Ratings are getting low!! I knew I shouldn't have abandoned that towel subplot...

I had training from Tuesday to Thursday and it was exhausting. It ran daily from 1-9pm and I was training in Umeda (northern downtown area) with three others - Mark (AUS), Katie (CDN) and Claudia (AUS). It started out with just classroom lessons - they were basically teaching us how to teach and it was boring and I had trouble concentrating. Every once in a while I would snap back into it and realize that my attention span during this little bit of instruction might plot out how good of a teacher I'm going to be over the next year, but I really couldn't be bothered and just let my mind wander for most of it.

Our teacher, British Doug, however, kept calling upon us for answers, so I needed to be semi-conscious. He seemed to be teaching us the same way as he's telling us to teach the Japanese students: using the same little tricks to "keep us interested", so that was kind of funny.

Soon enough, things brightened up when we found out that we were going to be thrown right into the pool that first evening (metaphorically). We each taught half of a class and were being observed by senior teachers and we were terribly nervous. At first we relieved ourselves in thinking that these students new we were newcomers and were probably getting a free lesson out of it, but then we were told not to let on that we were new and realized that they're all regular paying customers. It was bone-chilling...

The lessons are set up like so: Introduction, Assessment & Focus, Language Input, Tune In, Listening Exercise, Activities 1&2, Application, Wrap-Up. I know that makes no sense to you, but we're basically just given a "teacher's manual" and told to go teach a class and improvise while we frantically read up on what we're going to teach while we're teaching it.

We get to pick the topic of what we're going to discuss - each level (there are 7-8 English levels) has its own set of lesson choices. I tried to pick topics that I thought I knew a lot about, so my lessons are usually about movies or traveling.

I was really impressed with my first class. There were four students (the classes are maximum 4) and their ages/genders were approximately/probably 23M, 17F, 42M, 30F. As I said, I was really impressed with them. Not, by any means, because of their English level, but they were just so interested in learning English. I had their full attention and they were terribly intimidated by me. No one tried talking to their classmates and they would start taking notes as soon as I'd open my mouth.

So the first class went by smoothly and we had been given plenty of preparation and cool-down time. We had a dinner break where Claudia, Katie, Mark and I went to Subway (which is horrible here, for the record-- unless you want a shrimp & hot dog sub on sesame).

I like the group I'm learning with. It's fairly balanced in that we have two male, two female, two Canadians, two Australians, two who will be teaching part-time, two full-time, two living in Osaka proper, two living far away... it makes for a sense of equality. They made us practice teaching on each other and I was surprised that I was probably the least comfortable with it, but I seemed to feel the most comfortable with teaching the actual Japanese people.

Wednesday they threw us head-first into the deep end (again with the swimming analogies). But that wasn't until the evening. In the afternoon I taught another class which went quite smoothly - swimmingly, I should say. My topic was movies and I told them about how I was planning on seeing the new Harry Potter movie that weekend and one of my students elaborated on how the Harry Potter series is her favorite. It was an all-girls class, which I really like because they seem to be more eager to participate and giggle a lot whenever anything awkward occurs. One of them told the class about her favorite movie, "Regarry Brond". Regarry Brond is about Reese Witherspoon becoming a rawyer. I liked it to, Sadako.

At the beginning of each class I write down all of the students' names and constantly repeat them whenever I want them to speak. I accidentally turned my list upside-down this class and mistakingly kept calling Rumiko "Sadako" and she would say "But I am Rumiko" and I would laugh nervously.

We also sat in on "Voice" for a little bit. Each Nova school has a Voice room, where students can pay about $20 and sit in for the day. They cycle through the teachers and always have someone sitting in there discussing various topics with the students. There were about ten of them in there that day and they sent all four of us trainees in at once. Doug told them that we're all new instructors and the voice attendees were delighted and had plenty of questions for us about our home countries. An old woman had me all to herself and we discussed things that she suggested that I do here in Osaka and told me about her business trip to Wisconson a few years back. She also explained to me where my school was and how to get there. I really liked voice and hope that I'll get to do a fair bit of it later on.

We went for sushi for dinner and this was my first time having real Japanese sushi. It was as thick as an arm and really tasty. We ate it in a commonly set-up restaurant where all the stools are around the area where the chef prepares your sushi. We all asked for Coca-Cola and they explained to us that they only have sufficient Coke for two fo us and the rest of us would have to drink orange juice.

In the evening we had to teach two classes back-to-back, with only ten minutes in between to mark all of our students from the first class and get things ready for the second. I found this horribly difficult and bombed both of these classes. After my first one, the observer criticized me on the fact that there were all kind of dead silences where the students were just staring at me while I frantically tried to figure out what to do next. I guess knowing how the lessons work is something that gets easier with time.

