American stuff!!

I've found a few stores around that sell imported goods from North America. It's heavenly. One store in the mall here (Aeon) is called Kaldi Coffee Farm and it has a lot of imported wine and food. It's all usually pretty expensive but totally worth it, generally. I bought three boxes of Kraft box Mac n Cheese at $3 a pop, two cans of root beer for only $1 each, Skippy peanut butter for $4, a bottle of Bertolli alfredo sauce for $7 and Al a pack of Big Red gum for $2. A few other things but I don't really remember...they sell Old El Paso taco kits which is really nice because Mexican food is literally non-existant here. I've also found a few places that sell cleaners like Scrubbing Bubbles, Downy, Chlorox and Shout. Obviously they sell these things in Japan but I can't read the labels so I never know what to buy. Finding these things was a Godsend and it's amazing the little things that make me ridiculously happy =)

Ugh.

Stop lights here are the longest on the face of the planet.

Japanese drivers are the worst in the history of life.

It takes, on average, at least 30 minutes to drive 10 kilometers (about 6 miles).

End of story.

Karaoke, Driving and Pastry Shops

Well, I've survived driving in Japan. It's not as hard driving on the opposite side of everything as one might imagine. I'm quite okay if I'm on a highway or a road with a dividing line. I don't really feel the need to have to think too much about which lane I should be in. But once I get on the back residential roads where there are no dividing lines forget it, I will always be on the right-hand side, guaranteed. A lot of people have tried to pull into that road and nearly ran into me because I'm not on the correct side...oops :) If you (person reading this blog) has seen my facebook pictures you have seen the little white midget car that was going to be ours. But it's not bahahahaha!!!! Thank God. We actually are now the proud "owners" of a Daihatsu Cuore...a 2000 I believe. It's the cutest little car and it half reminds me of a Mini Cooper. Everyone says we have the nicest car at GEM School which is nice thought because it IS pretty nice I find. The cars around here are sooooo small. The other day I was driving alone and actually laughed out loud at the thought of my dad's giant truck trying to get around here. The roads are narrow and the parking spaces are miniscule. I had a nice chuckle. Actually, the cars themselves are a strange breed. There are definitely a lot of names and makes that I've never seen before like the Toyota Noah minivan, for example. Also, a lot of the Lexus cars I've seen don't have the "Lexus" symbol on them. It's the exact Lexus vehicle but with a Toyota symbol on it because Toyota owns Lexus.

So it's become clear that the only fast food that is around Japan (Or at least just around Kagawa) is McDonald's. No BK, no Taco Bell, no Wendy's...McDonald's only. So normally I'd think "Wow! Amazing! I'm going to lose so much weight from not having fast food around to eat!" WRONG. In place of the BKs and Taco Bells are the most delicious pastry shops in the entire world. Just bakery after bakery with scrumptious, evil smells wafting through the air to lure in the passerbys. My favorite one is in the Shotengai in Takamatsu. I make a point to stop every time I'm in there to buy a loaf of bread and some sort of sweet. My favorite thing is a round shaped sweet bread with a dip/hole thing in the middle. In that middle dip is cream cheese, custard and strawberries and blueberries. Delish. I also just discovered that there is one of these destructive pastry shops ON MY BLOCK. Bad, bad, bad.

We went Karaokeing!!! Karaoke isn't that big of a deal in the USA but considering this is the land where it was founded it's amazing and sooo much fun. This isn't like Karaoke back home where you pick a song from a book, tell the karaoke guy, get two mikes that are hooked up to an amp and read off of a tv screen. When you get to the Karaoke bar/club wherever you go they give you a little portable screen that you take to your table to pick songs from. You pick whatever, whenever and then it will come up on the screens in the order they were picked by you or the other people around who have the little screens. The place I went to was one big room but I guess most of them are a bunch of separate cubicles that you and a group of people go into and sing. Al and I had a very nice duet of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Al did a stellar redition of Kanye's "Run This Town"...rapping and all. I have a video. He won't let me put it on Youtube.

Our phone number here at the house is 1-304-581-4573. Anyone can call, it's a WV phone number just watch the hours that you call since we're 13 hours ahead.

Xoxo

Hooooot

Scratch what I said about the air condtioner. It's on and on full blast. It got hot quickly.

Just some randoms

It's now in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, just past midnight actually, and it's the first night that we've had to keep our balcony door open because it's too hot in the apartment. It wasn't unbearably hot today, just in the 70s, but the sun is baking the building I guess so it's definitely too hot to sleep. We have an air conditioner! YESSSSSS. FINALLY!!! I've missed having an air conditioner the past few years in Canada. We haven't turned it on or anything, the night air will suffice for the next month or so I think. I guess this part of Japan has oppressive heat and humidity in the summer months...awesome. June is, what I hear, the rainy season, so that's not going to be fun walking/biking in to and from work/the train station/the grocery store. It's really peaceful up here on the fourth floor looking out over our little town at night. I can barely hear the cars on the highway over by the mountains, it's nice.

