There is a Category 1 typhoon heading for Shima.
I am still at work. That is all.
September 19, 2008
September 7, 2008
Good News for Tomo
Today I left Tomo in the shower room with all his toys and effects to try and get him used to being alone in there. I'd done the same thing Saturday night while I went grocery shopping, and he didn't seem to mind all that much past the initial protests at losing his main source of warmth and cuddles.
I took a walk north up the Ise road (the road that goes to
. . . surprise . . . Ise) to visit Masako-san, from the Tuesday night English class. She wasn't home, but her husband said he would tell her I stopped by. On the way home I took a different route along narrower roads that branch off haphazardly west of the Ise road, around houses and garden plots. It's a very lovely little neighborhood, running up to the street that connects to my apartment building's long and lonesome driveway. As I don't really have a neighborhood per se, I think I'll take some pictures over there later.
Anyway, back at home I was about to start dinner when someone knocked on the door. It was Masako, who had just gone home, heard the news from her husband, and felt so bad about missing my visit that she drove back to my apartment to bring me sweeties - mini croissants, a jelly donut, and what appears to be some kind of large, puffy, nut-filled bun. I introduced her to Tomo, told her the story of how I got him as best I could in Japanese and some English, and she then told me that she knows the lady who wanted him.
Turns out they are very good friends. Masako called her up right on the spot, and I'm pretty sure she pulled a classic Japanese move and subtly guilted her into agreeing to take Tomo that very instant. I heard her saying in Japanese that the kitten looks very small and pathetic (pathetic is actually not a good translation of "kawaiso," but there is no one English word for the mixture of adorable and pitiable that this phrase implies), and that he will be alone in the apartment while I work during the week. In Japanese, insinuation and inferred context, not actual words, make up the main content of speech. So if one reads between the lines, that was a pretty strong admonition.
At any rate, once Tomo's new mum saw him, she was overjoyed to take in such a little cutie (n___n) All things considered this weekend has worked out spectacularly well. I can now go to work tomorrow without anxiety over my little buddy, and after he gets used to his new home I can visit whenever I have time - it's a good hike into town from my place, but so is the grocery store, so I should be able to walk it easily.
One last picture to try and better illustrate just how wee-tiny and precious he is:
I took a walk north up the Ise road (the road that goes to
. . . surprise . . . Ise) to visit Masako-san, from the Tuesday night English class. She wasn't home, but her husband said he would tell her I stopped by. On the way home I took a different route along narrower roads that branch off haphazardly west of the Ise road, around houses and garden plots. It's a very lovely little neighborhood, running up to the street that connects to my apartment building's long and lonesome driveway. As I don't really have a neighborhood per se, I think I'll take some pictures over there later.
Anyway, back at home I was about to start dinner when someone knocked on the door. It was Masako, who had just gone home, heard the news from her husband, and felt so bad about missing my visit that she drove back to my apartment to bring me sweeties - mini croissants, a jelly donut, and what appears to be some kind of large, puffy, nut-filled bun. I introduced her to Tomo, told her the story of how I got him as best I could in Japanese and some English, and she then told me that she knows the lady who wanted him.
Turns out they are very good friends. Masako called her up right on the spot, and I'm pretty sure she pulled a classic Japanese move and subtly guilted her into agreeing to take Tomo that very instant. I heard her saying in Japanese that the kitten looks very small and pathetic (pathetic is actually not a good translation of "kawaiso," but there is no one English word for the mixture of adorable and pitiable that this phrase implies), and that he will be alone in the apartment while I work during the week. In Japanese, insinuation and inferred context, not actual words, make up the main content of speech. So if one reads between the lines, that was a pretty strong admonition.
At any rate, once Tomo's new mum saw him, she was overjoyed to take in such a little cutie (n___n) All things considered this weekend has worked out spectacularly well. I can now go to work tomorrow without anxiety over my little buddy, and after he gets used to his new home I can visit whenever I have time - it's a good hike into town from my place, but so is the grocery store, so I should be able to walk it easily.
