I have moved

http://www.takeanumbrella.blogspot.com Here's my new blog - the adventures continue in Australia...

So I fibbed...

Here is another post. Probably a pointless post since owing to my calling hte previous post The End, most of you will have stopped checking this site! But today's, yesterday's situations have been too good not to gripe about in a public manner. As you all know I set off for Adelaide from Seoul at 5am yesterday morning. I spent a good part of my day sitting in buses, planes and my favourite, airport terminals. Indeed I spent a little bittoo much time sitting in airport terminals it turns out since I missed my connecting flight to Adelaide in Singapore. Boarding for the flight out of Osaka was an hour late owing to ithaving been hit by lightning while landing earlier on. Yes, the pilot was very informative indeed, even went so far as to explain in great detail what damage exactly had been caused and how the engineers "seem to think it won't be a problem". Hmm, hurtling through the air at 5000feet or how ever high it is, at 1000kmph - I think I want a little bit more than "don't seem to think"!! Off we go though, and it turns out that even a lightning bolt can do little to keep a 747 on the ground. I had 3 seats to myself and managed to watch 3 movies and worry about missing my connecting flight at the same time for 6 hours. Turns out I was justified in worrying since I missed my flight by 1 minute or so and was put on a flight to Sydney instead. From there, i was told, I could catch a flight to Adelaide at 10:30am and be only 4 hours later than orginally planned. Funny, it's now 1:30pm and I am still in the Sydney domestic terminal eating sandwiches so expensive I expect at any moment to crack a tooth on the diamond studded lettuce and reading magazines about millionaires who have probably never eaten an entire piece of bread let alone a sandwich in their lives. How sick of this do you think I am then? All that we need now is for this next flight to also be delayed - have a tree fall on it, trip on it's own shoelace or some such and my homeward trek will be perfectly disastrous.

Well no, let's look on the bright side; I am yet to either lose or have stolen any of my valuables! Just let me be home already!!!!

The End

Well here we are. The final word. My apartment is empty, my bags are packed (or very soon will be) and I have bid everyone I have never met at the Board of Education and the City Hall farewell. I am leaving. Let's have some fanfare or something! So I will make this my last blog entry. Tomorrow it doesn't seem likely that I will get internet access and then I am off to Korea for 5 days. Thanks to everyone who was reading - I hope I didn't bore you too much! God knows that most of the time my life over here has seemed a drag even to me. Daily life is the same anywhere, in Adelaide, in Japan, in Paris - life is just life. Living overseas isn't day after day of excitement and being overwhelmed by new things and feeling like you are on an adventure. It's just like home - there are a lot of average days and a few tops ones, and a few bad ones. Simply the act of being overseas is not excitement in itself. It can be, but home can also be exciting too. Enjoying life is less about where you are and more about who you have surrounded yourself with. I enjoy life a lot in Adelaide because I enjoy the company of the people I know there. With the right people a tiny town out the back of Burke could be a tops place to live I reckon.

On that note, here endith the diatribe and the blog.

3 days to go

Last night I went over to the Yamamoto's place for dinner. They were my host fmaily the very first time that I came to Kamogata in high school. Their daughters were both still away, but their son came home from work at about 9pm. It was a really fun night. I just kind of ft into their family dynamic really well, it is just heaps easy to make conversation with them. Usually I feel very awkward and out of place when I go to Japanese people's houses because they never let me do anything, I just have to sit there like the Queen while they fuss around me. This family just treats me like a member and so I get to be more comfortable. Our sense of humour matches too, which helps a lot! I should have caught up with them more while I was here. The father gave me a few stamps out of his collection, I got to pick the ones I liked the most. I am now in possession of the daggiest stamps you have ever seen - they made me laugh so much I was crying.

Today I have to go and greet the Mayor and say goodbye. I will also be required to make up something about how much I enjoyed my time here and how lovely it is to be a teacher here. Better go and work on that then I guess, it's hard to lie convincingly!

In response to a query

One of my readers asks, "So what do you do with yourself now?"

Let me give you an account of my day so far;

