10 Months in Japan: October 2013

みんな、ひさしぶり！ごめん。
Hey everyone, it's been a while... SORRY.

Where do I even begin. I really regret not doing this every week, because now, I have WAY too much to talk about.

For starters, the job.

I really like it. The students are awesome. On the first day (Friday, the 5th), I took a very complicated train route to the outer rim of Tokyo, where I met with a Linguage employee at the local train station. I only had a name, so for the first 10 minutes I just gave an awkward, approachable smile to every 30 something non Japanese man that happened to look my way. To my relief, there was just the one (not that many foreigners outside the city haha), a California-born, billingual English teacher who has been living in Japan for almost as long as I've been alive, so needless to say, I was excited to learn from this man.　The learning, however, was short lived. After a 15 minute bus ride and a short walk through several waves of security clearance, I was left in the hands of one of my students, who's english, was, well, not as strong as the american national. And that was it. Time to entertain 6 business men who speak next to no English for the next 90 minutes. I was, ... a little nervous. I had somewhat prepared a vague lesson plan, but I really expected to get some direction from my linguage mentor. So the door closed and they all looked at me with eager eyes, and I started to teach. Simple stuff at first, what you would expect on the first day of a language class, but after a few minutes the nerves were gone, and I just started explaining things to them like I would anyone else, drawing and acting (maybe a little singing, who knows? ;))So that was it, the hour and a half flew by, and honestly it was all in thanks to my amazing students. Day 1 complete, time to celebrate.

That weekend I went out again, with Andrew and Simon, to experience the Tokyo nightlife. I'll start off by saying Andrew knows the everything and everyone in Tokyo, so we met in Roppongi, and went to a restaurant/bar around 10, where we instantly bypassed the line (it pays to know people XD), and sat down in the lounge after a few drinks at the bar. The food was, quite possibly, the best food I've ever had, EVEN better than the dish I had the previous weekend.

Let me take a short second to talk about Japanese food. Japanese people who travel abroad usually find foreign food to be very bland. And honestly its so true. In NA, we garnish our meats and smother everything with sauce until it becomes a flavour we like. It doesn't really matter what you order at a Canadian restaurant, you will always add something to it, and usually good food boils down to the sauce. BUT, in Japan, the biggest difference I've noticed is that every dish has its own unique flavour which doesn't require any additions after the meal has arrived, and I think it comes from how they prepare the meat. But it's really different from everything tasting like Heinz, or Franks, or whatever your sauce of choice is. Japanese food needs nothing but a good beer to go with it. And there was lots of that.

So after the amazing meal, Simon and his youthful ID went back to Kikukawa, and Andrew and I went to a massive club, with 5 levels, great music variety, and free drinks. Yes, free. Andrew has the hookups.

My next few days were spent recovering from my 9pm-7am drinking binge, as well as preparing for my other class that I had to teach, which is, again, on the outer rim of Tokyo, but in a completely different and much more industrial area. This class featured 20 Nissan employees split into 2 groups of 2 hour sessions, twice a week (that made sense, right?). So on Tuesday I once again suited up for another 5 transfer, 2 hour long transit, and found myself having about 3 times as many eyes waiting for me in a small classroom within the Nissan plant. Again, a great group of guys, some were friends, other were just friendly, some shy, some outspoken, and I learned really quick who I could rely on to help me demonstrate activities that I'd planned.

And that has pretty much been it. I just finished teaching my 3rd week of classes, and even had someone from HQ sit through one of them, and told me how great the lesson was (she even joined in on some of the activities), so it's a big confidence boost to know that I'm starting to get good at my job (because the first few classes had their hiccups haha).

I havn't been doing a whole lot of travelling, mostly to roppongi, or work, or more recently to a fellow gamer's house just outside Tokyo. The last 2 days I've actually spent around only Japanese speaking gamers, so I was forced to speak Japanese for a long while, and I actually learned a ton just in this short amount of time. When you have to express thought after thought in a foreign language, it becomes easy to start connecting ideas before translating them, so English sort of fades out. Eventually I got so good at what I knew (even if it was rudimentary), that I could do full explainations in Japanese and have them understand. If I stay the course, and maybe add some study time for Kanji, I think I can become pretty well versed in the language before the end of the year, and maybe apply to some other jobs. There has been talk between Andrew and me about using our free time to be a little more productive and work on some game design, so I'm thinking that will be a nice project for me kill all this time between classes and beer.

There you have it, updated at last! The next one will be within the week, I promise. Also I'm not sure what pictures I can include this time, since my Canadian phone has been surviving less and less on Japanese voltages. I'll see what I can dig up. Hopefully I can upload the picture of this famous restaurant the borderless house gang and I went to for our roommate Rina's birthday. Tarantino and Stallone ate where I ate, :D.

Ganbarimasu!

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