Fun with Google Earth

The Higashiura Aeon Shopping Mall - 34.979191906,136.974286395

(This is where I've worked since the beginning of July. There's a Nova branch in the back of the mall, facing the parking lot.)


Nova in Handa City - 34.894603303,136.926120953

(This is where I worked for the first 5 months. Some of the students were cool but the location was terrible. The only things nearby were the grocery store and the McDonald's IN the grocery store. Moving to Higashiura made my commute a lot shorter and on days when I work 'til 9, unlike at Handa, I don't get home at 10:30pm.)


The Ryokan in Takayama - 36.1432208994.137.25315458

(I wrote about a trip that Yuka and I took to Takayama recently. This was the hotel that we stayed at. It was here that we took hot baths and I almost fainted. The dinner that we were served was awesome.)


The Red Torii Gate on Miyajima -

34.2972570461,132.31902329

(This is where I was standing when I took these shots of the red torii gate on Miyajima. This island has quite a large deer population and as a consequence, an impressive amount of deer shit. The mountain that I climbed, Mizen, is at 34.2799290933,132.320390953)




The Pier at Takahama Beach - 35.4928704519,135.570146174

(I took a video of myself from the end of this pier back in August. I pitched my tent in the campground not too far from this spot.)

Takahama hip-hop

I hung out with this cool student of mine named Tetsumasa on Saturday. He picked me up after work at Nova and drove me to some small bar in Takahama that a buddy of his owns. He's a DJ so he brought his crates and tables along and he just played all of his favorite shit for me and we lounged. The place got busy by 11 or 12, but it felt more like a private club house than a bar. I had a couple of whiskeys (which Tetsumasa insisted on paying for) and he put me onto some great Japanese hip-hop. I only really caught artist names, but if you're in the mood to listen to some good Japanese hip-hop, try Nujabes (the MC's name is Shingo2) and DJ Mitsu. He played a lot of stuff from the States, including Madlib remixes of Lootpack and Time Machine (I've never heard of them). I'm downloading a bunch of stuff on LimeWire now, so I'll give you all better direction when I get it.

Talkmate School

Today was the first day that I've had an opportunity to work at a school other than a Nova branch. I had mentioned earlier that I interviewed with this weirdo named Yasuyo. In that interview he told me that I wouldn't be using a textbook (lie), I wouldn't need a lesson plan (lie), and that his school doesn't have a 'serious' atmosphere (lie). He told me that I would be expected to just talk with students and offer a little advice. Awesome if it had been true. 30 bucks an hour to do that!? No sweat. I got a phone call from him on Christmas Day (thanks by the way) and said something about coming in early so we could discuss the lesson plan. I had been drinking with Yuka and I was high on cake so I didn't want to be argumentative. I find it extra ridiculous that he asked me to do something like show up early since that's not time I'm being paid for... hello?!

So I showed up 20 minutes before I was supposed to teach and he has a STACK of things for me to get through. No one-on-one either, I'm teaching six people (five of whom have a pretty good command of English and one who can't speak a word of it) for two hours straight. I felt physically weak. There was no time to prepare, I had no idea what he was trying to tell me to do in his broken English and students began to show up early. I actually thought about turning around and leaving him without a teacher (what the fuck do I care, anyway?), but i tried to look at the thing as a challenge and I'm glad I did (money aside). The first hour was spent practicing talking on the phone and I was clearly not prepared. To help me out, Yasuyo kept hovering around me and would occassionally interrupt to tell me to do things differently. It was fucking awful. At one point I had the students work in pairs and the thing they were supposed to do didn't make any fucking sense (everything was from some textbook that Yasuyo bought) and I couldn't explain it, because, like I said, it didn't make any fucking sense. Each pair had a copy of the SAME schedule. They were supposed to talk to each other and fill in the blanks in their schedules by asking each other what their plans are. That would make sense if we had TWO schedules. We didn't. We had ONE schedule. It doesn't make any sense. Later, when I asked the students to work in pairs again, this old woman freaked out and then started talking angrily in Japanese to Yasuyo. She quickly sucked every other student into the discussion (except for me of course who was completely lost) and it went on interminably. The only thing I could catch is that it was about me and she was PISSED.

The second hour went better. When we took a 5 minute break I was able to look over what we were going to do next and get something together. We practiced giving presentations and it was cute in like an elementary school kind of way. They all had to read out loud some Helen Keller speech and then I critiqued them on it (I just winged it but they all thought it was genius). I had a 3 hour break between my first two hours and my last one. Another teacher came in while I was out and taught something completely different. At 3 I returned to finish my lesson thing, and the Japanese lady who freaked out gave me an eclair. In that last hour everyone had to write up their own presentation and then deliver it to the class. The topic could be about anything that they found interesting. Because everyone's English was so basic and because they didn't have like a lot of time to prepare or anything, they gave the cutest presentations that you could imagine. This one girl gave a talk about New York City (she lived there) and it was something like: New York is located in the East coast of America. There are five boroughs that are Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, the Brooklyn, and Staten Island. There are 8,000,000 people there... blah blah blah. One guy who was a geologist gave a talk about dinosaurs.