08:03 - Arrive at work and discover my desk covered with random papers and a large wall hanging, assume everyone believes I have left the country already and wonder if it's possible I can just sneak back out of the staffroom and escape on the misconception.
08:04 - Too late I've been spotted by the vice-principal.
08:05 - Stamp my name in the attendance book. Note the 3 remaining empty places before I get to never see the thing again. Smile.
08:05 - 09:18 - Sit at my desk and stare at various objects. Possibly I am trying to levitate them, even I am not sure what I am doing at this point.
09:19 - 10:10 - Recover what's left of my senses, pull out a book and switch to staring at that for a while, at least this way it appears I am actually doing something besides practicing for a gig as the I Fell in a Paint Can Statue Busker in Rundle Mall.
10:11 - Am interacted with for a few moments by the head teacher who asks me to hang the pile of crap that was on my desk earlier and is now lying on the ground by the coffee maker in the English room. I nod eagerly in reply. The picture was filed under my desk where it will be about as appreciated as if it were hanging in the English room.
10:12 - I tire of pretending to read and decide to pull a laptop out of the cupboard, put it on my desk and make a start of translating the English Curriculum book into English.
10:17 - I tire of translating and instead look up "solipsism" on the internet. Wikipedia is a great time waster cos it has all those little blue links everywhere and in no time at all I am off on the biggest tangent since year 10 maths.
10:34 - Receive e-mail from a CIR at another school asking me to check if my school has an MD player capable of recording MD to MD. It does. He says he'll come by at 11:30ish and use it. I say OK.
11:14 - I am pulled out of my digestion of Sarte's biography by the arrival of my co-worker looking for the MD player. Thangod cos reading computer screens really hurts my eyes and my butt is getting pretty numb despite at least standing and walking around aimlessly every 30 minutes.
11:15 - 12:05 - We watch the MD player copy music and dance to the Hokey Pokey and Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes songs while our Japanese co-workers' fingers hover over the Mental Hospital button in their quick dial.
12:06 - I ask for permission to go to the bank and a granted it by my very distracted vice principal who is pulling bits and bobs out of the photocopier that I really don't think it's wise to touch. Off I go, how excitement, an excursion off school grounds!
12:17 - At the bank, brandishing my inkan and this time I am allowed to empty my bank account finally. The woman at the desk and I exchange glances, we had words yesterday about the necessity of a stamp with my name on it for accessing my money, a stamp I might add, that ANYONE can simply take out of my drawer and march around using. A stamp that anyone can have a likeness of made at any stamp shop. Yes, it's a foolproof identity verifier alright. She's still pissed at me for questioning her system.
12:20 - I start the walk back to school laden with a stack of banknotes about as thick as your average novel. I ponder just jumping on the train to Okayama and spending up a storm but then remember that I can't fit into any of the clothes or shoes they sell here and there are only so many books one can buy before the necessity of owning a car becomes apparent. I continue back to school.
12:21 - It starts raining.
12:25 - It starts REALLY raining.
12:38 - I am back at school with wet hair and a more than strong desire for the return of yesterdays clear blue skies and brilliant sunshine. I discover my co-workers all slurping 2 minute noodles and watching the baseball on a 20 year old TV hung from the ceiling at the back of the room.
12:45 - I finish off my sandwich and yoghurt and wonder for the millionth time how people who really are not eating any better than me can manage to stay so thin.
12:46 - I resume my Wikipedia digestion because there is simply nothing else to do.

And the end of the day is still 4 hours away...

Last Day of School - for the kids

This morning we had an assembly for the last day of school. The principal gave a little speech about looking after yourself during the break and not getting run over by cars and stuff. At the end of his speech he was supposed to say a few words about me and that was my cue to walk up on stage to give my speech. But he completelyl forgot about me! He just finished up on his flu talk and walked off, the head teacher had to make him go back up on stage and introduce me. I made a short speech thanking the kids for all the letters they wrote me last week and goodbye and goodluck. Then a year 5 kid came up as a representative of the school and read out a farewell letter to me and handed it over. As far as I can see the assembly is the only thing on the agenda for school today, they all go home at 11:40am. Until then they just stuff around I guess, get their reports. I'd forgotten all about grades, report day used to be my favourite day at school. That's just because I was a bit of a swot in high school though. It soon wore off after I started uni though!

So today is the 1 year anniversary of my arrival in Japan... This time a year ago I was probably struggling up any one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs installed in train stations specifically to annoy baggage ladden foreigners. In 5 days time I am facing the exact same struggle in reverse. It will come as no surprise to you all that I am very eager to be out of here. But there are some things I will miss about this place. The first thing that jumps to mind is the lack of spiders and creepy crawlies here. I have not seen a single spider inside my house since I arrived! I have had tiny flying insects and the occasional alarmingly huge cockroach and have had one Jesus Bug living in my bath. But on the whole, a very peaceful existence on the unwanted house guests front. Another thing would be the cheap and abundant ice cream - seriously I will not be able to pay $3.50 for an ice cream at home after paying only 70c here! I will miss the clean, prompt train service (although not paying for it), the most extensive recycling system I've ever encountered and the 100yen Shop - Daiso. Man, we really need Daiso in Oz. You can buy just about anything you need from there, for only a dollar. All my towels, crockery, cutlery, toiletries, cleaning products, everything that usually costs way more than you think necessary, you can get for cheap at the Daiso. The $2 shop is like a beggar's garage sale compared to the Daiso.

I will miss my mates down in Hiroshima. Perhaps if I had lived a little closer it would have been a funner year. I always have a good time with them and especially now that my Japanese is good we can actually have real conversations now. I will miss speaking Japanese, and being surrounded by it. Although sometimes it annoys me with it's fussy rules, there are many times when the first word that pops into my head for a situation is Japanese, because it's simply more economical than English. For example rather than saying "Did you eat?" I can just say "Tabeta?" Three words in one, easy :) Having said that it will be nice to get back to an English speaking environment and stymie the first language attrition that has reduced my speech to garbled sentences full of hesitations and gaping holes where a very good word I used to know would ordinarily go. Seems a bit of a waste to become so proficient and then just put it all on the shelf, but short of becoming a high school Japanese teacher (yuck), or spending more time in Japan (yuck) there's not much I can do about that. Plenty of other langauges to learn anyway!

It's just not quite right, but a fair effort...

The milk which had just been squeezed was made to ferment carefully, and the strong cheese of the taste was completed.