went on Christmas Day, which in Japan is a holiday for couples. So it was me and Tami, the two Canadians wearing multiple layers of long underwear and scarves, surrounded by women wearing the smallest mini skirts and the highest heels accompanied by their boyfriends in matching Mickey Mouse hats. And that’s all that needs to be said about Disney.

The next day, we ventured to Tokyo proper. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain all day. So besides walking to a tiny shrine and to a Hello Kitty store, we mostly stayed indoors and underground in Shinjuku station. I did buy a pair of sequined green high heels, so the day was not a complete waste. The remaining days in Tokyo proved to be beautiful, and we spent most of the time walking around various areas and window shopping. I found an amazing used book store in Ebisu, took a picture of the Saigo Takamori statue in Ueno Park, got a haircut in Shibuya, and ate a donair in Harajuku.

Throughout the trip, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of foreigners. In Kagoshima, whenever I would see a fellow gaijin, I’d stare at them and try to figure out if I know them, or start up conversations. I feel like many of the foreigners I saw in Tokyo were fellow workers in other more rural parts of Japan, because there would often be the stare and the gawk but a definite attempt to conceal this action. It was right weird.

A few days before New Years, our friend Tim at www.japants.blogspot.com came up from Hyogo-ken to spend a few days with us. We met up with another Ottawa friend in Tokyo, and wandered around Meiji Shrine, Ginza, and Harajuku of the aforementioned donair fame. Meiji Shrine was really cool, but I bought a fortune for 100 Yen, which turned out to be bad! I don’t remember what it said because it was shocking and a little upsetting. Half in English, it just listed all the terrible things that may or may not happen, and that I should not leave my house ever again, and while at it, throw out all sharp objects in case something cuts my ear off in a freak accident. Okay, the last part was not actually written, but it was definitely inferred.

The three of us were planning on going out for New Years, but couldn’t find anything that looked worth staying out all night for and was not overpriced. So we headed back to Shibayama, where we were planning on going to a shrine at midnight. But then it got really cold so we stayed in and watched Back to the Future and The Goonies, both which I had never seen and now feel like I missed out on a lot in my childhood.

The coolest thing we did in Tokyo, and probably the only real cultural thing besides the bad luck shrine, was visit the Imperial Palace. The grounds are only open two days a year, on the Emperor’s birthday and on the 2^nd of January. There were a ton of people there, but the lines were super efficient, with different security checkpoint for bags and bodies. Then we walked in an orderly fashion to the front of the palace, which was a bit underwhelming, where we waited with a bunch of people for the emperor and his family to come to the balcony and wave. Oh! I forgot. We were also given paper Japanese flags, and when the family came out, everyone madly waved their flags and all you could see was little red circles and all you could hear was the whooshing of the wind against the paper.

And that’s that about Tokyo. Tami came back to Kagoshima with me, where we did a bunch of touristy stuff even though it rained the whole time she was here. I also introduced her to the wonders of Joyfull, but that may have to wait for another entry.

Winter Vacation Adventures, part 1

Well, I'm not going to lie. You all know I'm terrible at updating, and I'm going to admit now that the main reason I continue to do so is that the few emails I receive stoke my ego. My desire to see the red dots on the Clustr map to the right spread and multiply also helps. Also, since I'm absolutely shit at remembering to bring my camera anywhere with me I feel like I should have some means of recording this adventure for posterity.

So I guess I should update about these past few weeks:

The issue with my car has for all extents and purposes been resolved. The dude called my Board of Education, who then came to my main school the next day to have me sign a bunch of papers I didn't understand to have the insurance pay for it. Then I cried because I had no idea what was going on and missed my mom and felt sorry for myself and came home early and took a nap and forestalled packing. The Friday was awesome because there were no classes but we did have to stand on the cold floors of the auditorium/gym for closing ceremonies of the second (Autumn) semester. I ate lunch with my teachers at my favourite sushi place, where I managed to drop half a sushi chunk of rice on my lap. I believe this was my first ever Japanese chopsticks spill, and I blame it on the tough piece of unknown fish eaten.