One last picture to try and better illustrate just how wee-tiny and precious he is:
September 5, 2008
Surprise LOLcat, invisible mommy :(
So ever since I knew I was going to be in Mie Prefecture, close to Nagoya, I kept joking that I should ask my host family if they'd like to give me their cat, Kira. They didn't pay much attention to her, and she grew to adore me so much that she would be in my room every morning at 7 am demanding a tummy-rub, and when I left to go back to the States she was forlorn for weeks.
I've always wanted a kitty, but mum is none too fond of them, so we had a couple dogs throughout my childhood and then we moved to a third-floor apartment on the north side of Chicago. Not the best environment for large dogs, which are the kind my dad likes especially. Practically speaking, what with figuring out how to take care of myself adequately in a foreign country, a cat is the last thing I need here in my little teacher's hovel distracting me from my teacherly duties such as prepping future lessons outside of class.
Well, mother nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently she felt the absence of felines in my life has gone on long enough. For no reason in particular, I decided to take the shortcut home from school today. Usually it's an overgrown deer trail leading back into a bug-infested fen which sprouts an old disused concrete road that goes through a forest and comes out behind my apartment building. The city workers occasionally go through and mow down all the weeds, though, and this weekend they did a stellar job with the non-forested areas of the shortcut. Anyway, it connects with the school grounds by way of a small footpath behind the baseball field. So I was headed down that way, when I spied a tiny orange-ish something faintly mewling on the blacktop. Thus was a little bundle of trouble dropped into my life by the hand of Chaos, who always likes a good laugh.
I don't want to pretend that I have the authority to name him (as T.S. Eliot makes abundantly clear, no humans may know the secret names of cats), but I've been calling him "Tomo" in my head. As in "tomodachi," or "friend," which is what he desperately needed when I found him. He was half-soaked, probably more than half-starved, scared, and hardly strong enough to stumble over to me when I held out my hand. Neither mommy nor siblings nor potential owners were anywhere in sight. I think it most likely that the heavy rains we've been getting washed him down from the mountains in one of the drainage ditches and he crawled out of the little stream that runs into a gully back in the woods next to my shortcut home. I took him back to the school office to get him some milk and a warm towel, and to look up the closest animal hospitals / shelters. Of course, everything in Japan closes at 3, and though the office ladies and the male teachers alike avowed that he was the most adorable thing ever, they didn't want him to be their problem. I'll admit I was pretty smitten with him from the start. So the landlord to my building, who works for the school, drove me home with Tomo bundled in the towel and basically said "Good luck, hope you figure something out."
My mom will probably be very relieved to hear that, with the help of AJ and Ayumi, and a former teacher from my high school who lives just down the road, I did figure something out. Tomo will spend a week at my place, and then go to a kindly older woman, the mother of one of my adult English students in the class at the community center AJ and I teach every other Tuesday. She will most likely spoil him rotten with love and affection and make him into a fat, dumb, and happy housecat.
I keep telling myself that this is the way it will turn out over and over again to fight down the frequent spikes of panic over my total inexperience with caring for abandoned kittens. If this is even a smidgeon of what new mothers feel like, I am for sure never having babies. Anyway, AJ and Ayumi have a cat, so they generously donated some cat necessities to Tomo. Chief among them being the kitty litter, without which he would literally hold in his dirty business until it killed him. That's one among the many interesting and harrowing facts I have learnt about kittens in the past several hours since getting home, putting Tomo in a box lined with old towels, and going "Crap, what now??? O___O"
Tomorrow he goes to the vet to assess his general health and probably take a chunk out of my wallet. I'm gonna wait out the week and let his owner-to-be get him all the shots and everything, but I'm willing to bet even a routine kitty check-up in Japan doesn't come cheap. Plus if he's picked up any mites during his stint in the great outdoors, I'm gonna want those gone before I bring him back into the apartment. He may be the cutest little fuzzball in the world, but it's gonna be a whole lot easier getting rid of him if it turns out he has brought parasites into my living space.
I've always wanted a kitty, but mum is none too fond of them, so we had a couple dogs throughout my childhood and then we moved to a third-floor apartment on the north side of Chicago. Not the best environment for large dogs, which are the kind my dad likes especially. Practically speaking, what with figuring out how to take care of myself adequately in a foreign country, a cat is the last thing I need here in my little teacher's hovel distracting me from my teacherly duties such as prepping future lessons outside of class.