The past few days Al and I have been staying in Saijo with Bret and Angelina at their place. They live a good two or three hours driving away and about an hour and a half by train so our train tickets were ¥5,800 (like $60) per person each way. Expensive trip but we had so much fun and met a lot of new people. I met a Japanese girl, Remi, who lives in a town close to Saijo called Niihama, Derry from Ireland, TJ and Dave from Florida, a few other Canadians, a dude from New Jersey...and a few more than I don't remember names or where they're from. There is a beautiful wide, shallow river running through the town and people go and set up tents and picnic stuff on the bank and just hang out all day and night. I'm really glad we spent the money and went.

Japan Facts of the day:

Health insurance is amazing here. The taxes are very low and yet they have universal health care...someone told me they can provide such good care to the people because the country has little or no national debt whatsoever. Amazing. When we went to sign up for our Gaijin Cards (next topic) we also signed up for our health insurance cards and Al asked when our insurance will go into effect. The response? "As soon as you landed in Japan!" As soon as a foreigner lands in America with or without a visa he's screwed health insurance wise. Makes me feel very lucky to be living here.

Gaijin...definition is "outside person". It's what the Japanese call us white folk. I guess they can use it for all foreigners but from what I know/read/heard it's generally just the westerners they use it for. There is also a thing called the "gaijin smash". Urban Dictionary defines it best: Gaijin Smash: 1. A technique used by foreigners, or gaijin, in Japan in order to impose their will on the Japanese 2. To art of getting away with douchebaggery in Japan and being an ignorant obnoxious foreigner by simply pulling a gaijin smash on their Japanese asses. Example: "I was supposed to give up my priority seat on the train to that old bag but I totally gaijin smashed her ass and acted like I didn't know what the fuck she was bitching at me about". (Thank you Urban Dictionary for being such a help) As of right now I really don't know what's going on most of the time so I look all confused all the time, but it is a pretty effective technique of getting things done. I've seen it in action.

Beds: So I guess Al and I are pretty lucky to even have one in our apartment. Most, or all of the rest maybe, of the teachers don't even have one. Generally the Japanese people sleep on the floor. Imagine that "mattress" on a futon. The have that thing on the floor...that's it. Since we took Andrew and Christa's old apartment we have their bed that I guess they had to fight to get in the first place. I guess the modern Japenese people have beds but most of them sleep on the floor. Sounds wickedly uncomfortable.

Highways: So the highway (or interstate-like thing) here you have to pay to drive on. It's always depending on how far you drive as to how much it is...kind of like one giant toll road all over the country. So if one needs to get somewhere in a hurry instead of taking the normal route through town you're going to be paying for it. I think to take it to the next town it's like 6 bucks or something. It's not very crowded ;)

That's all I have for today...BTW I miss my cat. I'm dying without him.

Monkeys on Shodoshima

Sorry I haven't updated in a few days, to be honest I've only done a few interesting things in like a week to even write about.

Sunday Al, Christa, Andrew, Bret, Angelina (two new friends) and I took a ferry to a nearby island to a town called Shodoshima to play with the wild monkeys they have on the island. The mountain they live on is pretty much THEIR mountain and they just built things around it so people could come play with them. They're so tame they just climbed all over us. I haven't exactly figured out how to put pictures on this blog yet so until then you'll have to see all the monkey pictures on Facebook! After the monkey mountain we went to a veeery nice onsen on the island. It wasn't as big but it was sitting on the side of a mountain looking over the ocean. If you can imagine, the view from the outside hot tubs was spectacular.

Monday Christa, Angelina and I went across Shikoku to the Naruto Whirlpools. It's supposed to be this huge whirlpool in the ocean and the pictures are awesome and all that. Whatever. It didn't do anything! We were pretty disappointed.

Japan fact: We have to take our shoes off everywhere. It's kind of annoying but everyone wears slippers at work. It's def comfy.

Onsen Day

I'm obviously not going to be writing every single day, but I'm hoping to be doing enough interesting things to at least post a few times a week. Right now I'm all excited about everything so will probably be posting more often. Today was JOUR DEUX of work. We only work in the evenings during the week (usually 3-9 or so) because the children we teach are coming to these classes after they get out of school, so we have all morning and some afternoon to do things or get things done. Andrew and Christa have been staying with us the past few nights because they are moving and are currently kind of homeless. (Actually they live with our boss, Miyuki, like two hours away or something crazy so they just crash here) This morning we all woke up around 9 and got ready and went to a place called an Onsen. It's AMAZING. It's basically a spa but it's only hot tubs. There are big ones, small ones, deep ones, cold ones, still or bubbly ones, outside ones, ones that send shockwaves through the water...it's great. It's apparently THE past time of the Japanese people. I know most Americans would be totally freaked by this but Onsens are a naked past time. You pay like 5 bucks, go in, get naked, shower and get clean, then go wander about the place soaking in the hot tubs of your choice. The Japanese people are ridiculously clean. Some of the older ones will sit there for like an hour scrubbing every inch of their bodies before even going near the hot tubs. Most of the Onsens are not coed. I think the nearest one to here is like two hours away. Al and Andrew go in one door and Christa and I go through another. In the sauna room there is a huge barrel of some kind of salt and you rub it all over yourself then rinse. My skin is STILL unbelievably soft right now. I plan on being a frequent visitor to the Onsens. Just a side note: the Japanese women have some huge bushes.