I sat in my teacher's chair with my scrap paper and just wrote ADORABLE! on it.

The highlight of my day was getting paid in cash. They handed me an envelope with 9000 yen in it while I was headed for the door. I thought I could get to Nova from downtown within an hour and it turns out, no, no I cannot (which will cost me 3200 yen in late penalties...). For three hours of awkward teaching and quick thinking I think it was worth it. After all, the day is behind me and I still have a wad of bills in my wallet.

Blah

Man. I know I'm terrible about keeping in touch, but I don't get emails anymore. Its been like 10 days and I've gotten 1 email. Ouch guys.

I handed in all my resignation forms two days ago. I'm gonna get my last paycheck electronically deposited in my Citizens account, but Nova is gouging me on the fees. Its gonna cost me over $70 for the transfer and I'm sure I'm also gonna get ripped off on the rate. I don't see how else to do it though since my last paycheck will come on the 15th of February and by that time I will have been out of the country for over 2 weeks. Assholes. I need to send at least one big bag home which I'm sure won't be cheap and then I'll also need to change all of my cash into traveler's checks or just send it home.

I had an interview with this guy named Yasuyo who runs a little English school in downtown Nagoya. I'm gonna pick up some extra cash working for him before I leave Japan, but I don't trust this guy AT ALL. He's gonna pay me $30 an hour to just talk to his students (no textbooks or lesson plans at all) and he scheduled me to come in for 3 hours on Tuesday. He gave me some other guy's schedule because, according to him, this other guy complains a lot, and I 'smile good.'

Tentative plan

January 26th 11:00am: Get on board of the ferry at Kobe

January 28th 12:00pm: Arrive in Tanngu, China. Get on a bus to Beijing, passing through Tianjin. Arrive in Beijing by 3 or 4pm. Check into the hotel and get dinner.

January 29th - Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City

January 30th - Outside the city to see the Great Wall

January 31st - Summer Palace, old and new. Get on an overnight sleeper train bound for Qingdao.

That's all I've got. I need to talk to Starr and find out what she wants to see. I finally put some more money on my phone card today.

Takahama show

I chatted up a student up today who DJs (hip-hop, R&B & reggae) and he's picking me up tomorrow at 8 so I can see his show. The place he's playing at is small but it should be fun. I invited Pat and David but they're busy so I guess I'm going alone. I'll let you all know how it goes.

He gave me his CD but its only a mix and mostly R&B. I'd prefer something a little more Madlib and a little less Craig David, but its not bad.

December 20, 2006

My first earthquake. I was at the Nova branch in the Higashiura Mall and teaching a Voice class. When I got home David said that they had something on TV about it and some parts of Aichi (including ours) were at a 3 on the Richter Scale. I always thought earthquakes had like, a clearly defined center, but I guess not. The 3's were separated by some distance. Anyway, so I was in Voice with three other people, Minori, a girl who lived in Toronto for a year and desperately wants to go back, a Vice President at a Pfizer reasearch facility, and this woman in her 40's, Youko, who gave me a gift of tea from Kyoto a little while back. So, it wasn't really a big deal, the room shook, I could see the walls moving, and I was rocked back and forth a little bit. At first I thought a really big truck was going by but then I realized we were in a frickin' mall and no truck is that big. They all realized what was happening and looked around for a second or two and then went back to talking like it was nothing. I tried to be funny about it but it was my first earthquake and I was genuinely a little excited:

"Holy Crap! Was that an earthquake?!"
"Yeah. Feels like a 2 or 3."
"Oh. This is my first earthquake. But its just a little one."

It lasted for only a few seconds but the shocks got smaller and smaller until I was trying to convince myself that I could feel something after it stopped. I can check 'survive an earthquake' off my list of things to do. It helps me to visualize how fucking crazy the Kobe earthquake in 1995 must have been. Not the destruction obviously, but it must have been like: 'oh, hey, we should go get some Spaghetti-Os for lunch,' and then the whole city is destroyed in a matter of seconds. Well, it wasn't destroyed in a few seconds, the fires and everything immediately afterwards did a lot, but you know what I mean.

