Ok, I'm having trouble remembering what happened a few weeks ago, so I'm going to write this in reverse chronological order like the movie Momento. Expect for things to get a little hazy by the end of it...
NOW
It's 5:36pm and I'm sitting in Popeye Media Cafe in Umeda, sipping on some Royal Milk Tea. I put the afternoon aside to come here, get my own private "Relax Booth" and get a few things done (including a big blog update).
FIFTY MINUTES EARLIER (Saturday, May 13th, 4:40pm)
I arrived at Number One Travel, an agency known for its cheap prices and foreign clientele. I inquired with the eager-to-please agent about flying back to Canada next month. He found me a good deal for under $900 roundtrip (including taxes). It would actually have been a lot cheaper, but there's an enormous fuel surcharge these days. I don't really understand the news, but I hear there's some kind of overpriced gasoline frenzy going on in the world at the moment (something about "highest gas prices ever" - don't bother clarifying this for me, I'm really not interested).
THREE HOURS EARLIER (Saturday, May 13th, 1:45pm)
Masahiko and I sat down at Mos Burger for our lesson. Luckily, he didn't seem angry for that afternoon's mishaps, so our lesson went by fairly smoothly. He learned about how to describe his weekly routines in various tenses and he learned all about all the exciting things that I do (hopefully it will inspire him to alter his routine of only working, studying, playing Final Fantasy XII and drinking with his parents). He seems to take particular interest whenever I mention eating sushi or drinking beer, so I try to include both in the majority of my stories.
After an hour, we planned our next meeting time the following week. He offered me an envelope of cash but I politely refused and apologized once again.
TWENTY FIVE MINUTES EARLIER (Saturday, May 13th, 1:25pm)
Good God I hate Michael Moore, I thought as I shut down the computer. I sauntered into my bedroom to see if there were any messages on my phone with exciting ideas of what to do today. There was one message, from a Masahiko Nose. It read:
Hello.Mr Ryan
I'm masahiko nose
Do you remember me?
I'm in nishinakajima minamikata St right now.
Was not it a lesson today? Gahhh!! I exclaimed, remembering that I was supposed to teach my first lesson with a new private student at 1pm. I called him, casually apologized and in a mix of broken Japanese and English, managed to get the point across that we were going to meet in ten minutes at Mos Burger in Nishinakajima. I threw a pile of notebooks into my bag and bolted for my bike. I flew through the neighbourhood and made it just in time.
THIRTY MINUTES EARLIER (Saturday, May 13th, 12:10pm)
I was having a dream narrated by a woman who was swimming to a secret island after having a conversation with a friendly whale. Upon arriving on the island, she scaled a rocky cliff to find the clothes of another visitor to the island. She peered over a rock to see the island's natives partaking in a scary sacrificial ritual, with another obviously frightened foreigner attempting to creep past them in the background.
She's going to get herself killed, I thought, when suddenly...
Ohhhh, I woke up to some kind of racket going on in the kitchen and my stomach hurt from the beer I drank and food I ate the night before. My room was dark so I reached my foot from my futon and batted at the curtains, trying to let some light in and give myself an incentive to get up.
A few minutes later I put in my contacts, ate a banana, turned on my roommate's computer and started watching my other roommate's DVD of Bowling for Columbine. I hope they wouldn't be mad that I'm using their stuff, I thought.
NINE POINT FIVE HOURS EARLIER (Saturday, May 13th, 2:30am)
I pressed play and started watching my roommate copy of "Dazed and Confused". I heated up my "Koroku" and opened a beer from the fridge. I've discovered a temporary cure for my insomnia troubles. Winding down with one beer before bedtime somehow helps me relax enough to prevent the hours of restlessness that sometimes keep me awake. After finishing my beer I turned off Dazed and Confused (great movie), got ready for bed and started reading the book about Australia my parents had sent me for Christmas. I need my dictionary in-hand to read this book and am learning a lot of exciting new British (and normal) vocabulary. Exhausted after a couple of pages, I turned my light off and drifted quickly to sleep.
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I'm hungry so I'm going to try to speed this up. Here's what I did over the past week:
Last Saturday I went hiking with my Japanese friend Takeshi and his two friends, Megumi and Kumiko. Megumi and Kumiko spoke very little English so it worked out to be a great opportunity to work on my Japanese. We met at the train station at 10:30am (10:30am!!) We made a stopover in Kobe and I had a bagel and coffee as the girls went shoe-shopping (??). We ended up taking a bus just outside of the city. We hiked up Rokku Mountain and had a beautiful view of some tree-covered hillsides, Kobe city and Osaka bay. From the top, we took a cable-car down and spent the afternoon in Arima, an old village famous for its "foot onsens" - little pools of underground water where you can soak your feet to relax. It was a nice day and I was happy to accomplish something that my students have been recommending I do for a while.
