First Week Roundup
Well like any alcoholic or alzheimer's sufferer, there are moments I remember with crystal clarity and everything else passes through my head sponge in a watery blur. The bulk of the week was spent travelling to my accustomed classes. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I teach until 9 or 10 PM, but I never have any classes before 11 AM, which I am very excited about. Not just because I have a lot of options as far as boozing and carousing go, but I like being a night owl, and I won't have to change my post college twenty-something timetable of pacing and listening to music until 3 AM every night.
Driving. Holy Crap, driving is crazy here, the first time I got in the car and drove was pretty crazy, the whole left side of the road thing. Everytime I need to make a turn I repeat the mantra of tight left, wide right, so I don't cause some limb severing pile-up. All the street signs are in Japanese but luckily all the major arteries are numbered, most of my driving to class happens on route 2, so I'm ok there. My car is a tiny Honda from the civil war era, it couldn't hit 100 if you dropped it out of a plane, but I've been driving Saturns my whole life so it's not so hard to get used to. Also, I'm constantly getting in on the wrong side of the car, since the driver's side is also switched here. Other than the main roads, all the back roads here are tiny, most can't fit two cars side to side, but almost all of them are two way streets.
Karaoke is quite an interesting endeavor here. I've gone to an atypical Elvis themed Karaoke bar a couple times, the owner speaks pretty good English and I think we've reached a rapport at this point where he undercharges me a little bit if I decide inebriation is in order. The owner also is the headline act, he plays guitar and sings a wide variety of English and Japanese songs, and if he knows the one you want he lets you sing the song. The last time I stopped in I ended up drinking with a trio of Japanese real estate agents who were decent chaps, they said thankyou about a hundred times when they left, which makes me feel pretty good because people thank me just for my company here.
I also taught my first two classes this week. Which I will have to remind the school's administrator that according to my contract I should be paid for. Both classes were private lessons, the first one, which I think was on wednesday or thursday, was one woman who wanted to brush up on her English because she is getting married in Hawaii in a couple months. So we talked for a half hour or so, I tried to gauge what her weak points were, and then I used some kind of travel English workbook to do some listening and reading excercises etc. The important thing is that the class was a trial class, and afterwards she decided she would come in every week, so I just earned the school a student on my first lesson, which I assume looks pretty good for me. The second lesson was a Japanese High School girl who was pretty shy and nervous, and we talked for the entire hour because I had no idea what else to really do for the first lesson, for some reason I ended up explaining Plate Tectonics at some point during the class, but she said she understood what I was talking about. The funniest part is when I try to explain something, she will tell me the Japanese equivalent and all I can say is, "umm, maybe" so it makes it a little hard to know if she knows what the hell I'm talking about half the time, but nothing catastrophic happened so I'm satisfied.
The weekend isn't over yet, but It's already proving quite interesting so I'll try to cover everything on Monday.
Wheat Out
Driving. Holy Crap, driving is crazy here, the first time I got in the car and drove was pretty crazy, the whole left side of the road thing. Everytime I need to make a turn I repeat the mantra of tight left, wide right, so I don't cause some limb severing pile-up. All the street signs are in Japanese but luckily all the major arteries are numbered, most of my driving to class happens on route 2, so I'm ok there. My car is a tiny Honda from the civil war era, it couldn't hit 100 if you dropped it out of a plane, but I've been driving Saturns my whole life so it's not so hard to get used to. Also, I'm constantly getting in on the wrong side of the car, since the driver's side is also switched here. Other than the main roads, all the back roads here are tiny, most can't fit two cars side to side, but almost all of them are two way streets.
Karaoke is quite an interesting endeavor here. I've gone to an atypical Elvis themed Karaoke bar a couple times, the owner speaks pretty good English and I think we've reached a rapport at this point where he undercharges me a little bit if I decide inebriation is in order. The owner also is the headline act, he plays guitar and sings a wide variety of English and Japanese songs, and if he knows the one you want he lets you sing the song. The last time I stopped in I ended up drinking with a trio of Japanese real estate agents who were decent chaps, they said thankyou about a hundred times when they left, which makes me feel pretty good because people thank me just for my company here.
I also taught my first two classes this week. Which I will have to remind the school's administrator that according to my contract I should be paid for. Both classes were private lessons, the first one, which I think was on wednesday or thursday, was one woman who wanted to brush up on her English because she is getting married in Hawaii in a couple months. So we talked for a half hour or so, I tried to gauge what her weak points were, and then I used some kind of travel English workbook to do some listening and reading excercises etc. The important thing is that the class was a trial class, and afterwards she decided she would come in every week, so I just earned the school a student on my first lesson, which I assume looks pretty good for me. The second lesson was a Japanese High School girl who was pretty shy and nervous, and we talked for the entire hour because I had no idea what else to really do for the first lesson, for some reason I ended up explaining Plate Tectonics at some point during the class, but she said she understood what I was talking about. The funniest part is when I try to explain something, she will tell me the Japanese equivalent and all I can say is, "umm, maybe" so it makes it a little hard to know if she knows what the hell I'm talking about half the time, but nothing catastrophic happened so I'm satisfied.
The weekend isn't over yet, but It's already proving quite interesting so I'll try to cover everything on Monday.
Wheat Out
posted by Just1Wheat at
1:47 AM