Hida no Sato and Takayama

This past weekend Yuka and I went up to Takayama in Gifu. Its a three-hour bus ride through the mountains and when you arrive: fucking cold. We spent Wednesday walking around Takayama, crashed at a Japanese-style hotel, and saw the surrounding area (Hida no Sato) on the following day. We made it home by 10pm on Thursday night and went into Nagoya for the Christmas lights and crappy artwork.

We made reservations at a Takayama Ryokan (Japanese inn) a week earlier and Yuka got us some books on what to see. On Wednesday we saw the Takayama-jinya, which is an old government building from the Edo era. Taxes were collected there and asses were beaten. They had some torture equipment on display and while its not quite up to Braveheart levels of awesomeness, it did make my balls tremble a bit. In addition to the biting cold, it started to rain while we were in the government building, which forced us to splurge on a fabulous-looking yellow umbrella from a sidewalk vendor. We had some Matcha (thick and bitter green tea) and Japanese sweets, raw beef sushi (its fucking awesome), and then saw some house that's an architectural masterpiece (for some stupid reason). We headed to our hotel around 5 o'clock.


Staying at the Ryokan was a cool experience. Some Ryokan are built around Onsen (volcanic hot springs) and are the most popular. Our place had hot tubs but thanks to the lack of a volcano, wasn't technically an Onsen. I took a dip (naked and on the guy-only side of the hotel) and found another scale with which to measure my physical decline. I now weigh 71kg., which (as I just looked it up online) is 156 pounds. I'm wasting away. That's about 30 pounds lighter than when I arrived. I might now be underweight for my age and height. Anywho, I stayed in the water too long, and thanks to not having had much to eat that day, almost fainted in the hallway. I got really dizzy when I got out of the water and had to lean on stuff to get back to my room. Yuka said that when she first went to an Onsen when she was little the same thing happened, so she was able to take care of me. This included fanning me with a magazine and trying not to laugh.

We changed into yukatas (light kimonos) and had our dinner served to us in the room. We bought a bottle of fancy-pants sake earlier in the day, so we had that with the meal as well. After dinner, the woman who had served it came back to clean up our mess and make our beds. Yadda yadda yadda, it was an awesome night. We watched some late night TV and I was totally able to follow this comedy show. My Japanese is shit but getting better.

The next day we had breakfast on the first floor, Yuka took another dip in the hot tubs, and then we checked out. She insisted on paying for everything and I've been unable to get her to take some money from me since. I guess my plan is to treat her to a stay at a Ryokan in Tokyo for New Year's (if that's even possible on such short notice).


The next day we went to Hida no Sato (Hida's village) which is a well-preserved village cum museum. All of the houses were open and you could walk around inside them but as they all had tatami, we had to keep taking our shoes off. In the biting cold of northern Gifu, this was a problem. We skipped several of the houses because we couldn't stand the thought of letting our feet get any colder. We got some good pictures of the village and after a few hours of that, we got Japanese sweets again, took a scenic hike in the mountains near Takayama, and got more raw beef sushi. Dinner was ramen noodles (Takayama is known for its ramen it turns out) and we killed the rest of our sake on the bus ride home. We got drunk and loud and then found out later that almost every single person on the bus with us could speak perfect English. I can't remember what we were talking about but it wasn't very Japaneesy. I kept getting in everyone's way as they tried to get off the bus and everyone kept saying things like 'Oh, excuse me, can I get by you?' I was shocked. No one here can speak English that well. Where did those people come from?

Short story: I didn't apologize

I teach at the Nova in Anjo on Saturdays and I have for what feels like FOREVER. I hate going there. The same people always come on Saturdays so I never see any new faces there. The type of student that Anjo seems to attract (with a few notable exceptions) are smug businessmen and engineers who don't like to be silly or creative and don't like to actually speak English. They like to just nod and act like this is all so damned easy that its almost funny.

So, I was given a group of junior students (7 and 8 year-olds) because there's one girl in the class who is a handful and the staff thinks she might listen to a male teacher. I go down to the lobby to get the kids (there are three girls and a boy) and one of the girls calls me a monkey right off the bat. That's fine. I get called lots of stuff by kids and I know how to handle it. 'I'm not a monkey, YOU'RE THE MONKEY!' She then calls me monkey teacher and I call her monkey student and everyone's laughing so its fun. I do the lesson and everyone waves goodbye and I feel like I did a bang-up job. Less than 15 minutes goes by and one of the Japanese staff comes up to the teacher's room to talk to me. 'We just got a call from one of the girl's parents. Did you call her monkey in the class?' 'Hells motherfucking yeah I called her a monkey. She IS a monkey.' 'Ok, that girl's mom is really upset. She wants you to apologize to the girl.' The staff tells me that the little girl's mom understands what happened and that it was all a game or whatever, but she doesn't care because I'm an adult and I should know better. Calling me a monkey can be forgiven because she's only a kid but I'm at fault because I'm a mature and responsible grown-up. I refuse to apologize. Being the mature grownup, I tell the Japanese staff that I'll quit before I apologize to the kid. It's not that I think I'm too good to apologize to a little girl, but I don't feel like I did anything wrong. I call students names all the time, and some of those names stick for weeks. Hello Eri, hello Shouta, hello Yuuki, hello Poop. Its just how it works.

