First Day of Skewl

I have a meeting at noon with the director of the Shunan English School, so when noon rolls around and my ride to the school hasn't showed up I start to worry a little. The biggest problem is that the nearest pay phone is a ten minute walk away. I debate whether its worth going to the phone to call her and risk my ride coming and missing me for a few minutes, and just as I decide to walk to the phone, her husband shows up to pick me up. When I arrive at the school, sans necktie (which will be important later, suffice to say I searched in vain all weekend for a store that sells ties) a half hour late the director asks me If I knew we were supposed to meet today. Then I asked her why nobody came to pick me up since we spoke on the phone sunday about just that subject.
This was followed with a few awkward minutes of jabber and then some explanations of a bunch of paperwork. I met one of the other new teachers, Ben from San Francisco, who turns out to be a pretty cool guy. As a side note the school is entirely composed of Americans with the exception of one British Bloke and a beautiful French gal. But moving back to our hero in this slightly awkward first day meeting, Ben and I were then given some kind of grammar test, which I'm pretty confident neither of us did well on. This would be the kind of thing that worried me at the first day on a new job if it wasn't immediately followed by recieving the schedule of classes I would be teaching.
For the first week of work, we aren't exactly paid, since it's an observation period, she gives us the equivalent of a few beers in Yen a day. So I went about observing, the first class I observed only had 3 students who were around 11 or 12, and consisted of the teaching wrestling them for about 40 minutes, with some bowling thrown in and a smattering of English between spares and strikes. The second class was a conversation class with an older woman, she writes in a diary, we go over it, correct her grammar, and then talk for about a half hour. The classes will usually come down to playing with a small group of children, or talking to a few adults. A minority of the classes involve using any kind of books or reference guide, and in the extreme minimum some kind of plan of attack for teaching them anything.
However, I did experience what might be the most awkward 18 and a half seconds of my life on Monday. Some of the clients of the school qualify as the extreme elite in both wealth and power in this little hamlet of 120,000 people. This particular student happens to literally be one of the most powerful men in the country of Japan. We're talking more money than God and bi-quarterly meetings with the Prime Minister powerful. Of course now it becomes a slightlly bigger deal that I am underdressed, I mean I look fantastic as always, but I'm not wearing a tie. Anyway the class with this particular person consisted of Elijah, the teacher who's leaving, Ben the other new teacher, and myself. It's all conversational, we walk in, talk to him for the alotted time and leave. On the way out the man in question walked us to the elevator. What happened between his office door and the elevator is the awkward series of moments I hinted at a moment ago.
On the way out he had his hand on my left shoulder, and then on my back, and then...What the $*&%! I'm thinking ok, that was below the border, but this is a baseball culture so maybe that's common. He says he likes my leather coat, and the coat is pretty long so maybe it was an accident. But not the second time....and there he goes again. Bear in mind these three bad touches occurred in the span of a 20 yard walk to the elevator. Obviously I can't complain about it to anyone at the school because the guy is by far their most influential customer. And although the class might go to Ben or myself, the student has preference over which teacher they want, so I'm pretty sure I know who's getting drafted for this mission. But at least it wasn't a problem that I showed up without a tie. When I got home that Monday my only thought was, "I wish I could go one damn day without my hot ass getting me into trouble."