Just a few quick things...gas is about $5 a gallon here...usually around $1.35 a liter. Doesn't matter though, we get reimbursed for all our gas so I don't care how much it is.

Also, I had my first squatter toilet experience yesterday. Awful. I nearly peed all over myself.

<3 <3 <3

First Day!

Today was our first day of work! We went to the main office in Kanon-ji for the weekly meeting this morning and we got to meet the rest of the teachers. Everyone seems so nice but a lot of them are leaving and we're taking their places or they are waiting on new teachers to get here, so we'll have to meet brand new people here in a month or so I think. We're observing for a week so after the meeting I went with Christa to the school in Kokubunji for four classes today. One is a one-on-one conversation class with one student named Keiko; a class of like 3 year olds who know nothing and just stare at me; a class of three 6 year old boys, one of whome is very disruptive but incredibly smart and another who is so dumb it's funny; and the last class is two 10 year old girls who are so smart and very eager to learn and can have conversations with me. That's just my normal Thursday. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are all at the Kokubunji school, Friday I'll be in Ota and Saturday I'll be at the school in Sakaide which I love because it's just around the block from our apartment. I really can't wait to meet the rest of the kids. Al's day went pretty good with Andrew...in one of his classes he has two boys one who is named Harry and the other is Potter. LOVE!

I'm definitely on Japanese time. I barely had jet lag, if at all. I really don't think I could even call it jet lag since the time difference never affected me because of the time we arrived. It's more exhaustion from the long trip because I do get tired in the eveings. I think today I'm officially over it all. It's 11pm right now and I feel normal...I'm tired after a long day but just the normal tired-after-a-long-day kind of tired.

I'm actually very, very tired right now and I know this was a pretty boring read so I'll write something more interesting later because I can't really think straight :)

Made it!

Here we are, living in Japan. It's been a long few days. The journey over went relatively smoothly and we actually slept most of the trip. The first leg from Pittburgh to Chicago was like any other flight but then we had a five hour wait there which was super boring. Our flight to Seoul, South Korea left at 1am Friday night/Saturday morning whatever and thirteen hours later we landed at 5am Sunday morning. Very weird. I was probably only awake maybe four or five of those thirteen hours and slept the rest so it was a pretty short trip. I never got bored or antsy but that plane SUCKED. Seatguru liiiiiied. We were on a terribly old plane with a tiny, crappy TV with an even worse movie selection. The "From Seoul" movies were like Avatar and New Moon...ones I would actually watch...while the "To Seoul" movies were God awful things like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Whip It. After another five or so hour wait in Seoul we had our last flight to Osaka, Japan where customs and immigration were a breeze. Makes me realize how uptight and mean the Canada/US immigration officers are. Once we got to Osaka we had to take a three hour bus ride to Takamatsu. We actaully got off the bus at the wrong stop thanks to the douche bus driver (his fault, honestly) and our friends that live here, Andrew and Christa, were supposed to meet us at another bus stop. Well we finally figured things out, Andrew came and got us and we had to take a taxi to the Takamatsu train station where we finally got on a fifteen minute train ride to Sakaide, our town. Remember we have four giant suitcases, a big duffle, and three carry ons dragging along with us. We finally get to our apartment at around 8:30pm Sunday night which all in all makes it around 40 hours worth of travelling. Miserable.

Today, Andrew and Christa showed us around, took us to the grocery stores and the mall. Grocery shopping is going to be either really easy or really hard. Obviously, I don't know what the labels say which makes everything terribly difficult but it's also nice because she showed me what to buy and what not to buy and if I can't read any of the labels I pretty much just go in, get what I need and get out. I liked perusing around the grocery story at home but I probably won't be doing much of that here. The food isn't bad, just a lot of the same thing. Meat, rice, noodles and maybe some vegetables here and there. I thought moving here would be a fast track to skinniness but there is junk food everywherrreee. I don't know how these people stay so thin. There are bakeries and pastry shops all over the place. Andrew said a lot of people actually end up gaining weight. Bah. I refuse.

Al thought he was some kind of man beast and beat the jet leg already but it hit him today and he's zonked out. It's only 8 at night but I'm heading to bed. I can't wait until I feel normal!

Tickets booked!

Well, I guess it can't get any more official than this. Our plane tickets are booked and they are the cheap, nonrefundable kind. Cheap being $2,000 but at least we get half of that back a few days after we get settled in there. We fly out on April 16th and our route will be Pittsburgh-Chicago-Seoul-Osaka. The flying is a 30 hour trip in itself and then we have a few hours on a train to get to our town, Sakaide. All in all it takes two days to get there. We'll have about 3 1/2 days of resting before we start our training on April 22. Right now I'm just focused on getting moved home. I can't wait to just sit around WV for a month and a half. Sad? Yes. Do I care? NO. *Excitement building*