Japan, you should really just send gift-cards from now on

Following up it's influenzariffic Christmas present, Japan's birthday present to me: chest congestion. Mmmmm, phlegmtastic :\

The Interwebs' birthday present to me: INFINITELY MOAR BETTER 8D
Say what you will about ND's internal politics (and I have said a lot of critical things), we have the awesomest damn band in the universe.

Re-Wired

So even though my instructions were all in Japanese, and despite the infuriating fact that Japanese and American Mac menus have different configurations when it comes to System Preferences, I managed to successfully get my laptop hooked back into the interwebbernets without blowing it up.

This post right here is being written from the comfort of my own apartment, where I steadfastly refuse to wear pants indoors until the temperature consistently stays below 20 C. HOORAY! More than you wanted to know.

Speaking of the apartment, I've made some improvements so that it doesn't look quite so dreary and empty of all warmth or comfort. According to the terms and conditions of my contract, my new curtains are technically a no-no because I didn't ask the school if I could put them up. But I really doubt the superintendent is going to evict me for taking down those fugly pastel floral sins against interior decor that pained my eyes on a daily basis before I threw them in my closet. As for that cluttered box in the corner, anyone who has ever lived with me can tell you I just don't feel at home until I've made an ungodly mess somewhere about the premises. IT BEGINS.

It has come to my attention that I don't have a lot of pictures of Shima / Isobe yet, so I will try to remedy that over the weekend. There was a JET outing to Nagashima Spaland (a local water park) planned for Saturday, but it has been raining on-and-off for the past week, and this weekend is supposed to get ugly again so I'm staying home. I should clarify that "raining on-and-off" in Shima / prettymuch all of southeastern Japan means "End-of-Days-caliber downpours for several intervals lasting at least 3 hours each and brief spots of sun in between." I remember lots and lots of rain when I first got to Nagoya two years ago, but not the subway-flooding that was reported there last weekend. Apparently this is a record-setting year for rainfall outside of "the rainy season." AJ tells me that, actually, most of the rain Japan sees comes outside of "the rainy season," and the weather forecasters always do their best to sound surprised and slightly indignant, but no one seems keen on copping to the fact that their parameters for seasonal weather patterns are just plain outdated and need to be changed. Oh, Japan.

The weather hasn't dampened the spirits of my students, though, I'm happy to report. All told I have 6 distinct classes, although one of them is just a smaller group of the same students. 1A and 1B are my first-year English classes, and they're, well, your typical freshmen (except Japanese students don't enter high school until the 10th grade, so by American standards they would technically be sophomores). Slow to warm up and too shy most of the time to give an audible response. The 1A class is more advanced, so they show a bit more enthusiasm.

I have three third-year classes, but my 3A Culture class is pretty much a group of six girls from homeroom 3A getting extra credit for spending an hour goofing off and maybe incidentally learning something. The big 3A class is Reading, and they're a bit of a rowdy bunch, but they do well enough with group activities. They seem to like me well enough to listen to me most of the time, and they're the least shy about volunteering answers on an individual basis. 3BC is a Reading class that AJ and I teach together; there are about 40 students, and the Japanese teacher assigned to the room with us half-jokingly and half-fearfully refers to them as "the monster class." He hangs in back shushing the boys occasionally, and AJ and I are left to our own devices. We're not really held accountable for much more than keeping them occupied for an hour a week.

2A Reading is the only class I haven't taught yet. If my other upperclassmen are any indication, they'll probably be a fun bunch. Shima-ko isn't really a high-performing school, as you may have guessed. I think only about 20% of the students plan on going to college. Many families in and around Isobe live in farming communities, so after completing high school a lot of the kids stay at home to help keep up the rice fields. There aren't a lot of jobs in available in this area, and those that are open usually don't require college degrees. I've even met a guy my age working as a translator in Ise (next city up the road to the north; actually qualifies as a real city, too, although it's not as large as say Tsu, the capital of Mie) and I'm pretty sure he hasn't gone to college. He's one of the younger students in the community English class AJ and I teach every other Tuesday night. I'm pretty sure he only comes to swap music with AJ, though; his level of English is way beyond most of the people there.

