I should have posted this a month ago

The blog keeps going unblogged. Life is taking up a lot of my time nowadays. Planning lessons still seems to take up a lot of my time and focus. The teaching has been going fairly well, but there have been some bumps in the road too. I'll have a really good class and then the next class will go just awfully, or vice versa. Today I had a class that I got into a pretty bad funk over. They used to be a really good bunch of kids, but I suppose its my own fault for not being really strict with them from the start. I let a few things slide in the beginning and now they are spiraling out of control. Rowdiness, whining, constant Japanese speaking, inattentiveness, general boundary testing. Its just one of those things that happens, but it doesn't feel particularly good. to get some order back to the class I will have to be incredibly strict to make up for my prior laxness. I will have to wear my German Uber-disciplinarian hat. We'll see how that goes.
On a more optimistic note, fun stuff happened to me too. Three weekends ago (gee, I really haven't been keeping up with stuff, have I) one of Trey's students took us to the Japanese pub. The student, Kio, is a 50 year old BMX bike racer. He took Trey and I out after class on a friday night. He ordered us these huge platters of sushi and sashimi, plus salad, sausage, fries, bright blue eggplant, pickled cucumbers, and of course many gigantic mugfuls of beer. I thought I was going to explode. One thing I really love about Japan is that your friends order for you, and if they are Japanese, they usually pay too. In exchange we just have to speak ridiculously slowly and engage in very basic small talk that just-learning-english-japanese-friend can understand. After all the eating and drinking at the Japanese pub, Kio suggested that we all amble down the street tot he darts bar. He had the bartender make me a drink that is apparently very famous in Japan because it is mentioned by Hemingway in the Old Man and the Sea. it was awful, but it was a small sacrifice to be made for literary trivia. I also discovered that I am freakishly good at darts. If the teaching thing doesn't work out, maybe I will become a professional dart shark in Japan.

So I suppose many things have happened since my last post. I started my first week of teaching and I moved into my apartment finally. I got into a bicycle accident and was tricked into eating liver. I drank beer with my boss and I am going to Disneyland. I committed horrible faux pas and I made Junior high girls giggle again. I can't figure out how to make an international phone call, but I discovered an espresso machine under my kitchen sink.
Since I left off last, I continued my observation week... meeting all of my classes. Turns out i was a little grumpy and pre-judgmental (shock) my first week. Jason, the teacher I took over for, turned out to be a pretty cool guy. He has a Japanese wife and a baby that live a couple hours away from here. He wasn't the best teacher ever, but he was inexperienced, just like me, and hey, these kids can be tough. Its easy to just let the chips fall where they may with them. the other teacher Trey, turns out, is actually my cup of tea. In a place where hardly anyone understands you, its nice to have someone around who appreciates my sarcasm and can dish it right back to me. I don't think Japan has cultivated the dry sense of humor yet. We commiserate and also laugh/cry over the third teacher Melanie, who we both find to be sometimes excruciating company.
Melanie is a whole other story. During observation week I had to live with her in her tiny apartment, since my apartment was still occupied. She is a nice girl at heart, and about 7 years older than me. Her fatal flaw though is that she talks INCESSANTLY. If you ask her a simple question, she gives you a forty minute explanation. From the moment she walked in the door at night to the moment she went to sleep there was not 5 minutes of silence. This is no exaggeration. I would try to write emails to my parents or read a book. I could not even type a full sentence without being interrupted. I had to give up on the book. I don;t know if silence terrifies her, or if she was just really excited to have someone around at home. This maybe doesn't seem so bad, but in the hours upon hours of conversation I was subjected to, none of it was interesting or stimulating to me, She just said all of her thoughts out loud. Melanie seems incapable of judging when people are interested or not, as she will continue having a conversation with the back of your head after you walk away from her. After 5 nights of over 3 hours of straight talking I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The other teachers where helping me plot an escape. I can't take that much socialization. After a while anxiety, boredom, frustration, and violated boundaries come together into a seething mass of antisocialness and the only release I can think of is to break through the sliding glass door and jump out the window. I nearly did, but then Jason moved out of my apartment.
My new apartment is small. I imagine that only apartments in New York City are this small. But I live in the country in Japan, which means that my apartment is bigger than the poor kids who live in the big japanese cities. My washing machine is in my kitchen. There is no dryer- such things don't really exist here. If I stretched out my arms I could touch all four walls in my bathroom. The same knobs control the sink and the shower. The kitchen and bathroom are very small. The bedroom/ living room is decently sized. there are no chairs. I sit on a little cushion on the floor and eat at a low table (with a heater built into the underside for winter!) that also has the television on it. My bosses were really nice and bought me a bed my first day in the apartment, Its hard and looks like a child's bed, but its nicer than sleeping on a futon. I also have a little balcony to let the breeze in. More importantly though, it has a clothesline strung across it so I can dry my clothes.
On Friday, Jason had his last day. After work, The Imais (our bosses) took Jason, Trey, Melanie, and I to the Izakaya. Its name was Alfalfa. An izakaya is a Japanese pub where you hang out after work, drink beer (or whatever), and eat whatever foods they happen to have available. It was a good time. It turned out to be fourth of July that day, though it took me almost the whole day to realize it. It was nice though to celebrate in even a small, non-american way. Randomly, the pub had an interesting choice of decoration, which included an american flag right behind our table, complete with biker Santa Claus.
After the Imai's took us teachers home for the night we ventured out again to the darts bar for more fun and to harass some reluctant Japanese bartenders into playing darts with us. I was actually good, despite not knowing anything about darts. I beat almost everybody there.
I also got into a little bike accident that week while trying to avoid a big truck. No real bike rules in Japan. I tried to jump a small curb ramp to get onto the side walk and off of the road. The curb and the bike did not agree. I ended up falling with the bike onto the sidewalk, So did my laptop which was in the bike basket. As I was picking myself up off the curb, I looked around at the cars parked at the light. They were all staring straight ahead, which means they saw everything and out of embarrassment for me decided to politely pretend like nothing had happened. I had some scrapes and bruises, but nothing serious. The laptop survived and is just slightly more bent than usual.