As I mentioned last month, I've worked into my schedule three weekly group activities. I see a movie Sunday afternoons with two Japanese friends, have a delicious ethnic meal in Kobe Sunday evenings with an American friend, and play poker with the teachers from my building Monday evenings.
Kobe, famous for its beef and an earthquake that shook the city in 1995, has been Japan's gaijin (foreigner) capital for hundreds of years. In fact, I think it was the only city where foreigners were allowed to live before Japan emerged from its isolation in the late 1800s, so it has a deeply-engraved foreign influence, similar to cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. Anyway, the main benefit to me is the food. Kobe has a delicious variety of restaurants from all around the world. This week, Kobe Dining Society (as I call the new Sunday-night tradition), was visiting a Jamaican restaurant.
Jamaican food is ok. My tasty Jerk Chicken and breadsticks was also served with cabbage salad and ketchup (which was, incidentally, already poured onto my plate when it arrived). We were the only customers at the time, but I hear that it's usually pretty popular. When paying, we got a special discount for some reason.
Later that night, I had a work party in Takatsuki. Our work parties usually consist of about 30 English teachers from a variety of Nova branches in the area overrunning a local bar and paying what I consider an exorbitant amount (this time $30) for admission. I showed up an hour late and was surprised to see that although there was a large crowd there, not one of the other nine or so teachers from my school had showed up. The experience reminded me that I should really start following suit and not showing up to these things. I keep forgetting that I dislike most Nova teachers...
I may have mentioned last post that I was going to have training with a new English school called Gaba. Well they told me to come for training in June instead of May (it would have been this week) because Nova had requested that I also do training with them this week.
So Monday I had Kid's Training with Nova. As a side note, please keep in mind that I really, really have no intention of ever teaching kids. "Kids Classes" have become a massive new trend among Japan's English schools. The secret is: they're not really teaching the kids anything. Here's how it works:
A group of seven or eight kids come into a seatless classroom. The kids proceed to scream Japanese profanities and insults at the teachers, delighted that the foreigner probably can't understand any of it. The teacher sings little mindless songs to them and has them play games like tossing a paper ball into a bucket (using hand motions and demonstrations to ensure that no English is actually taught).
The teacher has little cards with pictures of things like witches and vampires and the lesson material literally goes like so:
Teacher: "It's a witch. What is it?"
Students: "It's a witch."
Teacher: "It's a mummy. What is it?"
Students: "It's a mummy."
etc.
By the end of the class, the student hasn't actually learned the vocabulary; they've just realized that they have to repeat the first statement. Anyway, Nova Kids is basically just an expensive and well-marketed daycare service.
Tuesday I went to Nara, an old-style famous town to the south of Osaka. I had been planning to go for months but hadn't gotten around to it until Catherine, a girl from back home, invited me to go to a Japanese tea ceremony with her and her friends. I wore a hakama (the male version of a kimono) and I'm happy to have gotten that experience out of the way, it should give me a few months to wallow in not having to participate in any traditional cultural activities whatsoever.
After the tea ceremony we went to Nara Park, a public park which is full of - get this - small and friendly deer. Horned deer are just walking around among the people and you can feed them biscuits. If I ever have a really big backyard, I think I'm going to try to kidnap a bunch of these deer for it because I think they'd be a lot of fun to have around. Apparently, thought I haven't witnessed this first-hand yet, they're trained by monks to bow when fed.
Thursday I got my hair cut. This was my first major haircut since I came to Japan six months ago (I've had just one minor hair cut), so the results are shocking. They gave me a slightly embarrassing, very Japanese style that I had to sport for the rest of the day at work, but it's now grown on me and my hair will hopefully grow out again quickly. That evening at work, upon walking into the room, a co-worker broke the silence with, "So, are you having a really, really bad hair day?"
Yesterday I went to the Immigration Office to get my working permit extended. There was a lot of confusion because, as you may recall, I currently have no passport (which is supposed to hold my working permit). My new passport, by the way, is currently being processed by the Canadian Embassy. This new passport is going to be great. I paid an extra five dollars to get a giant-sized one (48-pages) and have plans to fill it up by 2010. I was surprised to see that Japanese bureaucratic offices are fairly similar to Canadian ones... I had been expecting more robots and complimentary snacks.
