Yet, I feel I should give a brief intro to my everyday life and the people I encounter here. And yea, Celeste finally got a camera!!! So, hopefully, this blog will be slightly more entertaining!
This is my lovely apartment building:
And this is the backside of my apartment.
I live in an apartment complex. All of the ALTs live in these apartments, so we often venture to each other's places for dinner and/or movie nights. My place has become quite the gathering place. So I must do my best to showcase the hostess skills I picked up from home. It's a lot of fun actually. Apparently I've been deemed the "Mommy" of the group. I live on the fourth floor of my building, which is a little odd to get to because the building is 10 stories high, but the elevator only goes to 3 floors.
Here is the lovely ominous hallway. I probably didn't use the word ominous correctly, but it feels nice to use big words, so I'm going with it. It looks a bit like something out of a movie. And I like it because the ceiling is short, so it makes me feel tall, haha. However, some of the other ALTs (Assistant Language Teachers)have to duck when walking through here. Ah, the benefits of being short in Japan...
This is the genkan. The place where people take off their shoes before entering someone's home. From what I understand, in Japan, the home is an extension of the bed, so everyone must take off their shoes. And in Western countries, the home is an extension of the outdoors. (Hmm...I worded that really poorly. Oh well! Please excuse my English. It's really gotten bad since I've been here. Haha. And, yes, I'm an English teacher. Go figure.)
BTW, I had guests over.
And here are a few pictures of my apartment. The people in the pictures are Mark and Tarnjeet (who we usually just call Teej). Mark is from Boston and Teej is from London. They are both really cool people. Mark is handy to have around because he can speak Japanese. He also speaks Portuguese, so sometimes we'll compare our respective Romance-based languages. It's just a big jumble of Portuguese, Spanish and Italian.
And this is the bento place I often go to get dinner because I'm too lazy to cook. Back home it was usually cheaper just to buy groceries and cook, but here it averages to be about the same price. And the people in the bento shop are so nice, but I'm sure they're probably sick of us gaijin, hehe.
My day usually starts at about 5:30am during the work week. I probably don't need to wake up this early, but I'm really slow in the morning, and cold weather seems to make me cranky in the mornings. So to counteract this, I do a lot of shuffling about in my apartment trying to bring all the things I need to get ready back into my nice, warm room. What can I say? I'm a Texas girl. We weren't always built for cold weather. I usually leave my apartment at about 7:20 to meet up with my friend Teej to walk to the subway together. We go to different schools, but it's the same general direction for part of our trips. I'm contracted to get out of work at 4:15, but recently I've been leaving school closer to 6pm. I am now an official member of the Art Club, so we have meetings after school a few times a week. It's amazing. There are only girls in the club and we usually spend our time talking, drawing and geeking out over anime. We don't ever really struggle to communicate either. If there's something we can't understand, we simply draw it, use gestures or simply look it up in the dictionary. It's really been great for me because they began teaching me about the school. Upon returning to my base school, I knew a total of 3 out of 45 teachers' names. Now, the students in the Art Club have taught me most of the teachers' names and have even told me some hilarious nicknames that they've made up for their teachers.
The next day after a very frustrating lesson. (Me and one of the JTEs [Japanese Teachers of English] have been struggling to work together. He's not a rude guy or anything. I just think our approaches to teaching are slightly different. I try to be more interactive and try to get the kids to have fun, so that they'll feel more comfortable speaking. I was happy because he finally let me try a game with the class. I was really excited, because this class is considered to be one of the best English-speaking classes in the school. The class was a little rowdy that day, which is good for ALTs because being rowdy means the students will speak more with you. So the game was going well, and suddenly the JTE ended the game. And for the next few minutes he stood there scolding the students. The entire mood in the classroom changed so suddenly. All of the students slumped down in their seats and the smiles were wiped away from their faces. The JTE was speaking in Japanese, and he kept saying my name. I hated it because I had no idea what he was saying. I really hoped he wasn't saying something that I didn't agree with. I hope he wasn't saying something like, "Celeste thinks this..." or "Celeste thinks that..." I don't know. Either way, I was so upset with him at the time. The students weren't misbehaving. It's a common thing amongst ALTs, apparently. We like the rowdy classes, and some teachers really don't. Oh well.) Anyway, after the class finished, a girl ran up to me and said, "My sister is in the Art Club. She says you are an 'otaku.' (Otaku=nerd) I am an otaku, too. When I hear this, I am glad." This totally made my day.
It's been snowing off and on a lot recently. I was at school when it first started snowing. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. I couldn't stop just staring out the windows. The teachers laughed at me, but in a nice way. It's been an in interesting time for me trying to get settled into this new school. But I have the feeling that it will be that much more worth it in the future. Who knows? Just gotta keep pushing forward.
Okay, now for a short preview of future posts to come:
1) life in Japanese elementary schools
2) junior high school life at my "one month" school
3) returning to my base school, which is also a junior high
