Last weekend on Saturday night (25/04/09) Jenni and I caught up with some of the other ALTs (Chris, Ana, Tom and Lisa) at Tom and Ana's house in Ota. We had a few drinks there and then went out for our (inevitable) first night of karaoke. Despite not being able to hold a tune to save myself and my throat still destroyed by the cold I had had since the previous week, it was a lot of fun. At the place we went, you pay 550Yen (currently roughly $8AUD though for arguments sake we look at it as $5.50) for half an hour of karaoke...plus all you can drink thrown in for free. That's alcoholic drinks. Beer, some wine, spirits etc. We stayed for two hours because the first hour seemed to be over in less than 20 minutes. So we payed 2200Yen for two hours of all we could drink, listening to/badly singing music we liked. I think it's a really good deal. Got home at about 3:30 Sunday morning. On Sunday we just slept in then went shopping for random grocery stuff.
Then we began our third week of school. Teaching-wise it was much the same as the week before though maybe I'm starting to get in to a sort of routine now. It's still fairly annoying doing lesson plan's with Japanese teachers when; a) I don't know anything about teaching or lesson planning, and b) I can't speak Japanese and they can't speak English [well enough for this task]. On Tuesday, Mikuria had a fire drill in second period (so rather than just cancel my lesson - like they would have at, say, Jenni's school - they made me do that lesson in first period, which was a bit of a let-down lol) and there are some small differences between their fire drill and the one's I took part of in Australia;
1. Everyone RUNS. They don't walk quickly, they all run out to the meeting area...it's how they are taught to do it.
2. They all have handkerchiefs specifically for the purpose of covering their noses and mouths when there is a fire/fire drill.
Overall I think they did pretty well.
Moving along in the week, Wednesday was a public holiday for the Emporer's birthday. We just spent the day cleaning the apartment and doing a bit of shopping again. Then that afternoon Lisa told us about some fireworks down on the river that night. So we met up with Lisa and Chris to go see those. They were pretty good, but nothing spectacular by Japanese standards - they went for about half an hour. We tried to take some video footage but the camera struggled to focus properly aaaand I don't know how to fiddle with the settings yet. Plan b, our two digital cameras...didn't work particularly well in the traditional sense either. The fireworks were quite a way away from our vantage point so we had to zoom in a lot...the result was any slight movement/shaking of the camera caused things like this to happen:
Thursday was back to school - to Kuno today though - ...nothing to report.. other than that the principal saw through my impressive pretending-to-do-work-while-eyeing-the-clock acting and said I could go home a whole 15 minutes early! This week it wasn't blowing a gale either.
The ride to Kuno is a good 25 minutes or so in good conditions. Last week I had to ride home into a ridiculously strong headwind. It took me almost double the time to get home than it usually does. At some points it was literally easier to get off the bike and walk it along than to ride. I couldn't believe there was so much wind on an otherwise clear, beautiful day. My ears were numb and there was a ringing inside my head for like half an hour after I got home.
Aaaanyway then I got through Friday fairly well, with only one small hitch: I did the wrong lesson plan for one class. I dunno why I did it or why I didn't remember what the right lesson plan was. It just happened. Luckily the only person to realise this was the Japanese teacher - not that she [could have?] said anything at the time - and the class went ahead pretty smoothly.
Following that, I found out that it's gonna require a lot of time and effort to get my Japanese drivers license and buy a car. I'm starting to think it might be easier to first just get my international drivers permit for the time being and then work on the arduous process of getting the Japanese license later. Oh well...Golden Week is starting. I'll post more updates later.
A couple of other random photos:
Our vacuum cleaner VS our iron.
The tiny cans of Fanta with Jelly in.
Oh, and I'm still sick.
