I hoped to write yesterday but I’ve been totally swamped. For some reason I thought this job was going to be easy and dull. It’s exactly the opposite as it turns out. I’ve been up late every night planning lessons and making supplements. Then I wake up early in the mornings to practice before going into training. It’s been totally worth it, though. I taught my first lesson to a class of Japanese people yesterday and it was a blast.
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Since I last wrote I’ve had three days of training. The first two days were pretty dull; a lot of lecture about company history and policy. Yesterday, however, toward the end we got to observe a 50-minute class that our trainer conducted with a few Japanese volunteer students. The students were all older businesspeople and housewives, but they were very enthusiastic about learning English. Watching them puzzle out sentences and try to roll and shove out complex English really made me look forward to my own classes. Before and after the class the trainees got to spend some time chatting with the students, all of whom were really awesome. One man in particular asked me all about what I thought of the recent American election. He is very excited about Obama as President.
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Today I woke up in Japan. Jet lag hit me pretty hard yesterday but I managed to stay up late enough to more or less reset my sleeping schedule. It’s about 10:30 am now and I’ve been up for a couple of hours unpacking my stuff and getting settled into the hotel room. I also went out for some coffee and picked up an onigiri (rice ball) at a nearby mini mart. Convenience stores in Japan are pretty amazing. You can pick up a boxed lunch that rivals the fare of many American restaurants for about five dollars. Unfortunately I couldn’t read the Japanese characters that said what was inside the rice ball, so I just made a guess. Actually it was an educated guess, because I did recognize the character for “child” or “egg,” and I know that of all the fillings used in onigiri, the most common one involving an egg is spicy Pollack roe, otherwise known as mentaiko, which I enjoy. I turned out to be right, which was a relief.
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As of this writing I’m somewhere in the sky not far from Anchorage, Alaska. I know this thanks to the secret remote control hidden in my armrest, which seems able to do just about anything I’d ever want to do at 37,000 feet. I can use it to turn on my overhead light, page a flight attendant, change channels on my personal television, and supposedly even play video games. But you have to slide a credit card into the side of the remote to do that. I already spent $50 today to check 140 pounds of clothes and shoes onto a plane, plus $8.50 for a mediocre turkey sandwich at O’Hare, so I’m not exactly swimming in cash for games.
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So this is my last night in America, for a year anyway. I originally planned to dig through my boxed books and pick out several for my parents to mail me later, but at this point I can’t stand to look at another single box. I feel like my whole life for the past year has been built of boxes – either going into them or coming out. I think I know my motley collection of cardboard better than I know the things that have been crammed into them. But it’s been a good time. All the places I’ve lived have been just as fun and interesting as they’ve been vexing. And I expect Japan will be just the same. What else can be expected from a land where you can order a still-beating frog heart for dinner? Mmmm mmm. I can’t wait.
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