Well, mother nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently she felt the absence of felines in my life has gone on long enough. For no reason in particular, I decided to take the shortcut home from school today. Usually it's an overgrown deer trail leading back into a bug-infested fen which sprouts an old disused concrete road that goes through a forest and comes out behind my apartment building. The city workers occasionally go through and mow down all the weeds, though, and this weekend they did a stellar job with the non-forested areas of the shortcut. Anyway, it connects with the school grounds by way of a small footpath behind the baseball field. So I was headed down that way, when I spied a tiny orange-ish something faintly mewling on the blacktop. Thus was a little bundle of trouble dropped into my life by the hand of Chaos, who always likes a good laugh.
I don't want to pretend that I have the authority to name him (as T.S. Eliot makes abundantly clear, no humans may know the secret names of cats), but I've been calling him "Tomo" in my head. As in "tomodachi," or "friend," which is what he desperately needed when I found him. He was half-soaked, probably more than half-starved, scared, and hardly strong enough to stumble over to me when I held out my hand. Neither mommy nor siblings nor potential owners were anywhere in sight. I think it most likely that the heavy rains we've been getting washed him down from the mountains in one of the drainage ditches and he crawled out of the little stream that runs into a gully back in the woods next to my shortcut home. I took him back to the school office to get him some milk and a warm towel, and to look up the closest animal hospitals / shelters. Of course, everything in Japan closes at 3, and though the office ladies and the male teachers alike avowed that he was the most adorable thing ever, they didn't want him to be their problem. I'll admit I was pretty smitten with him from the start. So the landlord to my building, who works for the school, drove me home with Tomo bundled in the towel and basically said "Good luck, hope you figure something out."
My mom will probably be very relieved to hear that, with the help of AJ and Ayumi, and a former teacher from my high school who lives just down the road, I did figure something out. Tomo will spend a week at my place, and then go to a kindly older woman, the mother of one of my adult English students in the class at the community center AJ and I teach every other Tuesday. She will most likely spoil him rotten with love and affection and make him into a fat, dumb, and happy housecat.
I keep telling myself that this is the way it will turn out over and over again to fight down the frequent spikes of panic over my total inexperience with caring for abandoned kittens. If this is even a smidgeon of what new mothers feel like, I am for sure never having babies. Anyway, AJ and Ayumi have a cat, so they generously donated some cat necessities to Tomo. Chief among them being the kitty litter, without which he would literally hold in his dirty business until it killed him. That's one among the many interesting and harrowing facts I have learnt about kittens in the past several hours since getting home, putting Tomo in a box lined with old towels, and going "Crap, what now??? O___O"
Tomorrow he goes to the vet to assess his general health and probably take a chunk out of my wallet. I'm gonna wait out the week and let his owner-to-be get him all the shots and everything, but I'm willing to bet even a routine kitty check-up in Japan doesn't come cheap. Plus if he's picked up any mites during his stint in the great outdoors, I'm gonna want those gone before I bring him back into the apartment. He may be the cutest little fuzzball in the world, but it's gonna be a whole lot easier getting rid of him if it turns out he has brought parasites into my living space.
September 4, 2008
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.
August 20, 2008
Munchies, Nummies, and Eats
Since the picture of my very, very empty kitchen (see previous post) probably has several people worried about my fooding situation, I figured now would be a good time to make a food-themed post to reassure certain parties that I am in fact getting nourishment, in abundance even.
The simplest way I can put it is that Japan is madly in love with food and the preparation thereof. This is not an exaggeration. If anything, it may be an understatement. Although there are only four or five channels on Japanese TV, on any given day you can easily view at least 24 separate programs entirely devoted to food. These usually follow the format of talk shows in which various celebrities recount their experiences of local specialties from all over Japan, interspersed with video clips of their adventures and educational information about the dishes and their places of origin. I've even seen a half-hour segment that featured an American family in New York City preparing crab cakes, steaks, and grilled vegetables in their penthouse apartment. Because the Olympics are being covered almost 24/7 by at least two channels at any given time, right now I would say that food-tourism shows make up about 60% of the programming. They probably account for at least 80% of television programs regularly. In other news, 72% of statistics are made up on the spot, and I'm too lazy to research this further right now, but I'd be willing to bet money I'm not far off the mark.
