Sunday, August 28, 2005
This is my arm now. I am burnt like crazy! I got these from the intense biking I did for 2 days. I practiced biking to my different schools for those two days.
I'm heading now to a music festival in my town. I just bought a cooler for beer today. Man, I have been drinking a lot recently.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
I have just come back from almost an all day biking practice to my different schools. Majority of these schools are situated on the other side of the mountains and so biking was no fun at all, not to mention the painstacking uphill biking. At least I'm looking forward to be in great shape in a few months.
5:09 PM
Thursday, August 11, 2005
It's been 11 days since I arrived in Japan. I am now in my little town. Although it's a small town, the people here are very friendly and down to earth. I'm too lazy to blog right now and so I will cut and paste excerpts from an email I sent to a few friends. Ha ha. I also took some photos from my mobile phone. I took a lot of photos from my digital camera but I left my USB cable at my home in Canada and so I could not publish them right now on this site. I asked my brother to mailed it to me instead. Here we go...
[excerpts from an email sent to friends.... edited of course]
Well, it's been 11 days since I arrived Japan. I stayed in Tokyo for 3 nights. Tokyo was great! Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to really do sightseeing because of our very busy schedule. On Wednesday last week, my own prefecture picked me up (with about 8 others) from Tokyo and flew to prefectural capital. The trip was about an hour and 15 minutes. We stayed there for one night. It is a city of about 600,000 people, same size as my home city in Canada. The next day, we were all picked up individually by our contracting organization, which in my case is my city's Board of Education. It's a city of about 46,000 people. This place is considered countryside. I am surrounded by mountains and farmlands. I'm OK... I started liking living in my small town. The people are a lot nicer and friendlier. I felt being part of the community already. I feel like everybody knows me. Last Saturday, I joined "bon odori" which is an annual summer festival celebrated all over Japan where people dance on the streets in sync, drunk!I actually saw myself on TV dancing and so I videotaped it with my camera... haha. I am working right now in the board of education office until the end of August. School starts in September. I am teaching 7 schools: junior high school, elementary, and kindergarten, two of which are situated on top of the mountains and so I have to take a bus which runs only a few times a day. Two others are low enough on the mountains that I can bike to, the rest are in the lowlands. I was already introduced to the teachers of each school. Everyone was so nice, in fact, I received a bag of different kinds of vegetables they harvested from one of these schools. haha. I thought that was cute.
I went to an astronomical observatory on top of the mountain. I saw Jupiter, the moon, and other stars, close up! It was amazing!
My house is great! It's a two storey house. The second floor is a Japanese style room -- the floor is covered by tatami (Japanese straw map). I sleep on a futon (japanese style). There are sliding doors everywhere in my house. I have two a/c's, one for the living room and the other for the second floor. There are no central heating nor cooling system in japanese houses. The japanese are very strict with energy conservation so the a/c's must be set at a high temperature and a/c's must be turned off when you are not in your room or when you're leaving the house. The water heater must also be turned off when not in use. The government discourages wearing suit and tie so that a/c's can be set high in the office. So it's quite warm in the office. Everyone is carrying a fan ("uchiwa") and fanning away... Everyone wears short sleeves polo shirt, dress pants and dress shoes. They call this fashion "Cool Biz" (cool business)... haha.
It's so hard to quit smoking here since you can buy cigarettes anywhere, e.g. vending machines... and they are so cheap (around $3.00)! You can also buy beer from the vending machines. I have been drinking almost everyday since there's always something going on. There's this one Japanese lady who always treat us English teachers here. She owns a company in this town and everyone knows her and she has a very big influence here in this town.. hehe. I have been eating "kombini bento" (convenience bento boxes) everyday. They are delicious but I'm getting tired of them... haha.
I took some photos from my cellphone though and here they are. I took a photo of the main train terminal in my city (the cone shaped building)... can you see the mountains behind it? haha. Another one was taken on top of the mountains while I was in the observatory, and then a photo of me, another English teacher, a co worker and my boss (far right), getting drunk before we danced "bon odori" on the streets last Saturday.
... the train terminal...
... drinking party before bon odori...
10:07 PM
Monday, August 01, 2005
今東京にいるよ！ Yes, yes, yes.... I'm in Tokyo! It's like a dream come true. I still have a bit of jetlag but I'm OK. I arrived Tokyo yesterday at about 3.30 PM Sunday but didn't get to my hotel until 6.00 PM! My friends from Toronto called me up in my hotel room and met them downstairs at the hotel lobby and off we went... We walked around Shinjuku area. I can't believe how busy this area is on a Sunday night! We went to Yoshinoya, a very popular and cheap fastfood chain serving traditional Japanese food, for dinner. I had gyuuyakiniku___ something. It was good and then we had icecream and sat at a park. It was not too hot last night but it's so humid in the morning, the next day.
Well, that's all for now... I have to get ready for my seminars and orientation in 15 minutes. It's my first day on the job today.
9:33 AM
