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| JET Adventures 46 - Kobe, Osaka, Nara and Kyoto |
| Wednesday, May 31, 2006 |
Last week was the recontracting conference in Kobe - all first year JETs who want to stay another year get packed off to Kobe for a 3-day "conference", but (as the big important JET advisor told me) it's really just an excuse for a 3-day party, paid for by them. Us Okinawa JETs were particularly excited because it means a visit to the mainland and a chance to see real live Japan. Louise and I took some hard-earned holiday and stuck around for a couple of days to see the sights.
Good stuff:
* The 5* hotel they put us up in, complete with teddy bears on the beds
* Feeding the "sacred deer" at Nara
* Watching other people feeding the "sacred deer" and freaking out when the deer attacked them
* Achieving enlightenment at the "there-are-15-rocks-but-you-can-only-see-14-rocks-unless-you-are-Buddha" Zen rock garden in Kyoto
* Seeing the 1001 statues of the Goddess of Mercy, each with 1000 arms (well okay, technically they each had 40 arms, but each arm saves 25 worlds, see?)
* Watching people get stuck in the "if-you-can-crawl-through-this-hole-that-is-the-same-size-as-Buddha's-nostril-you-will-gain-enlightenment" hole
* Louise's Dr Who audition
* Finding an honest to goodness Japanese techhaven where I got allocated a tiny cubicle replete with TV, PS2, PC, wall to wall manga and PS2 games, plus tea machine, all in the dark with ambient trance piped through the walls
* Getting all sniffly-soggy-eyed over Miyazaki films in the surprisingly good Kyoto backpackers' hostel
* Becoming a convert to reflexology - after a 20 minute foot massage, the woman says "okay so your right shoulder hurts, your left knee is in excruciating pain, and you've been very ill recently with some kind of lung infection" - is she not omnipotence personified?
Bad stuff:
* The conference. Yawn.
* Having to stay in and watch TV for the first few nights because of my stupid anti-alcohol anti-smoking anti-fun antibiotics while everyone else in the entire world went out to banging parties
* Kobe - it all got ripped up in 1995 and they had to remake it and while it wasn't quite Milton Keynes it wasn't far off
* Osaka - The best thing about Osaka was that it had a Subway (I'm talking about the sandwich shop - when you haven't had real bread for 10 months it was a real utopia)
* Getting bitten by the vicious, Satanic "sacred deer"
* The ridiculous number of bikes in Kyoto, all ridden by incompentent fools on the pavements
* Having some strange egowhore woman trying to infiltrate my photos, so cheeky!
Anyway, it's good to be home - I went to school today for the first time in nearly a month(!), after the hospital gave me the all clear this morning. My desk was awash with 'congratulations on not being dead' cards that the teachers had coerced the students into making, and after the initial fuss it seems like things might just be back to normal. |
posted by Alice @ 6:22 pm  |
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| JET Adventures 45 - Dragon boat races and Hospital |
| Friday, May 19, 2006 |
Golden week was going well - I went to Moon beach...
And the next day I went to Naha Haarii with my friend Fumiko - the dragon boat race ceremony. It's supposed to be a ceremony to ask the gods for rain and good fortune for the fishing community but it was really about watching the US Marine teams getting annihilated by the other teams. Here are the Americans before their humiliating defeat:
I found out the other day that it isn't compulsary to have the military haircut, but they all have one because they think it's patriotic. Here is the Army (white t-shirts) and the Marines (red t-shirts) losing stylishly (go Indonesia!)
About an hour after I got back from the Haarii it all started to go wrong - I got a big fever and had to stay in bed for a few days. I thought it was just 'flu but I had to go to hospital to get a doctor's certificate in order to be able to take sick leave, and it turned out to be pneumonia! I still don't understand how that happened. The doctors don't know either - the weirdest explanation I received was that it was because my hobby was gardening, even though it isn't.
Anyway, I had to stay in hospital for two weeks because they had problems finding an antibiotic that worked. I'm on one now that seems to be doing a good job, but apparently it's destroying my liver and kidneys which suggests to me that they wheeled out the big guns. Hospital was pretty bad - I had a fever of over 40 degrees for 8 days in total, and an inept doctor who couldn't even take blood out of my arm without giving me a series of bruises that make me look like a clumsy junkie. He looked about 10 years younger than Doogie Howser, and after he took 4 really quite painful attempts to find a vein for my drip, I developed a healthy phobia of him. Who'd have known that the most useful Japanese words I'd learn would be "Ow" and "Scary"? The food was typically weird - the strangest thing I had to eat was carrot jelly, complete with a big smily carrot family on the packet, but I still managed to lose 7kgs in what I'm calling the "pneumonia and hospital food diet". Look out for the book and workout DVD later this year. |
| posted by Alice @ 8:03 am |
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| JET Adventures 44 - Golden Week |
| Wednesday, May 03, 2006 |
This week is Golden Week in Japan. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it means 3 days off school so it gets a big smiley face sticker from me. It couldn't have come at a better time as things have been pretty busy recently:
* Welcome parties
Two welcome parties for the new teachers. Actually I'm starting to cultivate a healthy fear of these kind of parties. They just can't seem to have fun unless it's meticulously organised with an agenda of speeches, stupid games, and then more speeches, followed by karaoke, and more speeches.
* Dodgeball
The new first year students were 'welcomed' to the school by an all day dodgeball tournament. It's a bit unfair because the sports classes have such an advantage that they win every year. They tried to get me to play, but I refused on the grounds that David Hasslehoff wasn't playing. I was also put off a bit when one of the poor first years got smacked in the face with the ball and broke his glasses. On the plus side, it made him look a bit less like Harry Potter.
* Getting to know the new first years
I have to do an 'introduction' lesson with every new first year class (there are 8 of them). One of them went like this:
Me: Hello everyone, do you know what my name is?
Class, in choral unison: Christopher!
Hmmm. Amazingly, this wasn't the pinnacle of humiliation for me this week - I got a taxi to the shops and the driver gave me too much change so I gave him the 10 yen back and he thought I'd tipped him 10 yen. I'm glad he laughed instead of having me ritually slaughtered by his Yakuza mates.
* The rainy season
It's torrential. I nearly drowned. I've bought myself a big sheet of plastic so I can make myself a plastic dalek rain-resistant costume.
* Planning world domination
Obviously this is a full-time, ongoing occupation, but I've also been planning my holiday to Canada (make it be summer sooooooooon), my trip to Kobe and Kyoto (every JET who's sticking around for another year gets packed off for a 5 day party later this month), what I'm doing for Golden Week (emphatically NOT camping, contrary to Louise's iron will), and what on earth I'm going to do in the new and exciting English Club that's starting up this month. I'm also considering taking this job my friend offered me that involves teaching English to a doctor. And his wife. And their children who are 4 and 6 years old.
I tried to take photos of all these things, but I failed. So instead here's the best bouncy castle I've ever seen.
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| posted by Alice @ 7:37 pm |
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