End of the first week

Hi,

I've finished my first week at my new school. My apartment is in a quiet neighbourhood, it's very small but nice enough.

I found the week wasn't too bad, a fair amount of coming in early and preparing for lessons, and lots of forgetting names, especially the four-syllable names of my male students. :) I feel like I've been fending for myself a bit, living on my own, finding my way around, working out my classes and whatnot. I've answered 'where are you from', 'why did you come to Japan', 'do you like Japanese food' and 'what do you think of Japan', about a hundred times now...

Thanks for your birthday wishes everyone, I'm glad I could finally get online tonight. Mum I got your card, thanks. Sorry I don't have time to reply to emails at the moment. I've not had the chance to get online this week yet, and also I haven't got a phone or anything. I have to get my Alien Registration Card first.

I had a good birthday today; when the new day started I was in a bar in Kawasaki with about thirty students and teachers. I had my welcome party on Saturday night/Sunday morning and I didn't get home until 6am. :) We started in an Italian restaurant owned by one of the students, then progressed to the bar, then finished with several hours of karaoke, which was great fun. They had a tiramisu cake for me with 'Happy Birthday' written on it in chocolate powder. Even at 5:15, when the party was wrapping up, there were still about 30 people there. It was a lot of fun.

The trains here are good but stop 'early' - around midnight. This is ridiculous because the last train of the night always has hundreds of people in it - businessmen who've been out for dinner and drinks after a long day in the office, etc - and if they ran trains all night, there would definitely be a demand for it. I got caught out like this on Wednesday; we went to an izakaya for the outgoing teacher's farewell - just five of us - and I forgot about the trains. Fortunately I only missed my second train, so the taxi wasn't very expensive. The alternative to leaving a party early is to leave very late - ie, in time for the first train of the next day at 4:30 or 5am.

It's worrying when everyone asks me if I like Japanese food, because I don't. I don't like raw fish, or wasabi, or chicken cartilage skewers (yes, I ate chicken cartilage), or octopus too tough to even bite, or pickled radishes, or any of the other horrible things I am confronted with! At the izakaya they had an English menu and it was worrying looking through the translations and thinking 'mmmm, beef diaphragms, sounds tasty'...

This afternoon I met up with a girl from training to explore Yokohama. (I'm in her apartment now 'stealing' wireless Internet.) It was pretty cool, I've never been there before (even though I technically live in Yokohama, my neighbourhood is very quiet and feels far away from the action. :)) The harbour area is really cool and we went on the ferris wheel.

I found that this week I have already 'un-learned' a lot of stuff from training, haha. Nobody adheres to the Official Lesson Plan exactly, and it kind of works nicely when you use your own discretion - you know, try two exercises if there's lots of time left, start the lesson with a bit of a chat, etc...

Teaching classes was okay. It's quite formulaic, so it's not so hard to teach multiple classes. It's very clear that it's the students that make it a good class or not. I had this one group lesson that was like pulling teeth - nobody wanted to volunteer anything or get creative with their dialogues - so I thought 'oh, I don't like teaching that lesson'. Then I taught the same lesson to a different class on a different day, and had a great time - the students were fun, and asked questions, and seemed to actually want to be there.

The other foreign teacher at my school is a nice guy, I think we'll get on well. The Japanese teachers are my school are quite nice too, haven't really clicked with them. Actually I've been mostly working autonomously anyway.

Hope everyone is well, sorry my emails are so sporadic, but I enjoy getting yours. Hope to get in touch properly soon. :)