New School

Yesterday I went a driving in my little beasty around Kamogata. Hirai was making it out to be a big deal, driving in a foreign country and what not. But basically it's the same as Australia. The only thing is in this town that the roads can get pretty narrow. I mean, if two bicycles approached each other they'd be concerned about hitting each other. But my car is only about twice as wide as I personally am, so whenever I run into someone coming the other way one or the other of us just reverses until we reach a driveway, back in and let the other go past. You can't be in a hurry to get anywhere here.

Hirai also tells me that it is OK to travel up to 10km faster than the given speed limit, whatever speed zone you may happen to be in. Odd, but the Japs do seem to take that extra 10km to heart and are constantly speeding.

So this morning I trundled up to my new workplace, nishishougakkou (kamogata west primary school) where I was met by the teacher who was previously teaching there. She gave me a run down of the class procedure and etc. It seems I will only be teaching about 10 classes a week, plus some time with the kindy kids. The rest of the time I am pretty much free to do as I please. It is a fairly small school, only one class of each grade, up to grade 6. There is a little playground with the traditional dirt for running around on. God forbid they should fall over and land on something soft like, say, grass.

So if next week at school doesn't go so well I have found the Aussie Bar in Okayama which I am sure will be frequented by me of a weekend. All I need now are some poeple to drink with...

Apricot with ability to say clearly what is thought

Well here I am in my new home, Kamogata. It`s a pretty small place. I can only describe how small by reference to fast food chains; there is no Maccas here. Yes, Maccas pervades even the wannabe cities of Japan. There are no internet cafes, that is a bigger indicator. My house is on a hill (as is almost everything here), a big baby blue number divided into four apartments. My place overlooks a lake type arrangement with some kind of fruit tree surrounding it, which in the half light of sunset looks almost romantic. However, the Japanese delection for burning things means that my house constantly smells like a bonfire - this is Outback Japan.

This morning I went for a walk and ended up in the next town. Not your usual occurance during a one hour walk, but things here are pretty snug. I had my first offical emergency when I found I didn`t have time to walk home again before the agreed 1pm meeting time so I had to ring Hirai (dude from Board of Education who is looking after me) to pick me up. While searching for a telephone though it started to pour with rain, which when combined with the gale force wind made for a very messy Jo indeed. It was kind of like a mini tyhpoon. Weird.

Tomorrow I`m picking up my first official Hanko (stamp with your name on it used as we would use our signatures). I had to pick out my own kanji characters to represent my name. I went with 叙杏　which means something along the lines of "apricot with ability to say clearly what is thought" Sorry to those who can read Japanese and are currently looking up in their dictionaries to see if I`m right on the meaning, or who already know I am wrong...

Well, this apricot is signing out for today.

Still not there

Yeah, kinda didn't work out like I thought and there was a slight delay on my leaving the country. So I'm in Oz until Sunday now. Kind of good cos I can use the time to catch up with people I didn't have time to squeeze in before Thursday. Sometimes it's good to see people you haven't seen in years and realise that no one really changes much.

By way of explanation...

Last time I was in Japan lots of people wanted to know what it was "really like" over there. Trouble is, by the time I came home to explain, I'd forgotten most of the small moments that make the experience in another country so different and sometimes odd. So I'll just use this space to relate small anecdotes about my life working in a rural Japanese school in the hopes that it may dispell some myths about modern life in Japland. Something I can clear up immediately is that my house will not be made of paper. I know how disappointed many of you will be to hear that. Sorry.