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...