食べ物 (things what you eats) are also the preferred kind of おみやげ (little gifts you bring back to your co-workers and / or family after a business trip or vacation; sort of like souvenirs, except it's pretty much mandatory because you need to show some consideration for the fact that while you were out having a good time, everybody else was stuck back at the office / school / whatevs). Apparently the little mochi (rice cakes filled with bean paste) I brought back from Mie Orientation in Tsu City were a big hit. I was told that they were gone within a day. I was in Nagoya on Monday and Tuesday, so today I brought in a big box of wafer-cookie-things filled with buttercream. What makes them special is that their wrappers have pictures of Nagoya Castle. Also, they're pretty effin' delicious.
Of course, as I'm sure many people have heard, there are some things about foodstuffs in Japan-land that seem a bit...off. For instance, TV dinners: stick in microwave, remove after 2 minutes, eat. Yes?
No. As far as I can tell, there are no quick-fix dinners that you can actually fix quickly in the microwave. Everything I have come across at a konbini ("convenience store" conveniently shortened into three syllables. Sometimes Japanglish works a whole lot better than my native tongue. I'm making all these annoying parenthetical explanations now so I don't have to bother explaining my pidgin-speak later. You should probably take notes) has a big warning somewhere on the side of the packaging along the lines of "if you make the regretful choice to honorably place this holding thing in your microwave, we must humbly inform you that a bothersome electrical fire will unfortunately result." No matter how innocent and metal-free the container looks, you must never ignore this warning. I tried it with a styrofoam cup of pasta. The cover on it, which for all the world looked like nothing but plastic, had a thin coating of aluminum or something on the inside. Several large sparks and a few rude words ensued.
The other thing that never fails to take me by surprise and cause me some discomfort is the ubiquitous but very, VERY sneaky usage of mayonnaise. The local stores sell sandwiches that are actually two slices of bread with the crusts removed and the edges fused. So really it's like a sandwich-cake with delicious mystery filling. The type of sandwich is actually indicated on the wrapper - egg salad, curry, peanut butter, etc. So I figured when I picked up a menchi karoke sandwich, I was going to bite into it and find myself a nice menchi karoke in the middle (karoke is a little fried patty of something-or-other, usually meat. I still don't quite know what menchi is, and I doubt even the Japanese can tell for sure. Nevertheless, it's powerful tasty) The advertised filling was indeed there, but it was resting on a generous spread of mayonnaise. I purposely stayed away from egg salad, or any other kind of "salad" sandwich, because these of course always include mayo, but I have a feeling that even if I had chosen the "banana cream" - which was extremely tempting - I probably would have found that the "cream" was in fact mayonnaise-based. I'm not really keen to test this theory out, because there are alternative combinations of bananas and cream which I know for a fact don't include surprise condiments.
It's about time I checked with my supervisor downstairs (this post is being written in the computer lab on the third floor, which actually has more high-tech machinery than any of the labs I saw at Nanzan University. I am perplexed and bemused by this, seeing as Shima High School is in the middle of nowhere, and Nanzan is in the middle of Nagoya. What the what now?). She's still working on getting me internet at home (>_<) Erg. Once I finally got my alien registration card so I could prove to the phone company that I wouldn't just order up internet service and then flee the country or something, all the public offices were closed for Obon holiday. That holiday period ended Friday, but then it was the weekend, which means no work. And I was in Nagoya Monday and Tuesday. If I don't have the use of the webbernets by the start of the school year, I honestly might just start going American on people and beat them up until they give me what I want, and then beat them up some more for the hell of it because I police the world. Or, yanno, just wait and gripe quietly to a few people, and use all the time I would spend on the computer at night watching cooking shows.