So a week went by and I had to go back to Anjo. I figured that after what I said the staff would just switch the class to someone else and the mom would get over it. Well, the mom got over it and no longer wanted an apology but the staff wasn't bright enough to switch me out of the class. After all the fuss that girl's mom made (including phone calls to the other parents to see if their kids liked me as a teacher or not) the kids just couldn't be comfortable around me. They were all quiet and wouldn't really look at me. I tried my best to get it back to how it was but that trust (or whatever) was completely fucked. It was terrible. I felt guilty and so did they. Ugh. If that mom hadn't freaked out no one would have cared and everything would have been fine.

The other teachers and I came up with some theories on why the mom got so heated. One is that in Japan there have been some recent high-profile cases where teachers bully students and the kids go off and kill themselves over it. Maybe the mom just freaked out because her head was elsewhere when her daugher told her what happened. Another one, that Alex (from New Zealand) came up with, is that the word monkey has special significance in Japan. I guess thats what occupying forces called the Japanese and its a racial slur on par with the N-word in the US. The only other thing that we came up with was that she didn't really understand what happened in the classroom because if she had, she wouldn't have freaked out.

Anyway, its all over and nothing has changed except now those kids and I can't have fun anymore.

my car is in the hose-pee-tall

Every weekend I go to the Tsurumai Public Library and to the Nagoya International Center and swap out the books I've finished for some fresh ones. This past weekend, with a stack of books under my arm and the sweaty look of someone who hasn't showered, I was approached by a camera crew who wanted to interview me. Approached is the wrong word since I was actually grabbed from behind and then quickly surrounded by four people. I was waiting to cross the street and there were maybe another 8 or 9 Japanese businessmen standing with me. They all looked quite amused when they realized what was happening. 'Do you speak Japanese or English?' Apparently when I said 'English' they heard 'you may start the interview now.' The guy holding the camera hoisted it up on his shoulder and a really bright light came on. The woman reporter's face completely changed to like, her show-time expression and she put the microphone in my face. The other two guys stood up straight but I put my hand in front of the camera and asked her WHY she was asking me what language I spoke. Her exact words were 'Ok ok ok ok ok ok. I want to know how your local travel experience is different from what you expected.' Nothing clever came to me and right as she finished her question the light turned green, so I told her I was sorry but I didn't want to talk about my 'local travel experience.' I guess I just wasn't ready to be THAT famous yet, you know? I mean, signing autographs I can handle, but the tabloids, the rumors, the paparrazi... its just not worth it in the end. At least, not before I speak to my lawyers and iron out the details of the merchandizing rights. The money is an issue but you have to consider overexposure.

Chuugokugo (=Chinese language)

I borrowed a CD of Taiwanese and Mandarin phrases from the Okazaki public library and I'm putting it onto my iPod right now. I can say hello, how are you, what's your name, and a few other things in Chinese now, but my pronounciation is terrible. Yuka and I came up with the brilliant idea of going to ECC (a school that competes with Nova) and a Nova branch outside of our own area to take demo lessons in Chinese next weekend. Both of those schools offer free 20-min. trial lessons (you can get a trial English lesson from a teacher at the branch but any other language that the schools offer is done with a computer and networking software. For Nova, all languages other than English [Italian, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish] are taught by teachers in Tokyo and Osaka), so we think its a good plan. Maybe we'll go to two different branches and try German lessons after that. Whatever we need to kill time before the bars open.

This weekend Yuka and I are heading up to Takayama. Its in northern Gifu (the prefecture bordering Aichi to the north) and high in the mountains. We booked a night at a Ryokan (Japanese-style hotel) and transportation there for about $130 each. It'll take about 3 hours on a bus to reach Takayama but its supposed to be worth it. My Lonely Planet suggests visiting Takayama and Kanazawa in central Japan if you're a tourist just passing through, which means that according to Lonely Planet there are more worthwhile things to do and see in this tiny mountain village than a modern city the size of Chicago. Either this place is amazing or Nagoya really, really, really sucks. The town escaped the destruction of World War II and Japan's own turbulent history so its a preserved community from like, not just hundreds, but thousands of years ago. Its also known for its sweet unrefined sake. There are tons of breweries that offer tours according to my guide. And by guide I mean imagination since I didn't actually look that up. It just seems like there should be, you know?