That evening, we had our junior high school Bonenkai (end of the year party) at this ryokan (Japanese inn/restaurant) whose former proprietress was a surrogate mother to many of the kamikaze pilots. There were pictures and model planes all over. The food was pretty delicious. The teachers in charge of the planning made a top ten list of events of the past year, on which my arrival was number six. As I was sitting blank faced in my own little daydream for the previous four entries, I had to be informed twice of this and then was forced to make a speech, which basically was 'Ugh...these past few months have been very interesting. This food is tasty. Ugh....thank you.' and then I sat down. We also played a bingo form of Secret Santa. I got a really cute mug and table mat, and my purchased gift of a Takoyaki (fried octopus balls) maker was won by the eminent Kyoto-sensei (vice principal) himself. I don't think he liked it. But at least he didn't win a Kitty-chan (Hello Kitty) vacuum cleaner like Kocho-sensei (the ultimate principal), who tried to pawn it off on me. Then I went home while everyone else continued on to karaoke. I had to pack for my next adventure: Tokyo!

I woke up early Saturday morning to an unpleasant surprise: frost on my car windows! I was already a little late to meet my friend whose house I would be parking my car at while in Tokyo, so I hurriedly scraped some ice off with a random cassette tape holder found in the car and anxiously sped off towards the freeway. As I was leaving my sad excuse for a driveway, I hit the left side of my Daihatsu on this concrete block that indicates the sidewalk. There was a loud scraping sound as I rushed to get out, which I later saw was the sound of my left floodlight being pushed up into itself and its frame being pushed out. As nothing broke, and I don't even know how to use the floodlights, I'm not stressing this, although I can't say I'm too proud of my two accidents in the span of less than 60 hours.

Nevertheless, I arrived to meet my friend and got to the airport with time to spare. After buying some omeyage for Tami, the friend I was meeting in Tokyo, I boarded the plane and proceeded to pass out for the entire flight. From Haneda, the airport in Tokyo used primarily for domestic flights, I took a bus to Narita, the international airport about an hour and half outside of central Tokyo where Tami happens to live. Unfortunately, although I was a bit early, Tami emailed me to let me know that she was in the hospital! She had a stomach flu, and her overeager office took her to the hospital to get an IV. I would have bussed to her house, but as I had no idea where she lived I chose to wait a bit until she got out. In the mean time, I busied myself gawking at all the foreigners in the airport, browsing the magazines and books, looking at all the different Tokyo Hello Kitty cell phone charms, and buying a face mask.

I don't think I mentioned the prevalence of the face mask. The first time I encountered one was at Matsugaura elementary school, where I scrambled in late to my first morning class to see 10 six and seven year olds, half of them with their mouths and noses covered by these surgical-like masks. I wondered if there was an epidemic that I wasn't told about, but it's just the kids' (or their mothers') protection against common winter air born viruses. Actually, I'm not sure if the kids wearing the masks were sick or just germaphobes, but in any case it was a weird sight.

So, though Tami was just hospitalized, we talked and she told me that she was feeling much better. In any case, she suggested I buy a face mask to protect myself from whatever thing she had. So I did, and wandered about the arrivals area of Narita wearing this thing and waiting for Tami. Although in the next week I would see thousands of people wearing facemasks, I'm pretty sure I'm the only non-Japanese person to ever do so. It would explain the strange looks I was getting, from tourists and natives alike. So Tami picked me up and we drove to her place, in a little town called Shibayama that's famous for their creepy ceramic life-like tiny people statues.

I think it's a universal JET fact that anytime one JET enters another JETs apartment, the former experiences some form of housing envy. Since almost all JETs have no choice in their living arrangements, which are chosen by each JETs contracting organization (or town), the housing varies considerably. While I live in a drafty tiny apartment with virtually no kitchen and a bedroom smaller than my bathroom, Tami lives in a freestanding house with a massive kitchen and two large rooms. She also lives about an hour from a Costco, so her kitchen was stocked with some Western favourites, like brownie mix (she has an oven!) and taco seasoning. Well, some of my Western favourites, at least. She also has nice dishes and no clutter from her predecessor, as well as an awesome heating system in both bedrooms, so of course I wanted to kill her and take over her identity in order to live in her swank house. But as she was graciously putting me up for the next ten days, I decided not to.