The simplest way I can put it is that Japan is madly in love with food and the preparation thereof. This is not an exaggeration. If anything, it may be an understatement. Although there are only four or five channels on Japanese TV, on any given day you can easily view at least 24 separate programs entirely devoted to food. These usually follow the format of talk shows in which various celebrities recount their experiences of local specialties from all over Japan, interspersed with video clips of their adventures and educational information about the dishes and their places of origin. I've even seen a half-hour segment that featured an American family in New York City preparing crab cakes, steaks, and grilled vegetables in their penthouse apartment. Because the Olympics are being covered almost 24/7 by at least two channels at any given time, right now I would say that food-tourism shows make up about 60% of the programming. They probably account for at least 80% of television programs regularly. In other news, 72% of statistics are made up on the spot, and I'm too lazy to research this further right now, but I'd be willing to bet money I'm not far off the mark.
食べ物 (things what you eats) are also the preferred kind of おみやげ (little gifts you bring back to your co-workers and / or family after a business trip or vacation; sort of like souvenirs, except it's pretty much mandatory because you need to show some consideration for the fact that while you were out having a good time, everybody else was stuck back at the office / school / whatevs). Apparently the little mochi (rice cakes filled with bean paste) I brought back from Mie Orientation in Tsu City were a big hit. I was told that they were gone within a day. I was in Nagoya on Monday and Tuesday, so today I brought in a big box of wafer-cookie-things filled with buttercream. What makes them special is that their wrappers have pictures of Nagoya Castle. Also, they're pretty effin' delicious.
Of course, as I'm sure many people have heard, there are some things about foodstuffs in Japan-land that seem a bit...off. For instance, TV dinners: stick in microwave, remove after 2 minutes, eat. Yes?
No. As far as I can tell, there are no quick-fix dinners that you can actually fix quickly in the microwave. Everything I have come across at a konbini ("convenience store" conveniently shortened into three syllables. Sometimes Japanglish works a whole lot better than my native tongue. I'm making all these annoying parenthetical explanations now so I don't have to bother explaining my pidgin-speak later. You should probably take notes) has a big warning somewhere on the side of the packaging along the lines of "if you make the regretful choice to honorably place this holding thing in your microwave, we must humbly inform you that a bothersome electrical fire will unfortunately result." No matter how innocent and metal-free the container looks, you must never ignore this warning. I tried it with a styrofoam cup of pasta. The cover on it, which for all the world looked like nothing but plastic, had a thin coating of aluminum or something on the inside. Several large sparks and a few rude words ensued.
The other thing that never fails to take me by surprise and cause me some discomfort is the ubiquitous but very, VERY sneaky usage of mayonnaise. The local stores sell sandwiches that are actually two slices of bread with the crusts removed and the edges fused. So really it's like a sandwich-cake with delicious mystery filling. The type of sandwich is actually indicated on the wrapper - egg salad, curry, peanut butter, etc. So I figured when I picked up a menchi karoke sandwich, I was going to bite into it and find myself a nice menchi karoke in the middle (karoke is a little fried patty of something-or-other, usually meat. I still don't quite know what menchi is, and I doubt even the Japanese can tell for sure. Nevertheless, it's powerful tasty) The advertised filling was indeed there, but it was resting on a generous spread of mayonnaise. I purposely stayed away from egg salad, or any other kind of "salad" sandwich, because these of course always include mayo, but I have a feeling that even if I had chosen the "banana cream" - which was extremely tempting - I probably would have found that the "cream" was in fact mayonnaise-based. I'm not really keen to test this theory out, because there are alternative combinations of bananas and cream which I know for a fact don't include surprise condiments.
It's about time I checked with my supervisor downstairs (this post is being written in the computer lab on the third floor, which actually has more high-tech machinery than any of the labs I saw at Nanzan University. I am perplexed and bemused by this, seeing as Shima High School is in the middle of nowhere, and Nanzan is in the middle of Nagoya. What the what now?). She's still working on getting me internet at home (>_<) Erg. Once I finally got my alien registration card so I could prove to the phone company that I wouldn't just order up internet service and then flee the country or something, all the public offices were closed for Obon holiday. That holiday period ended Friday, but then it was the weekend, which means no work. And I was in Nagoya Monday and Tuesday. If I don't have the use of the webbernets by the start of the school year, I honestly might just start going American on people and beat them up until they give me what I want, and then beat them up some more for the hell of it because I police the world. Or, yanno, just wait and gripe quietly to a few people, and use all the time I would spend on the computer at night watching cooking shows.