In the second class I had a Brazilian (they exist as the biggest non-Asian minority in Japan, though this is the first one I have encountered). He couldn't understand anything I was trying to say and things were so hectic that I had to wave in the Australian observer to take over. She flew through the class with ease, it was really impressive and the students seemed to be enjoying it and laughing at (somehow understanding) her jokes. She was really direct with them and instead of saying something like "Hiroki and Norohiro, you will be partners in this activity" she would just point at two of them and say "Together". Ooh, the simplicity, I definitely talk way too much.

Thursday morning I went jogging, remember that for later...

The third day things went far better. We taught two sets of back-to-back classes and they weren't too bad. We went to a restaurant called First Kitchen for dinner and I ate some kind of Terriyaki Chicken Pizza with seaweed on top that was pretty bad. I really like the fact that I'm not loving the food here, I think I've already started losing weight and have been eating whatever I want whenever I want. I think the key thing is that I don't keep any food at home (except for orange juice, bread and peanut butter for breakfast) so I'm never snacking. It was like the early days of Hong Kong before I figured out how to bargain with the Filipino grocery store ladies for cheap muffins.

To simplify things in my second-last lesson, I did the movie theme again. I had only two students in this class, an old woman who had recently seen "Saving Private Ryan" (or "Pulivetu Lion", as she called it) and a younger woman whose favorite movie was "Bewitched". We did an exercise where she had to describe the movie to the older woman and then the older woman had to describe it to me, but she was obviously not listening and completely made up the plot. I haven't seen "Bewitched", but know that it didn't involve Nicole Kidman driving around and shooting bad guys, but I let it slide.

Our last lesson of the day, we were not being observed. This felt great, and was a huge relief because that's the way that things are going to be as soon as we start teaching at our own schools (I was going to start the following day). At the end of the day, Doug allowed us to ask any questions we had about Nova or Japan in general and that was great. We got him to tell us exactly how much the students are paying, which is kind of funny.

Students buy large volumes of "tickets" and each ticket allows them to come to one forty-minute class. They will buy up to 540 tickets at a time (that's about a class every two days for three years) and I think tickets end up costing around $20 each (though a bit less if you buy huge volumes). Furthermore, some students will buy up all four students' seats in their class with four tickets (so $80/40 min.) so that they can have a one-on-one session with a teacher (I've taught a couple of them, actually), which sounds a little excessive to me.

At the end of the night we asked Doug where we could go for somewhere cheap for beer and he asked us to hold on a minute. He went out and checked with some of the teachers and said that they'd take us to a really cheap bar called "The Balcony".

A few Nova teachers (I think all Australian), took us to this "Balcony", which turned out to just be a look-off in the train station downstairs with a grocery store next to it selling cheap beers, which was perfectly fine. It's overlooking an area of the train station with escalators and giant TV screens and there is a lot of movement. I got the impression that they go drink there every day after work and seems like a cheap alternative to a pub.

A Japanese businessman slyly came up next to Mark and I while we were talking and while pretending to be looking in a locker next to us, pulled out a camera and held it there, trying to get a picture of us while looking away. We posed and when he went to look at how it turned out, saw that we had seen him doing it and scurried away.

The train station security came to kick us out, which they apparently do most nights. They can't speak English, so I think it takes them a bit of courage to come up and politely say "No drink", though I'm sure some of these teachers would speak fluent Japanese. We politely moved to another secluded "balcony" in the station where, they say, no one has ever told them to leave.

Although some of the newcomers from other training sessions were going clubbing all night, we all headed home on the last trains since we were starting work the next day.

When I got home, I realized I had lost my key. "Gahhh!!!!" I exclaimed, since I had been planning on getting an extra one cut earlier that day but hadn't gotten around to it. Losing my key was horrible because not only could I not get into my building and apartment, but I had absolutely no idea how I was going to get a replacement key. We have no idea who our "landlord" is, and even if I could convince one of my roommates to lend me their key to try to get it copied, they would have no way back in and I wouldn't even know where to start to get it cut. I rang the buzzer and luckily Will was there and up and was able to buzz me in. I stomped around the apartment ranting about how horrible this was and envisioned having to survive without a replacement key for a couple of weeks, just sitting and waiting outside of the apartment for hours on end until my roommates got home. Then I decided to check my shorts. Ahh yes, I went jogging that morning (as stated far above) and had left my key in the pocket, hehehe. That night I slept well, with my training behind me, my stomach full of beer, and my key clasped tightly in my hand.

