Late this Week

Wednesday I had my "follow-up training" with Nova. This means I had to go to a more central branch in Umeda for the day for some group learning. A group of seven of us (the only one I knew, though, was Mark) reviewed some of what we had learned in our Orientation week and refined our teaching skills. Unlike our original training, this was actually a lot of fun.

In our original training, they had gotten us to go through lessons with each other, pretending we were students. At the time, this was nerve-wracking, since none of us had really taught before and had little experience in bullshitting our way through an enthusiastic lesson about "Giving Directions" or "Asking for Permission".

By this point, however, we've all had enough experience to be able to sit back and let it flow a little. Also, we had the opportunity to act as students. This allowed us to perform all the characteristically 'interesting' actions that our Japanese students will do. For example, when being asked a question, getting a really nervous expression, looking from side to side, then pointing at yourself with both hands and asking "ME??!" - even while being the only student in the classroom. It's all kind of funny because everyone has seen these things.

On a sidenote, some topic's in class always get the same reaction. For example, a common question that comes up is "What are your hobbies?". Although a few students will respond with something interesting or outlandish like "Hang-gliding", about 98% will answer a combination of the following items: Studying English, Driving, Shopping and Singing Karaoke. I was surprised to find out that for most people, studying at Nova is their hobby.

Back to Wednesday, the training session started and ended a few hours earlier than my usual shift, so I was down in Umeda during the last bit of daylight hours. I decided to explore a new area of town that I had never seen (in hopes of stumbling upon tacos), and headed southeast. I didn't find a Mexican restaurant, but ended up getting lured into a Tahitian restaurant that served something with "taco" in the name (though it ended up being little wrapped clumps of vegetable with a little bowl of salsa). The restaurant was pretty interesting, though, it had kind of a beer hall atmosphere and palm trees. Also, there was a waitress from the United States who spoke perfect English. I will probably not go back there.

That night I did find something exciting, however. Have I ever told you about the grocery store near my house? No, not Max-valu, a closer yellow one. Well, I found out that right around the corner from that, there's a much better grocery store. It looks kind of like a small "Superstore" from home and is now my favorite place to buy my three grocery items: bread, peanut butter and orange juice.

Thursday night played poker at my co-worker Frankie's apartment. It went swimmingly as always and I left the next morning as the big winner. They were a fun group of people to play poker with, so I guess I now have a fairly extensive list of people I can invite if I host a game.

My weekend generally starts on Fridays at 9pm, though not this week. I had agreed to take over Frankie's shift since Friday was his 25th birthday and he would need Saturday to recover. We agreed to a "shift swap", meaning he will work for me on March 1st and will pay me some extra cash since my shifts are only four hours and his was eight. A lot of people want to do shift swaps with me since I have the coveted Saturday-Sunday weekend (most people have obscure ones like Monday-Tuesday or Tuesday-Wednesday). I have already signed into three agreements and am trying to build up the entire week off around the end of February and beginning of March so that I can do something exciting that I can look forward to through the winter.

So I did my first eight-hour shift yesterday and it was a little exhausting, but not unmanageable. I had a break right in the middle, which kind of made it feel instead like two separate days of work. The only thing I didn't like, though, was having to come in at the ungodly hour of 11am.

In voice, one of my students outlined for me something interesting about Japanese popular culture: skin colour. We discussed the concepts of parasols, staying out of the sun and skin-whitener. She said that the Japanese consider it to be feminine to have white skin and to be masculine to have dark skin. She topped it off with the quote: "I don't like a man who is whiter than me." But then thinking she offended me, quickly added, "But for foreigners it's ok."