Still, it's nice to have mature students who come to class because they want to. Switches it up a bit. And there's a very motherly older woman, Masako, who lives not too far down the road from me and who has questioned me at length about my favorite Japanese foods. In Japan, this is as good as saying "Come to my house and I will cook dinner for you." So I know where I'm headed after work tomorrow (n__n)

I will leave off with a picture of the wee-tiny little crabs that wander all about the town wherever there are drainage pipes leading to the river. They could fit quite comfortably in the palm of my hand, if I were stupid enough to try and pick them up. This little guy is regaining his composure after a tense face-off with a crawfish about twice his size. It was the cutest narrowly-averted-epic-battle I have ever witnessed. Much waving of claws and sideways dancing.

インフォメーションGET!!!

First off, yes: I'm alive. Yes: I like my new town pretty well. NO: I DON'T HAVE INTRONET YET D:

BUT HOW AM I MAKING THIS POST??? (lolallcaps)

My ALT-sempai (that's senior assistant language teacher) was kind enough to invite me over for dinner & for to make use of his interwebbernets connection, which is far faster than what is available at the school where I work. Also, the school doesn't want me bringing my personal laptop to work and hooking it up, because I guess they're afraid of spreading viruses or something. So I have a dinosaur of a laptop to use there (if Jenni is reading this, remember your old laptop? EVEN SLOWER). It can't handle image-laden websites, or even very large images for that matter. I froze it up today just trying to load a desktop-sized picture of Navy Pier.

But anyway, back to the low-down on my new digs.

I have a little one-bedroom apartment that's out on the main road between Ise and Shima (Ise being chock full o' shrines, and Isobe, the part of Shima where I live and work, being chock full o' liquor stores and old people as far as I can tell). When I figure out how to stick pictures in the middle of posts, I'll update this post with some shots so you can have visual aids to supplement your vibrant imaginings.

SURPRISE UPDATE! PICTUARS ARE HEAR :B

This is what I wake up to every morning. Mountains, greenery, and the sun streaming through my hideous pastel-flower curtains at 5 in the morning. I'll upload more pictures of my bedroom once it's redecorated a bit so it is fit to evoke admiration rather than pity. The good news is the tatami mats are clean. There are spiders living under them, but I figure they keep the really nasty bugs from taking over the spaces beneath my floors, so they can stay down there. I'm certainly not going in after them.


Kitchen / "lounge area" - directly behind me is the TV and a sliding door that leads out onto a patio just large enough to hold my wee-tiny washing machine & racks for drying clothes. That big yellow plastic tube you see in the foreground is a toxic powder that you spread about outside your domicile in an ancient Japanese voodoo ritual to ward off crawly things. Actually, it doesn't ward them off so much as guarantee that if they walk across the chalky white line and enter your living space, they will succumb to the malice of evil spirits sometime within a week or so. Maybe.

Anyway, at $230 a month this place would be a steal by any American's standards, and to someone like myself who has become accustomed to living out of a single room with a stacked bed-and-workspace and one sink on the far wall, it almost seems like too much space. Almost. I've managed to make a pretty spectacular mess of it thus far, so I would say the settling-in process is going quite well.

However, the previous occupants either didn't see fit to clean it . . . EVER . . . before they left, or it has been vacant for a looooooong long time, because when I first walked in the smell from the shower room was ominous, to say the least, and everything in the kitchen/TV area had a disturbing stickiness about it that humidity alone just couldn't account for. I won't even talk about the stove top, since the landlord has since replaced it with a shiny new one that makes me very very happy because that's one less surface to sanitize. I am also happy to report that I have a gas stove, so cooking is not so much of an ordeal as it could be, although the heat and humidity tend to make the prospect of preparing hot food quite disenchanting.

