Nihon Gaijin

Ah, it must be tuesday!

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 03:46:39 GMT

I always seem to post on tuesdays. That is probably because tuesday is my laziest day. I'm sat in my Elem, killing time because I found out when I turned up that 2 of my lessons had been cancelled. Thanks for the heads up, people. So now I have to find enough stuff to entertain myself between 8:20am and 5pm, with only 1:40 hours of actual stuff to do. Hence the postage on lj. It's not like I could even do any work. My work is all up in my JHS (which I found out the other day has the charming nickname Hayachu. Yes. I work in a bizarre and as yet undiscovered evolution of Pikachu.) I've already played myself out on my DS. I have a fair amount of fanfic to catch up on courtesy of lack of home internets, so that'll probably be next. OH YES!!! I'm getting connected to the internets on 10th October. I will be back in the world of the technologically able. I desperately need to download the final two episodes of the last season of Doctor Who, so that'll be a good first test of my new, shit-off-shovelMbps internets. I will be having dreams about internet until next week. It's been so long.....

I have come to the conclusion that whoever was dishing out the brains to the hayashima boys, they should probably be fired. Because they, simply put, are morons. In a hysterically funny way, mind you. One kid, managed to knock his pencil case off his desk, a few pencils fell out. He picks it all up, puts it back in the case, and then not 2 seconds later, does it again. Except this time was a pencil case explosion. Pens, pencils and other assorted crap goes everywhere. I could not help but laugh hysterically, completely involutarily. Then, this bright spark decides, because he apparently has the common sense of a small pea, that he will just lean down and pick everything up. Except, he overbalances and ends up, arse still on the chair, balancing by his head on the floor, surrounded by the remains of his pencil case explosion. I am most definitely not surrounded by genius.

Fuji and the YMCA....

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 07:01:13 GMT

I climbed Mt Fuji on the weekend. Hells yes. Praise and reverence accepted gratefully ~~aka. WORSHIP AT MY FEET, BITCHES!!~~ It was hard work and the top of Fuji is less "Ooh, amazingly beautiful mountain!", more "I feel tremendous sympathy for the Martians and/or Clangers." Describing it as barren would be a kindness. Still pretty cool though. Afterwards there was naked bathing, because the Japanese love that kind of thing. I feel I now know my fellow female ALTs exceptionally well, having seen a whole bunch of them butt nakie. It's amazing how no-one ever breaks eye contact in that situation. You should try it sometime, it's hilariously good fun.
Oh, and the YMCA thing. I was teaching "You look happy/sad/angry" etc and one of their vocab words was 'young'. After they learnt the phrase we played a sort of charades where one of the group did a mime and the other players had to say the corresponding phrase. Well, the gesture one bright spark came up with for "You look young." was doing the village people YMCA dance. I cracked up laughing, but didn't have the heart to expand their vocab to include "You look gay."

One mad weekend and an enkai.....

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:31:13 GMT

Dear. God. That's about all I can say about the weekend just gone. It was a long weekend with a holiday on the Monday, but I got even less sleep than normal. First I had to work on Saturday for the school sports day, of which I have loads of photos, so when I finally have internets at home (which is coming closer to being more than an impossible dream) I will be able to show you video and pics of Japanese schoolchildren fighting each other to the death over bits of bamboo and pretending to be mukade. Good times. I didn't have a race, so basically I was a glorified cheerleader, but it was a laugh. After sports day, I had my first enkai. Basically, the Japanese love to drink until they fall over, and make drunken speeches, and sing karaoke. I had to make a speech, since it was technically my welcome party. I was drunk, and they cheered when I said 'konbanwa' because any attempt to speak Japanese by me is met with "SUGOI! SUGOI!" and other obviously untrue flattery. My Japanese is appalling, although I now know how to tell people that I or someone else has drunk too much and would very much like to go talk to god on the big white telephone, which will always come in handy. There was karaoke, and there was drunken stumbling around Kurashiki. There was also the 5 teachers, including myself, who skipped down a main road arm in arm, and who rubbed kyoto-sensei's head for good luck.......

"Yochien" translates approximately as "Barely Controlled Madness"

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:56:40 GMT

Well, that's a close enough translation. Today I worked at one of my kindergartens (yochien) and, damn, those kids are loud. I am exhausted from 4 year olds screeching "SENSEI!! SENSEI!!! ISSHO NI ASOBU!!!!111!" and dragging me in the direction of their chosen form of play, up to and including making mud pies in the sand pit. But now I am lazing in the staffroom of my JHS, since the yochien finishes at 2pm and I work till 5. Chill out time, since there's nowt for me to do on a tuesday after my visit school. I have two JHS lessons tomorrow, but all the worksheets and so on and so forth are in a folder on my desk. Now I just have to actually get into my normal schedule and start teaching some Engrish rather than just introducting me and Scotland. I've lost count of the number of times I've done my jiko shokai......

Dude, I need better internet access....

