My Most Amazing Day Yet

So today (really 2 days ago) at work: I did absolutely nothing. Normally I set daily goals: chug through a chapter of Japanese for JETs, learn a line of katakana (5 characters), try to plan a lesson, and don't spent too much money. I failed to do ANY of that yesterday, and it was AWESOME. :D

But first of all, welcome to Shikama Technical High School!

For those of you who are wondering, technical high schools in Japan are still high schools, but they focus on industrial/engineering courses instead. Most of the students end up going right to work after HS, and probably in factories. Hell, they have their own machine shop... uh, complex - it's that entire building next to the parked cars in the photo.

High school in Japan is three years - it's six years of primary school, three years of junior high and three for senior high. High schools are divided up by focus. You have your regular high schools, technical high schools, commercial high schools, and a bunch of others that I can't remember. But the point is, in my school of 1000+ kids there are maybe 20 girls. And most of them probably don't give a damn about learning English. I guess I'll just have to charm my way to them (time to break out the non-verbal communication 5ki11z!). On the other hand, I've heard that Shikama Kougyu Koukou (that's its name in Japanese) is famous for its sports teams; Particularly it's judo team, which won the prefectural championship or something last year. I won't be doing that, but ever since my days of competitive swim team training I've been DYING to dish out sets as a swim coach. So:*Buahahahahaha... hahahahaha... ha.*

School is about 20 minutes from my apartment by bike, and the ride is hot burning hell. I made the mistake of trying to WALK to school the first day because it was raining. The umbrella worked fine, it was just so f$*#ing hot that by the time I got in to school, my nice ironed dress shirt was a half see through, sopping, wrinkled mess. You learn to bring a towel to work rather quickly that way. (yes I was contemplating marrying the towel, that's how awesome it is)

In other news, since school is out at the moment, there isn't very much for me to do at school. I'm looking around at the teachers (who's left of the staff anyways, everyone's taken the week off) and I see people napping, reading newspapers, and generally wasting time. So therefore I am on facebook and gmail. All the time. But I haven't wasted it all either. I've prepared my introductory speech when I am officially inaugurated into my new ALT post on the 31st, and I have my first lesson planned out. But considering that I'm teaching only one first year English class a week (I teach it five times, but to different homerooms) and Oral Communications only twice a week, I don't think I really need to plan more than 4 lessons in advance. All of which, if I decided to actually do work, would take no more than 2 days to plan.

So I learned to play Shogi yesterday! That's Japanese chess, and it has a very complex set of rules that I actually rather like. You get to promote units (most of which have a very limited range of 1 square), you get to use units you capture (my favorite part. Attrition for the win!) and games can go on for 50-100 moves! You can really feel the tide of battle, as it were. And stop calling me an old man! >.<

My place.... oh my lovely apartment. I LOVE IT. It's a 2DK, which means it's got 2 bedrooms, a dining room, and a kitchen. It's a fairly new place, and it's even got insulation, which is a) incredibly rare in Japan, and b) really useful in the winter because it means the apartment won't freeze over 5 seconds after I turn the heater off. I paid Kyle, my pred, 30000 yen (~350 USD with today's exchange rate) to leave everything in the apartment, so I got a fan, futons, extra sheets, an (Japan sized) oven, rice, more sauces than I know what to do with, detergent for every purpose imaginable, towels (a GREAT boon for that first night), speakers, a home made laptop cooler, board games, books, etc when I moved in. It was practically spotless when I moved in (sadly no longer) and I'm only paying 30000 a month. Isn't that the sweetest deal in the world? I know ;)

(My bedroom, the kitchen and the guest bedroom/storage. In that order)

Ok there are some drawbacks. First off, I'm the only JET in my ku (ward, kanji character is area/district), and the closest ones are Wendy and Daniel, who live a half hour bike ride from my place. I visited their apartment yesterday, and they have a sweeeeet location. 30 minutes inland and they're right next to a river, got nice green mountains 500m away, and the air there is so clean. I'm smack in the middle of the city, right next to the port, and it is hot, humid, polluted and congested as all heck. But it's at least convenient: I'm a 10 minute bike ride away from 2 malls, the JR train station, and all of Kyle's favorite restaurants (more on that in the next post). Wendy and Daniel have each other for company, but, quite honestly, my apartment blows theirs out of the water. However, their location is infinitely more enjoyable than mine. So it kinda balances out. And I will be visiting them a lot because it is sabishi where I live.

That means lonely by the way, so heap on the sympathy.

But it is deliciously pretty here on nice days. In that Japanese medium-sized town way.

Oh and did I mention I tried to go visit Daniel? Nick's Japan Hack #1: Don't ever try to find a place just by the address. They divide EVERYTHING into tiny bits. It's not a street address, but your city (shi) gets divided into wards (ku), then into areas (cho), then the area is subdivided into numbers (chome). And that's where your building gets it's number. The number is NOT on your door/postbox/anywhere. So good luck finding stuff. I had to ask 5 separate people just to get to Daniel's cho, and 3 of them pointed me in the wrong direction x.x But thankfully that leads right into Japan Hack #2: If you want to make Japanese friends, GET LOST! Literally.

This is what happened: I was running around Higashi Yumesekidai (Daniel's cho) for about half an hour asking for 2 chome, and nobody knew... apparently people only know their OWN cho, and their OWN chome. If you're in the right place, yay; if not, keep trying. Cuz the people you just asked? They won't know even if it's just the next street over. That is, unless you run into someone as awesome as Ryota.

He's just a friendly local I came across asking for directions. I guess my Japanese was good enough to convey that I was completely lost, so he whipped out his phone, called his mom and got directions for me. Which were apparently kinda vague and wrong, because we spent the next forty minutes running around the same 7 blocks looking for Daniel's place. But he stuck through and, two giant cans of pepsi and fifteen mosquito bites later, we finally found it! ... only to realize that Dan had forgotten about my visit and had gone to the grocery store.

But whatever. Point was, that we had somehow found a way to break the stupid language barrier ("Boku wa Amerika no Norusu Kararaina kara kimashita, where are you from?"), and bro-bonded on the perilous quest for Higashi Yumesekidai 2-50-113. It was chill - except really hot, actually. So we exchanged contact information at the end, and I made my first Japanese friend!

Yatta!

And so, I leave you with pictures of dinner with our new Himeji sister, Wendy, and omg convenient stores have EVERYTHING.