On another side note, I have a new roommate. His name is Jack, he's about 25 and is Indian-British. He's very pleasant and a good guy to have around. Luckily, he's my first fully non-smoking roommate here, so the no-smoking-in-the-apartment rule is much more easily enforced. He has a laptop with a DVD player that we've combined with Adam's DVD collection and a set of speakers in our living room to make a decent entertainment system and have been watching a movie every night. This week has included Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and From Dusk Till Dawn (hmm... a lot of Quentin Tarantino now that I think about it).
Oh yeah, I also have a new room. Will, my ex-roommate from California, left at the end of April to go on a ten-day meditation retreat in rural Japan. He returned last weekend with tales of enlightenment and such. Apparently, they had all made a vow silence on the first day and they spent the remainder of the "vacation" sitting quietly in a room and not being allowed to move (
at all - if your knee hurts, he said, you still can't unbend it because that would mean you'd be "giving into a desire"). They only ate something really cultish-sounding like porridge, and weren't allowed to eat at all after 11:30am. Anyway, it sounded like a really, really fun time. Now he's on a big trip from Beijing to Bangkok overland, which I'm actually fairly jealous about.
With Will gone, I now hold seniority in the apartment and was able to move to the big room. This new room is actually bigger than the other two bedrooms put together and has a lot of exciting features like sliding doors, direct access to the balcony, a gigantic closet with shelves that I can (and will) nap on and many coat racks. I also bought a big bookcase for it at a nearby used furniture shop which fits in nicely.
Having my new room is great. My old room was tiny, its curtain wouldn't fully cover the window and it was right next to the masses of train tracks. So everyday at 5am when I was going to bed, the sun would come out and the trains would start up (with a lot of honking, for some reason), and it was horrible. The new roommate doesn't seem to notice yet, though. With my new room, I can eat popsicles on the balcony and the people in the office building across the street are none the wiser that I'm spying on them.
Speaking of cold treats, the weather is warming up here and it's now like summer back home. I wish I could just freeze the weather like this, because I hear we're about to enter two of the worst seasons in Japan's year. June encompasses the "rainy season", when there are supposedly downpours everyday for the entire month. Then, as soon as that's over, we're launched right into the "hot, wet summer", where the heat and humidity combine for something, I hear, is almost intolerable.
So to escape some of this, I'm planning on going back to Canada for a month this summer. I had been planning to coincide this with my university graduation and my scholarship interview, but I decided to drop the whole graduation ceremony attendance since there's really no point in my making the effort to go. But anyway, I'll be visiting in Halifax for a couple of weeks (maybe late-June and part of July) and will hopefully be in Montreal at the end of June, providing I get the scholarship interview I've applied for.
So now that the application deadline is Monday and you thus have no time to apply, I can openly talk about the Monbukagakusho scholarship that I applied for. I've applied for a really gigantic scholarship to study here in Japan. If accepted, the Japanese government will pay for me to fly back to Japan next year, take six months of Japanese lessons, and write a post-graduate thesis at a famous and exciting Japanese university. I'm proposing to research and write about the nature of Japanese entrepreneurship (and lack thereof). The government would pay for my flight, my tuition, my Japanese lessons, my accommodations, and provide me with a monthly salary equivalent to what I'm making now at Nova. If I get the interview, I'll have to go take it at the Japanese Consulate in Montreal at the end of next month.
The reason I didn't want to talk much about this until the deadline has almost passed is that, as things are standing now, the competition is really not too fierce. They give a out few of these per year to people from Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. In this region, there are almost no Japanese people and relatively little interest in Japan altogether, so I would estimate that under a dozen people apply each year. Anyway, I needed to request a slew of documentation and letters of recommendation from various places and I received notification from the consulate yesterday that they've received everything, so things are looking good.
What else... well, I got in a bike accident a few weeks ago. While cycling over a really long bridge, I was trying to see what time it was on my watch... the next thing I knew, a Japanese man was yelling and looked up to see us collide. We both ended up on the ground, mangled in our bikes. I faked a serious arm injury so he wouldn't yell at me, and helped him up with my "good arm". His bike looked a little banged up, but he quickly jumped on it and sped away without saying anything. I'm not sure what condition he was in, but by the time I got to the train station to meet a friend, my arm was all bloody.
On that note, I'm going to go find something to eat. Here are some pictures from this week:
First, some views of my new room...
...and onto the balcony
On the hills outside Kobe
The beginning of our hike up Mount Rokko
With it's massive urbanization, most people don't realize that 80% of Japan is covered in uninhabitable mountainous terrain!
A Monday evening stroll in Umeda
A woman purchasing some streetfood
At the tea ceremony
A deer friend of mine