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Friday
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Friday I decided to open my Japanese bank account. I walked to the Jusa branch of UFJ (the big bank here) and sat down with the documentation that Nova had given me. I needed my own little signature stamp with oriental lettering to go through with it. They also needed me to write my name out in Katakana, which I did with difficulty, and had to reference Michael Jackson for the banker to understand what my middle name was.

I started work at 5pm at the Nova branch where I'll be working. It's located in Hankyu Ibaraki and I got a little lost on the way, so I was only about 10-15 minutes early instead of the hour I'd been planning for, so time was tight. Considering that, however, the lessons went smoothly. They cram five back-to-back sessions in for me between 5 and 9pm and it's actually nice to actually have all my time at work used efficiently, rather than any job I've had in the past where there's never enough to do.

This paragraph is going to sound stupid, but when I get into a bind at work, I think to what my inspiration is for teaching English. Believe it or not, it's not the money. It's more so that I've had such a hard time getting around in Japan with no Japanese that the more English I can spread among them, the easier it will be for myself and others who come after me. That kind of motivation actually works.

As a side-note, I just got a drink out of the vending machine called "Aquarius". One of the other trainees had been telling me about this drink, that they bought it from the grocery store expecting it to be some kind of water, and it's definitely not. It tastes like honey and nectar mixed in with hot sugar-water. No wonder the kids here are so buzzing with energy. I wonder why the adults seem so calm and dead inside...

Back to my first day at work, I met the other teachers there and was a little alarmed that I could easily be the youngest by five years. What are 28-year olds doing going to teach English in Japan at such an old age? Does the fact that I'm doing this six years ahead of them make me better than them? I would wager that yes, it does.

The people seemed really nice, though. An American teacher told me she lives near me and can help me out if I need to find anything. They all seemed fairly care-free and relaxed and were running the school as a team. It's a really small school (I think there was a even a period where I was the only one teaching), so that's pretty nice. The area that it's in is just another suburb of Osaka. It's halfway to Kyoto and there's apparently no break in development between the triangle of our two cities and Kobe, so we basically have city going on forever which is a little unimaginable.

After work I mistakingly took the "local" train rather than the "express" train. The express only stops a couple of times before my area whereas the local one sits and waits at every little station along the way, so I think the trip must have taken me at least 45 minutes. I went home and changed and went out to meet Mark in Shinsaibashi.

Mark had just finished his first day as well and we met to go to the Pig & Whistle, Osaka's most famous pub among the expatriate community. It was full of British-looking expats and Japanese people who wanted to associate with them. In a sense it's good to have these British communities in cities around the world who will refuse to assimilate and demand replica pubs like this one, but in a sense it's really tiring. It was a nice bar and I'll probably be going back soon, though the beer was steeply priced at 700 yen/glass.

I didn't realize until I was on my way that I only had about half an hour before I had to leave to catch the last train back. We sat down, I threw back my beer and soon enough I was on my way home, after having sworn to buy a bike the following day so I wouldn't have to rely on this transit system.

I walked briskly back to the subway station and as I approached I saw people running. Whenever you see locals running towards or away from something, it's a sign that you should be doing it too, so I sped up and jogged down the stairs ahead of them all. I paid for my ticket and at the bottom of the escalator saw the subway stopped on both sides, the last car heading in either direction. Since I didn't have time to figure out my bearings, I just plunged into a crowd of people on the one on my right, which immediately took off heading south. I turned to the guy next to me "Shinosaka?" I asked, hoping we'd be heading in the right direction. Nope. He had obviously had too much to drink and was trying to piece together a fancy English sentence, but I meanwhile heard an announcement over the subway intercom in Japanese, something about Namba (wrong direction).

The guy next to me pieced his thoughts together and told me that I was supposed to be going north and that I was taking a great gamble going south and he predicted that I would be paying a lot of money for a taxi ride home. At the next stop he told me to run and I took off running and made my way to the other platform, since people still seemed to be hanging about.

So the subway going north arrived and I thanked Jesus that I hadn't missed the last train. But then the subway just stopped in Umeda and sat there while everybody poured out and headed upstairs. So the subway was just stopping there and I figured my journey home was over and I might as well just settle with the fact that I was going to have to camp out there all night (I didn't have enough money for a cab) or make the long arduous trek home. I made plans to camp out in an all-night internet cafe that I had seen, when suddenly I saw someone running. Yes, running! Was there another way out of here? A secret train?!

And it turned out there was. I followed them a few blocks over, where we converged with more running people. The subway was finished, but everyone was trying to get the last train home. I got up into the large JR station where I found a train that was actually heading up to Shinosaka and was cheaper than the subway! I had no ideas that trains from Umeda came into my station and it landed on a platform above the subway station mall.

Just when I thought my adventure was over, I saw a really strange-looking man hobbling about in the station, what a night!

Ryan