Friday was White Day in Japan.  On Valentine’s Day, women buy gifts for men, coworkers as well as husbands, and a month later on March 14th, the men reciprocate.  Cookies and chocolates seem to be popular gifts and the stores definitely gear up with lots of goodies on sale.  I got lucky this year as I spent Valentine’s Day in Canada and White Day here and received gifts from my romantic hubby on both days! 

This coming Thursday, March 20 is a national holiday in Japan – the first day of spring!  Don’t you wish you had a day off work for that?  Actually, our school offers classes that day but it’s a regular day off for Richard and I.  We’ve been celebrating spring ever since we got here though.  We boarded the plane in Edmonton with snow all around and arrived in Japan to find flowers growing and oranges hanging on trees!  Amazing!  Now the plum trees are in bloom and the cherry blossoms will soon follow.  It’s still chilly at night but, with the exception of one very rainy day, we’ve been enjoying lovely daytime weather. 

School is keeping us very busy.  Unlike, Matt & Robin’s Japan experience, ours isn’t exactly teach by number.  There’s quite a lot of lesson planning to do.  It should get much easier after the end of this month.  A new term begins April 1 & we’ll finally have  regular schedules with the same classes every week.  Right now, we’ve only had a bit of that with lots of subbing thrown in.  Unlike at home, when you sub here you have to do the lesson planning & how easy it is or isn’t depends on what the regular teacher’s plans are like.  Some are good but others are definitely not.  Also, at this time of year there are a lot of trial lessons thrown in, short lessons given to prospective students to find out if they’re interested in becoming regular students & if so, what level they’re at. 

In addition to teaching, I’ve also been offered a modeling contract!  Well, a slight exaggeration maybe but I did receive a memo from our teaching coordinator the other day asking me to model for some new advertising flyers that the school is putting together!  Several adults and children have been lined up and and photographer has been hired to come in on March 30 to take some staged shots of us in action.  I’m not sure why I was chosen but the memo says it’s because I’m “cute and photogenic”!  That from the fellow who saw the hideous passport type photos I had to send in in order to get my visa!  No, he’s not trying to hit on me – he just has a crazy sense of humour.

We really hope to have internet at home soon.  We have everything we need including the modem & are just waiting for someone to come and hook it up.  There is so much I want to share!

We’re making progress toward having internet at home and being able to update more regularly. Thursday was a day off for both of us.  We started the day by walking to the nearby recycle store.  Useful items that are no longer wanted are put by the street on a specific day each week so that they can be picked up and resold.  We were able to purchase a very functional but small computer desk for 2000 yen, approximately $20!  Richard carried it home on his shoulders! Next we ventured into Tokyo for the first time to Akihabara, the electric town, an area known for it’s hundreds of electronics shops.  There we found the used monitor we were looking for.  Now the computer is set up and ready to go and we’re waiting for the internet to be connected.  Unfortunately, it will probably take a couple of weeks or perhaps even longer. 

On a completely different note, we woke up just before 2 o’clock this morning because the building was shaking.  Our first earthquake!  Actually, it was just a tremor and didn’t last long.  It wasn’t even slightly scary and we were both asleep again within minutes!

Teaching is going well though the lesson planning still takes awhile.  I’m especially enjoying the adult classes.  I think I’m learning as much from them as they are from me! 

No, we’re not lost!  We arrived in Japan safe and sound and are loving it so far.  We don’t have internet at home yet though so I probably won’t be able to post very often until we do.  I’ve found a good “internet cafe” – 3 computers at the back of a bookstore/electronics shop but it isn’t very close to where we’re living.  It’s near one of the schools we’ll be teaching at though, so whenever I’m in this area I’ll stop in and let you know how we’re doing.  Once we get internet at home, watch out!  I have so much to share.  I wrote 13 pages in my journal yesterday, my first day off!

There are many challenges to learning to live in such a different environment but we’re enjoying the experience immensely.  Of course, there’s the job – learning what’s expected of us.  It isn’t rocket science though and I’m sure we’ll soon be quite comfortable with that part of life.  Learning the train system and getting from place to place can be quite a challenge.  I did manage to get on a train going in the wrong direction the other day but I realized it right away, got off at the next stop and got myself turned around!  MIL has 2 main schools and 8 satellite ones. We’ll be teaching at several of them so we’ll spend lots of time on the trains.  Grocery shopping is another major challenge.  How do you tell if the package contains salt or sugar if you can’t read the label?  So far, we haven’t made any major blunders though and we’ve started to experiment with a few unfamiliar foods.  Figuring out a workable meal schedule is also an interesting aspect of our new life.  We usually work afternoons and evenings so are quickly adjusting to eating supper late in the evening – often about 10:00 p.m.  Settling into the apartment has presented a few interesting challenges as well.  Things like how to use the washing machine when the instructions are in Japanese but I’ll go into that in more detail in a future post.