Wheat Out

Day 1

After a 35 to 46 second tutorial on how my apartment works the previous occupant and my ride ditched out. It was around 12:30 AM and despite the massively long trip I was restless enough to unpack everything. Afterwards, still restless, I decided at about 2 AM to take a walk outside around my apartment. This is the first time I'd set foot outside an airport, train, or bus station since I landed in Tokyo, suffice to say, it looked like a cross between The Bronx, Harlem, Bulgaria, and anything we've all gleaned from watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. That is however, the one back road I ventured down, which was totally vacant of anylife, cars, people, stray cats or otherwise.
I tried to instill extremely low expectations about my apartment in myself before I left. As a result, my apartment is f'in (this is a family blog afterall) awesome. Not only are the kitchen and bathroom separate entities, but there's also a livingroom, bedroom, and balcony (albeit a first floor one). The hot water feels like the center of the sun (thankyou volcanic island) and the shower is big enough for...well more than one person.
The bedroom isn't so much a "bed" room persay, but more like a matt-room, because everyone sleeps on a 3 inch thick matt layed on the hardwood. Apparently the easiest measurement for a room is by how many of these matts can be layed across it, I have a moderate six matt matt-room, where I will watch matt-lock with laying on my matted hair with Matt Stiles.
Well Saturday came, I have no phone, nor anybody to call locally to show me around, nor do I have voltage adaptors to plug in my computer, which doesn't have working internet yet anyway, so I decide to wander until I find something useful. With that I traverse the mean streets of Tokuyama.
The mean streets of Tokuyama are pretty much shut down on Saturday. There is nothing open. I found a moderate sized supermarket and decided to grab some chow. Which I can store in my refrigerate and freezer unit - provided. Along with a microwave and rice cooker. The kitchen also has two gas burners, but no stove, so nobody gets cupcakes. The first thing I see in the market is beer, I decide I like this market, I picked up a couple of Kirin Beers and toss them in my basket, then on trying to decide if I want a third I look at the price. $2.50 for a can of beer, or 2500 yen for you currency exchange nazi's. I picked up a box of Japanese frosted flakes, because they had snoopy on the box, and Snoopy would never give me food poisoning, and some vegetables, bread, deli meats etc. As a side-note, all deli meats in Japan look like ham, but I like ham so it's ok. I did a double take when these items were wrung up though. Because it came to almost 40 dollars, 40000 yen, as it turns out beer isn't the only expensive item here, everything you can eat or drink is ridiculously expensive, which is the only reason Japanese people are so thin, don't buy into that diet crap. You have to be a millionare to afford to even gain weight here. I decided on day 1 the food budget would have to be kept to a minimum to furnish the beer budget. Big bags of rice, big bags of noodles, and big bags of beer will be the norm from now on.
With food out of the way, I went back home, dropped off my wares and set back out in search of adaptors, how hard can it possibly be to find an electronics store in Japan? What the #&$^! I wandered around literally a thirty block radius, 360 degrees around my apartment and found one electronics store, which didn't have voltage adaptors. But if I were writing a treatise on Japanese culture based on what I did see it would go something like this.
The Japanese are a race of car loving people who have wonderful smiles, but for some reason their hair grows at 6 times the rate of a normal human beings. They have no wish to look "cool" or even reasonable for that matter. They love to sing karaoke, but hate to buy music. Unfortunately they seem technologically inept, and have severe aversions to crowded places and smog.
Based on 6 hours of walking Saturday I did not see a single dirty car, they cherish their cars more than their children, spouses, cameras combined. A small note on Japanese cars, they're very cute, most are about 3 1/2 feet wide, and designed like card board boxes, but they love the things. During this walk I saw 2 hair salons for every other kind of business, with the exception of car dealerships. A lot of people around here ride bikes, and most of the men I saw were riding bright pink or purple bikes with little Wizard of OZ type baskets in the front. They have a ton of Karaoke bars, but no record stores, and I did not see another electronics, computer, or dvd, computer or game store the entire day. Every other Japanese person also happened to be wearing a thin white mask over their mouths, similar to what we'd see housepainters wearing, which I have to say makes me slightly nervouse *cough* birdflu *cough*
Also, I'm not sure how many of you can truly appreciate the degree of helplessness a foreigner faces here. This is not like France, or Italy or any other European country. There are no letters here (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz). Our alphabet does not exist in this country, everything is written in the same stlye as the whorey tattoos every post gen-x long island girl decides to scrawl across the crack of her ass. There are slashes, and boxes, and lines, and circles mashed together like a playschool factory exploded. So suffice to say, nothing was accomplished aside from buying the beer I would later use to help me fall asleep.
I am writing this particular entry on Tuesday night, I landed on friday - This morning I discovered...the voltage here is the same as the USA. Bear in mind Sunday and Monday were consumed with the same quest to find adapter I didn't need. Welcome to my world.

