Monday - Orientation - "Welcome to the Nova Corporation"

First of all, I have a little feedback for comments I've been getting. Item the first: I am not having a bad time here. Sorry if my entries sound sad or stressed out, pretty much everything's going well. There isn't really anything that I'm too disappointed with yet and I'm really enjoying being here and think it has some good potential.

Secondly, yes, I will get some pictures up sometime soon. I actually haven't used my camera once since I arrived in Japan. I didn't want to sully my first few days here with the feeling that I had to be constantly carrying my camera around and taking pictures of anything that happens. I also wanted to get a bit of a perspective on Osaka before I started snapping photos of what I thought was representative but what would later end up not to be. Finally, there's a bit of a tendency for people who take pictures to only remember exactly those moments, so I didn't want that to happen to me in my first few days.


"Orientation"

So back to Monday, there were about 16 of us at orientation, which was held on the 19th floor of their main West Japan office in Namba...

People from my flight: Me - Justin & Jacquie - Jeremiah - Alex - Lesley & Linda
People from Saturday's Meet-up: British Zoe - NZ Susanna - Australian Claudia
New People: Canadian Katie - Australian Mark - NZ Brett - and one from California and one from Australia who I didn't really meet.

The Orientation was split up into three parts, but I can't really remember what they were. I was a little bored, at least for the first half, and there was lengthy discussion about Nova policy and such. I really don't enjoy going through all of that each time I start a new job and wish there was some way of hibernating through the first few weeks of jobs.

My roommate had told me that there were going to be free bento boxes (food) there for all of us so I made sure not to eat any lunch, but at our 3pm break I realized that the bento boxes weren't coming. I was famished so I took the 10 minutes we had to run downstairs, order a McDonald's combo and stuff as much of it down my throat as possible. I think I only got about half of it down before it was time to rush back upstairs again.


"Mushi Mushi?"

I got a cell phone at orientation from Vodafone! I'm not sure what you have to dial to call from overseas, but if you're interested then e-mail me and I'll figure it out. OK, my phone is really high-tech, comparible to the Trapper Keeper from South Park or the Matrix from The Matrix. It has its own e-mail address so I can send and receive e-mails from wherever. It has internet access - I haven't fully figured it out yet and I think it's just basic, but I was able to search google on my phone and find my blog. I can take pictures, and better yet I can take videos. It has an English/Japanese dictionary which might come in useful, and I can supposedly also tune into local radio stations, though this feature has given me trouble. And its most high-tech feature, you ask?? TV. That's right, I can watch colour TV on it from wherever - it's not perfectly clear, though I'm sure there are some Japanese scientists out there busy at work perfecting this.

I now have eight names in my address book and someone is showing me how I can get a picture of this person's face to flash up on the screen whenever they call. Last night I figured out how to take a picture of myself and then e-mail it to my hotmail address, though the best feature that I've found so far is for a cartoon bear to come up on the screen and play rock-paper-scissors (or "janken") with me. It makes me wonder what people used to do in the olden days before playing rock-paper-scissors with a cartoon bear was an everyday activity.


"Welcome to the Nova Corporation"

One thing I should note about what I've seen about Nova so far is that they definitely do seem like a big corporate company rather than a school. We're not teachers per se, we're more so customer service representatives. Instead of showing us how to actually help our students learn English, they seem to be more focused on showing us how to not offend our students, how to keep them comfortable and basically how to keep them satisfied (with the altering of their English level being a side-benefit).


"Chinese Food & Trolley Bar"

When the orientation came to an end and the bento box was officially not coming, some of us decided to go get something to eat and drink. I went to a Chinese restaurant with Katie, Justin, Jacquie, Brett and Susanna. There was no English so I tried out my Cantonese, but they were full-on Japanese people. After dinner, we wandered around looking for an appropriate bar. I remember how easy this used to be in Hong Kong, we would wander into HK's bar district, Lan Kwai Fong, and everything was right there on display. Things have been a lot tougher here as no one really knows their way around and things don't seem to be as easily set up. We found a number of interesting-looking pubs, but they seemed to be too small to accomodate us all. They would be literally just a bar with some stools alongside. After wandering down a few alleyways around Dotonburi, we found a pretty good one.

Walking into it felt like walking into a small 1920s drinking hole. The bartenders (both a Japanese man and woman) were like 70, which I had never seen before. We had a big old-style booth in a side of the bar had the air of being in an old-style trolley-car, somehow. Justin's Scottish roommate showed up, he was in his second week of teaching. He said that during our training week (this week) we'd say about a thousand times that there's no way we could do this and that we want to go home, but once it's all over it will be ridiculously easy. That seemed reassuring since my first impression of him was that he was someone who might have trouble doing many day-to-day activities, but I don't think that's true.

At around 9pm, we all were yawning and struggling to stay awake. Orientation really takes a lot out of a fellow. I got on the subway and headed home. I had training the following afternoon and had a lot of resting to get done!

Ryan