Anyway, so far the local insect population has seen fit to keep to the outdoors. Everywhere outdoors. All over the building, the stairs, the walls, the lights . . . but there are no monstrous bird-eating spiders or poisonous centipedes or wee-tiny little tatami mat bugs inside. The little tatami mites ("dani") are actually probably the worst pests you could find indoors, because they're too small to see, they bite you all over during the night, and they're at the bottom of the food chain for all the other wriggly crawly nasty beasties you don't want to see in your room. You learn about so many fun things living out in the boonies in Japan.

I do love the nature, though, for the most part. There are cute little crabs roaming about the "river" (actually more of a salty backwash from the sea that runs through a weedy ditch outside my apartment building) that wave their tiny arms at me whenever I pass by and startle them, and rumor has it there are monkeys in the little arm of forest that cuts into my neighborhood. The other day from my window I saw a Japanese raccoon-dog napping outside in the shrubbery. It was quite possibly the cutest animal I have ever seen, something like a cross between a marten and a big brown fox with black stripes across its eyes, black limbs, and a skinny little tail. Apparently they're very common around wooded areas, and Isobe is pretty woodsy. There's a short-cut to my high school up a hill and through a patch of bamboo forest that grows up to the baseball fields behind Shima High School. It's a little rough, but it gets me to work in 15 minutes instead of 25, taking the long way around down the large roads with no sidewalks. Also it's cooler under the trees, and there are always pretty emerald dragonflies with black wings fluttering about.

Since it's still summer vacation in Japan, I won't have any classes until September, which means I pretty much sit around all day at my desk, reviewing my old Japanese textbook and attempting to make small-talk with my co-workers. They're all very nice, thankfully, nothing like the frigid, enigmatic, alien beings we were warned about during the big JET orientation in Tokyo. The orientation sessions kinda reminded me of the talks we had to attend at Nanzan University for foreign students, in that the negative aspects of culture-shock and the possibility of terrible things happening were way overblown (re: the infamous "Japan is not safe" presentation that has been the subject of much mockery amongst my group of Nagoya-buddies). I'm not feeling too isolated despite the language barrier and the fact that I'm living in the inaka ("heart of the rice field," literally; in more colloquial America-speak, "the sticks"). I don't feel shunned and unwanted by my co-workers. My supervisor and several of the teachers speak very good English. I have another JET at my school who's been here a year and can help me figure stuff out. By Tokyo-Orientation standards I'm living in a fantasy world.

Heart of a rice field! That's my apartment right there. Despite what lies perspective might be trying to impress upon you, there's actually no direct way to get to it from the main road (hint: this little footpath right here is not "the main road" - it's that dark line running through the middle of the picture). You have to walk past it and down a little side street to get to the driveway what leads to the apartment parking lot. It's a little bit inconvenient, but I would much rather see cranes wading in the reeds outside my window than blacktop or concrete.

I haven't been able to compare experiences with my fellow Mie prefecture JETs yet, except to some extent Nicole, since I have her phone number. I've started using my old cell phone from Nagoya, but because it's so out of date and I don't have my foreign-resident ID card yet (affectionately referred to as "the gaijin card") I can only use a prepaid SIM-card - the cell phone companies won't let an undocumented immigrant contract with them. What gives, right? That's downright un-American. To be fair, I am actually pretty well-documented. I'm just waiting on the bureaucracy now.

This also means that I can't get a phone company to hook up internet service at my apartment yet. If my local city hall is to be believed, my gaijin card won't be ready to pick up until August 14th. Which means I can't apply for internet service and a cell phone contract until then. Which kind of really bites. 'Cause that means I can't really use Skype unless I'm ganking AJ's intarwebz at his place, and even though he's invited me I've already soaked up enough Japanese sensibility to feel bad about imposing. But my supervisor and I have done all we can; now it's up to the government. That's never a phrase you want to use.