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:30:14 GMT

Well, hi there! It's been a while since I posted, but I've been busy. Well, that's not strictly true of any day but today, but I haven't had great internet access.
Today has been awesome. First day I actually had to team teach lessons today, but not in my normal junior high. I was in my elementary today, and the kids are awesome, but have waaaaay too much energy. I have a feeling I will go home and sleep for approximately a week. It doesn't help that it's hotter than the proverbial hell today, with a helpful zero cloud cover. Hiding out in the staffroom at the moment, because as always, it's the only place with aircon and a freezer to stick my head in. Today I was teaching "I like ice cream." and I have the feeling that 4 lessons worth of suggestion may just drive me into the freezer section at the conbini for some haagen daaz.
Anyway, must go, am being hounded by teachers attempting to decipher what I'm doing. That's one thing about a country where next to no-one has a decent command of the language - you can do pretty much what you like on the internets, and nobody has any clue what you're up to.

Tokyo, baby, yeah!

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 10:21:59 GMT

As I sit here in my extremely shiny hotel room with free internets in the middle of Shinjuku in Tokyo, my life is good. Just the difficult decision of where to go for dinner.... There will be pictures soon :D

Gah...

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 17:05:55 GMT

I still haven't had anything from my contracting organisation. I'm gonna need to put a redirection on my mail in case it comes after I've left - I'm moving down to Wales next Sunday because my contract on the lease doesn't cover July. Bummer. If it did, I could have avoided any of this needless moving around...

sulk

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:41:27 GMT

Another day passes without hearing anything from my contracting organisation. I'm trying to be patient, but when other people are hearing from their contracting organisations about their apartment, rent and all that other exciting stuff, it's hard. Even an email from them would be nice. Maybe they're just taking extra long to put together an awesome welcome pack. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking....

Hayashima

Sun, 27 May 2007 19:18:37 GMT

So, yeah, I keep harping on about this place, but it is kind of the point of this journal. Anyway, it's 62 days until I leave for Japan! Awesomesauce. I'm leaving on 28th July, and although it seems forever away atm, it really isn't that long. I should get one of those counter things, like this one I just went away and made:

Flash Countdown

Ah, yes, I thought I better edit this post, since I realised halfway through writing it that if I didn't leave pronto I was going to miss the film at the cinema. I found out during my reading that Hayashima, small and insignificant a place as it it is (I personally think I'll love it anyway - I'm going to see real life Japan, not the Lonely Planet version) it is known for several things, one of which can be deduced from the satellite images on google maps (follow the link on this page to find its exact coordinates Hayashima)
I'm not gonna tell you yet, because I want to see if anyone gets it. Bet you won't :D But the other two things are interesting. For some reason only known to the mysteries of the universe, the people of Hayashima are proud of their history of... waiting. w...t...f...bbq. Weird people. I like them already. Oh, and it was also apparently an important town for storage of wealth, being as it is on the way to Shikoku and things. I quite like the place :D

My School!!

Sat, 26 May 2007 17:22:23 GMT

Today I found pictures of my school. Although I haven't heard from them directly, it's not too much of a stretch to guess that this is mine, given that there's only one Junior High School (JHS) in Hayashima, other than a special needs school which I hope to god I'm not working in. I couldn't cope with that. I might be making elementary visits too, but there's only one elementary school as well.

So yay! Picspam ahoy! These are all of my JHS :D

This is my school!

Some kids at the school - they're so cute!

The gaijin is my predecessor :D

The whole school in the assembly/sports hall thing place :D

A classroom, duh. I've been watching too much school-type anime. The whole place seems very PuriPuri to me. Complete with shiny bling bling sparkles and feathers. XDDD

For some reason, this amuses me greatly....

Fri, 25 May 2007 13:30:20 GMT

My town of Hayashima is squished in the middle of two small cities, Okayama and Kurashiki. Okayama has a pretty garden, a castle and a river named after a popular Japanese beer (it could be the other way round, I'm not sure :D) but Kurashiki beats these attractions hands down. Bearing in mind it's not exactly an enormous town (nowhere in Okayama is enormous), listen to this. It has a large DANISH themed theme park. Not Legoland Japan - actually with Danish buildings and restaurants, almost like a small Danish town. In the middle of a pretty insignificant small city. In Japan.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *ded from amusement*

Here's the website if you don't believe me - Kurashiki Tivoli Park

I got my placement!!

Wed, 23 May 2007 09:48:06 GMT

Ok, so I'm gonna start using this journal now for all my Japan ramblings. I got my placement today! I'm going to a tiny little town called Hayashima in Okayama prefecture :D As you probably have as much idea of where that is as I did when I opened my enormous packet of information, I have provided you with a handy map under the cut

It's a tiny little place, with a population of only 12000, so even smaller than St Andrews! As far as I can tell on the badly translated town website, it has only one junior high school and no senior high (I guess they must travel to a nearby town), which means that in all likelyhood that's where I'll be working, and probably only in that school, since I put down on my application that I can't drive. From this point on I have to wait for information from my contracting organisation, not JET, so it could be a while until I find out the particulars of my job, or it could be tomorrow. Who knows?

Also in my information pack, I received the General Information Handbook, which is a book of everything that is hefty enough to beat someone to death with. GOod thing I already read the pdf version...

Welcome to my lair...

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:04:17 GMT

Why hello there. This is the public travel journal of the friends-locked user doublenatural, intended for her family and friends whilst she away being a jammy sod on the 2007-2008 JET Programme, although anyone and everyone is welcome, hence the non-friends-lockyness of the thing :D