More news of the teaching and Dsineyland should follow shortly.

Observation

Monday was the fateful day that I left Yotskaido, the general Tokyo area, and civilization. Just kidding about that last part... mostly. I took the Yotskaido train to Chiba (where the head office was). Even though the train station was familiar, Hannah and I stood there like idiots for about 10 minutes trying to figure out what platform our connecting trains were on. A woman on the next platform wanted to help me, but she would have ended up sending me on the wrong train if I had actually gotten on the one she suggested. When in doubt go by departure time. By my own devices I boarded the rapid train to Tokyo station. A young business woman slept against me for the entire half an hour. At Tokyo station the real fun began. The station is huge and you have to go through turnstiles (and risk losing your ticket, at least in my paranoid traveler mind) to get to other platforms that may or may not be yours. I asked a bunch of people and with a little frenzied jog I made it the right platform where my next train was already waiting for me. It was the SUPER Express with airplane style seats and a woman who came around with a cart to sell snacks and beer. I ate the mystery lunch I had brought: What I had thought was a donut type thing and turned out to be filled with curry, a roll with a fried mashed potato patty topped with seasoned mayonnaise, and what I thought was water since it came in a blue and white carton that said Acqua on it (actually a fruit-flavored yogurt drink). The Japanese, to my dismay, put mayonnaise on almost anything. I took that super express to Takasaki, which is the major city that my little village lies outside. There I transfered to another train line with more confusion and a lot of gesturing. This new train though, was a zebra train. The scenery in the area is very pretty. There are lots of mountains in the distance. The Japanese Alps start in this prefecture (county/ state). There are rice paddies everywhere. The houses are more spread out. At least from the views on the train, everywhere where there aren't houses or rice paddies, there are groves of trees and bamboo. I think it will be a good area for photographing.

The entire commute from Yotsukaido to Tomioka took about three hours. I was met at the train station, if you can call it that, by Mrs. Imai. She is the owner of my school along with her husband. She is very nice. Her English is pretty decent. We made awkward conversation as walked to the school. She showed me around the school a little bit before leaving me to the internet. The school is small, but nice and clean. There are about four classrooms. The teachers desks are out in the open, but obstructed from view by huge cabinets full of books and games. The first person I met besides the Imai's was another teacher named Tanner. He has a horrible Minnesota accent. He also struck me as kind of an odd guy. He has a Japanese fiancee who he met in Minnesota. He talked to me about house loans. Then Jason came. Jason is the teacher I am replacing, but he was only substituting for a month. The teacher who was teaching my classes for the past year was named Bethany. She left at the beginning of June, though. They got this guy, Jason, to fill in until I got there. Jason is a big Australian guy with a big voice. He is a nice guy and was very helpful in showing me around. He isn't a very good teacher though. This week I am meant to sit in on all of his classes and observe. They will become my students and my classes next week and for the rest of the year. i am supposed to note how he structures the class, how the students behave, who the strong students are, what areas they need improvement in, etc.
Jason has never taught before, and it kind of shows. He obviously had no interest in keeping up the standards that the old teacher had made for the classes. The young kids where borderline out of control. The older kids speak japanese in class all of the time instead of English. He plays games that take up more than half of the class. The games are supposed to be fairly education, but he just lets them play without saying or repeating the words in English. Basically he kind of lets the kids walk over him. Its decidedly his perogative though. He said he didn't want to invest time in disciplining the kids because he was only going to be their teacher for a month and he wanted to make it easier on himself. Having lessons takes more planning. He seems to feel guilty that the kids get sent to the school by their parents and so they should learn less and play more. Thats all well and good for him, but it is going to make it that much harder on me. Its going to take that much more discipline, and meanness (which I am not so good at in the first place) to get things back on track. I'l have to be the mean teacher who cuts the games short for some actual learning, or forces them to answer. Oh well.
The first class was a group of three little kids. I think they were 6 and 7. Two of them are brother and sister. The little boy who is younger is very smart and has a huge little laugh. The next class was a group of three, soon to be four, 11 year old boys. They played Junior scrabble, but they have learned to spell phonetically. Japanese phonics and English phonics are very very different. They came up with some pretty interesting things. After an hour break there was a group of adults that all work at the same company. The business pays for their lessons, but they work so much that its lucky if half the students show up for a class. They are Usually all late too. They can have basic conversations, but they are very reluctant to give more than the absolute bare minimum to communicate an idea. Their responses are never more than a sentence. The last class of the day seems like a handful. They are 4 junior high school girls, maybe about 12. They giggle the whole class and talk to each other in Japanese. They are very curious though. They all gasped and giggled when I said I was from America. The last girl teacher was from Canada- way less exciting than America. They invited me to play Uno with them during class. They giggled and said I was beautiful and had a beautiful name etc etc etc　giggle giggle giggle. I am Also staying with a girl Bethany in her apartment. She was b\not there last night as she went to visit her boyfriend. I slept on a little futon on the floor and had my first Japanese apartment to myself