August 6, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
July 17, 2008
The plot thickens
Recently, I found out that I will be living in Isobe-cho, a town within the only-technically-a-city of Shima. Apparently Shima formed back in 2004 when five towns situated relatively close together decided "Hey let's become a city why not!", and from then on everything was completely changed forever. Except the towns are still towns, and they're still the same distance apart, and the only thing that's different is now there's an administrative / geographically conceptual entity known as "Shima-shi" encompassing it all. But anyhoo, that's all pretty boring and bureaucratic. What's really of interest is this:
Although it's officially part of the Chubu region of Japan (again, technicalities . . . they screw up everything) Mie Prefecture, where Shima is located, has traditionally been considered a part of Kansai (which for some reason the government recently decided to re-name "Kinki," a fact which causes me no end of immature giggling). The fun thing about Kansai is that the people there speak a regional dialect of Japanese that sounds pretty weird to speakers of standard Japanese. Yes, like Uh-murr-i-kuh, Japan has its own brand of southerly redneck-speak. And this is known as Kansai-ben.
For those of you without any Japanese experience, let me flip the scenario around. Imagine a Japanese person who has taken a few years of lessons in standard American English. Now imagine that person leaving Japan to go live in Mississippi. The comparison isn't completely sound - for instance, no incidents of culture-shock in Japan can compare to the horrors of the Deep South - but the linguistic confusion factor is basically the same.
Since Shima is on the edge of Kansai and fairly close to Nagoya, I'm hoping that the regional speech patterns will bear more in common with Nagoya-ben than full-blown Osaka-ben (yes, specific cities can have their own particular flavor of dialect, too, just like Boston or Chicago. My friends and I got called out a lot in Tokyo for our Nagoya "accent." We didn't even realize we had picked it up). After a couple clumsy weeks of struggling to remember the Japanese I've already learned, I'll probably be alright communication-wise. My co-workers and neighbors will of course understand my standard Japanese with a smattering of leftover Nagoya-ben, and their accents probably won't be too strong. Nevertheless, I'll be printing off some Kansai-ben word lists to look over during the first few weeks at school - the kids are still on summer holiday and thus there won't be much to do besides work on my self-introduction for the opening of the school year.
Although it's officially part of the Chubu region of Japan (again, technicalities . . . they screw up everything) Mie Prefecture, where Shima is located, has traditionally been considered a part of Kansai (which for some reason the government recently decided to re-name "Kinki," a fact which causes me no end of immature giggling). The fun thing about Kansai is that the people there speak a regional dialect of Japanese that sounds pretty weird to speakers of standard Japanese. Yes, like Uh-murr-i-kuh, Japan has its own brand of southerly redneck-speak. And this is known as Kansai-ben.
For those of you without any Japanese experience, let me flip the scenario around. Imagine a Japanese person who has taken a few years of lessons in standard American English. Now imagine that person leaving Japan to go live in Mississippi. The comparison isn't completely sound - for instance, no incidents of culture-shock in Japan can compare to the horrors of the Deep South - but the linguistic confusion factor is basically the same.
Since Shima is on the edge of Kansai and fairly close to Nagoya, I'm hoping that the regional speech patterns will bear more in common with Nagoya-ben than full-blown Osaka-ben (yes, specific cities can have their own particular flavor of dialect, too, just like Boston or Chicago. My friends and I got called out a lot in Tokyo for our Nagoya "accent." We didn't even realize we had picked it up). After a couple clumsy weeks of struggling to remember the Japanese I've already learned, I'll probably be alright communication-wise. My co-workers and neighbors will of course understand my standard Japanese with a smattering of leftover Nagoya-ben, and their accents probably won't be too strong. Nevertheless, I'll be printing off some Kansai-ben word lists to look over during the first few weeks at school - the kids are still on summer holiday and thus there won't be much to do besides work on my self-introduction for the opening of the school year.
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