The Enola Wheat - From Take Off to Dropping It Like It Was 10,000 Degrees

Well the day started simply enough, I “finished” packing (and I say that because at this moment I haven’t thought of anything important I forgot to pack) at about 3:30 AM, and decided to take a cat nap until 5 or so. I woke up to wash the last stink of America off of me before charging into a country that subsists almost entirely on raw fish. We got to the airport without too much fanfare, parked, got a bus to the American Airlines terminal, which thankfully wasn’t busy at all. We had plenty of room to vent and gesticulate wildly when we had to pay 86 dollars to check a third bag. The suit carrier I packed to keep my suits from getting wrinkled had to be discarded so I could stuff the suits into an already overstuffed suitcase. They also informed us that, despite the forms I had printed which listed in bold lettering that international flights sent all of your bags to the final destination, my bags would only go as far as the first airport. In fact that line that soothed my worries of scrambling for my luggage and finding the right bus to go to a different airport within a couple of hours of landing in a country whose signs are going to be pictures of boxes and dashed lines, was kind of like an airline set of dinosaur bones. It was simply put there to test my faith in the incompetence of American Airlines. After a thorough pat down from a large black guy with what I can only assume was a metal detector I was through customs and on my way to the gate.
While waiting at the gate I decided it’s entirely unlikely I will ever be able to understand a single Japanese person over 60, no matter how fluent I become in the language. They have a specific kind of mumble that I can’t quite put my finger on, and because their mouths are generally smaller, you get kind of an old prospector’s whistle added in. Suffice to say I give up, the old people win, unfortunately they won’t be able to enjoy their victory being so pre-occupied with outrunning death, who surprisingly still flies coach.
The plane I’m riding in is a 777, and I know what you’re all thinking, that’s the luckiest god damn plane in the fleet. How many sevens can you pile into one flight design? Unfortunately, 21…eh…not so much a lucky number, remember how 21 jump street ended? No? That’s right, because nobody does. 21 jump street is a lot like a 14 hour flight, it begins a bunch of people trying to go to sleep even though they know they can’t because Johnny Depp is going to take off his shirt, it was inevitable that once an episode Johnny Depp was topless, and you could lose yourself in those chiseled abs like watching the clouds break and re-form above the Canadian Rockies. Yet somehow the show was still awful because 21 is an unlucky number. However, to honor the sacrifice of all those wasted hours, I now dub this craft the Boeing 21 Jump Street.
But I digress, so I am going to again recount my love of take-offs. The shear insanity of the physics involved in making a giant cylindrical school bus airborne never ceases to amaze me. It starts off with what’s essentially a controlled explosion of jet fuel which propels the plane, much like a Deloreon to a pre-determined speed that’s fast enough to keep the plane moving while the entire front section lifts into the air. So you (or in this case me) the passenger actually feel a slight dipping sensation before the plane takes off because the front of the plane is in the air well before the rear.
The seat belt, ah the airplane seat belt, has now become even more useless. Say the plane were to slow itself enough during a crash that we all didn’t die instantly, well luckily for us we have these seat belts on, and this seat belt goes well with the other new safety feature on this particular airplane, a small television built into the back of the seats. Whereas without my seatbelt I could potentially fly into something soft, like a fat person (although not as likely in a plane filled with Asians) now with the seatbelt on I am guaranteed to smack my cranium straight into a television screen, or if I’m lucky just the tray table.
After the take off is over it’s time for the actual flight, snooze central, what I have discovered however, is that if you fall asleep chewing gum, your body will eventually stop chewing, and there’s going to be a lot of extra saliva left over, and since you’re sitting up, well gravity is going to tell that saliva were to go, your shirt. Listen, I learn these lessons so you all won’t have to. Swallow your gum when you hit cruising altitude. Luckily some of the passengers probably just thought it was a leak in the air conditioning system since craning their necks to the point where they could see my head would cause severe neck pain. It was kind of funny watching everyone stand on their seats to put their carry-ons in the overhead compartment.
So awash a sea of Japanese folk returning home, I was curious to see who I would end up sitting next to, and as it turns out, I ended up sitting next to a Mexican born New Yorker. A gal named Miryam who I have nothing negative to report on, although even if I did there’s a good chance she’s reading this out of the corner of her eye so I won’t write it anyway. She’s flying out to Osaka to sell wedding plan designs to Japanese hotels. Apparently the Japanese can’t quite flaunt their cash and conspicuously consume as well as we can. I’ll make a note to add chrome and bling into my lesson plans. Damn if she didn’t buy the most comfortable looking plane pillow in the world too, it practically took an Alaskan mountain to wake her up for lunch.
The flight is 14 hours long, I assume it’s mostly because the flight moves in a parabolic trajectory to the god damned North Pole and then south again to Japan. Although I can’t complain too much because the views over Canada and Alaska were phenomenal, it’s good to have a reminder of what the world was like before it was a Wal-Mart parking lot. Especially on the way to an island more densely populated than Jersey.
Everything else today has been kind of a blur, I think single run-on sentence will encapsulate it pretty well; we landed in Tokyo and I scrambled to get my luggage, paid thirty dollars for a bus to the other airport in Tokyo I had to get to for my next flight, sat next to a Japanese dude who was a 4 year army vet that I could probably snap like a tooth pick, got on the next plane, checked all three bags without a single comment or extra penny added, stupid American Airlines, got on the flight to Hiroshima, fell asleep, woke up as we were landing with a little note that said you missed dinner, bought a bus ticket, got on another bus for about 45 minutes to get to a train station, bought a train ticket, got on the train, got off at Tokuyama (in Shunan City) got picked up by the husband of the head of the school, got dropped off at my new apartment, and here I sit after 24 straight hours of traveling, 2 planes, 2 buses, 1 train, almost two hundred dollars in bus and train tickets and no geishas later. Tomorrow of course is another day.

Wheat Out

Some More Toga Pictures

TOGA TOGA TOGA

We had a farewell bon voyage on St. Patrick's Day, in the form of a Toga Party, I don't really have a lot to report about, there was much drinking, some dancing, and much debauchery. But you know what they say about pictures...and their mathematical equivalent in words.