We’ve been spared the terrible winter storm that ravaged eastern Canada and the Maritimes over the past few days.  In fact, we’ve been enjoying a fairly pleasant winter so far.  There’s plenty of snow but the daytime highs have been mostly in the -10 to -15 C range which really isn’t bad at all.   This morning we woke up to a coating of hoar frost on the trees and the sun shone brightly most of the day.  I can appreciate the beauty of a day like this one but still I am not a winter person so it is with great delight that I have been checking the Tokyo weather each day lately!  Daytime highs have been between +5 and +15 C and the days have been mostly sunny!  Apparently, there’s lots of rain in the spring followed by a summer that is very hot and humid but I think I’m going to like winter!

We booked our tickets this morning so we’re one step closer to leaving for Japan!  We fly out of Edmonton early on the morning of Sunday, February 24th.  After a 3 hour layover in Vancouver, we’ll fly nonstop to Narita International, the airport that serves the Tokyo area.  That flight takes approximately ten and a half hours so it will be late evening our time when we arrive but taking into account the sixteen hour time difference, it will be mid afternoon the following day there!

As many of you know, drama is a passion of mine. Richard and I have been actively involved in a local community theatre group for several years. The group is presently in the midst of preparing Arsenic and Old Lace for production the first weekend of February. Because we were away when auditions were held and because we were in the midst of applying for positions in Japan and didn’t know if we were going to be around for the actual performances, neither of us took onstage roles this time. I volunteered to help out behind the scenes. Little did I know that that would mean stepping into the director’s shoes when she was called away to Arkansas to be with her mother who is very ill! It’s a bit outside my comfort zone as I haven’t directed adults before but we have a great cast and it’s been going quite well except for the fact that one cast member with a lead role has been having a great deal of difficulty memorizing her lines. She suffered a stroke less than a year ago and it has impaired her memory much more than she realized. She’s been doing a wonderful job of bringing the character to life but is very distressed over the fact that she can’t remember her lines. Today I agreed to be her understudy; to memorize the lines and be ready to step into the role if she can’t do it. In spite of the fact that it’s a very large role, I’ve been at every rehearsal and have heard the lines over and over again so I don’t think they’ll be too hard to memorize but I sure hope Mary Jane is back soon and that nothing else goes wrong in the meantime!

We’re often asked these days what we’re going to do with the house while we’re away.  Since we do plan to return to Sedgewick, we’re keeping it and have arranged to have Chrissy and her husband, Buck, move in and take care of it for us.

Chrissy first came to live with us in 2002 when she was in high school.  She was a kid who needed a home and ours was a home that needed a kid.  Our youngest, Nathan, was about to leave for college and I didn’t feel ready for an empty nest.  She quickly became part of the family and holds a very special place in our hearts.  We often hear of grown children leaving home only to return again.  That’s been Chrissy.  After two years of college in Calgary, she came back for the summer of 2006.  At the end of that August, we celebrated her marriage to Buck.  They were both with us for awhile earlier this fall and are now renting a tiny apartment here in Sedgewick until we leave.

We plan to store some of our furniture as well as the contents of our cupboards and closets in the basement while we’re away so that Buck and Chrissy can move their own things in.  That has necessitated a major clean out!  It’s amazing what you accumulate after twenty-six years in one house but over the past month, we’ve become pretty good at getting rid of stuff.  Many loads have been hauled to the local thrift store and the garbage men must be wondering what’s going on as the weekly pile by the street has been much bigger than usual.  We started with the storage room which now seems much bigger than before.  I’ve also completely cleaned out the office space that I no longer need and today the linen closets were done.  There are still several closets to go as well as the kitchen cupboards but we still have two months!

We also owe a huge note of gratitude to our niece, Tina, who teaches grade 5.  Richard taught grade 5 for most of his career and I taught a wide variety of elementary and junior high subjects.  Over the past 32 years, we accumulated a lot of valuable teaching resources.  We didn’t want to see them go to waste but saw no reason to keep to them.  We passed some things on to our colleagues at the end of June then invited Tina to visit in August and take away whatever she could use.  She left with almost everything that was left!  What a big help that was to us.  Thanks, Tina!

It looks like we’ll be heading off to Japan a little sooner than we thought.  We’ve been asked to arrive on about Feb. 25, two or three weeks earlier than we’d expected.   Shouldn’t be a problem as long as there aren’t any delays getting our working visas.

In order to get the visas we were required to send a number of documents including notarized copies of our university diplomas to our employer in Japan.  They have presented them to Japanese Immigration on our behalf and are waiting for Certificates of Eligibility to be issued.  This usually takes about four or five weeks.  Once the certificates are issued, they’ll be sent to us and we’ll take them, along with our passports, to the closest Japanese consulate which is located in Calgary.  The consulate will hold our passports for five working days then stamp the working visas directly into them.  We can either return to the consulate to pick them up or arrange to have them mailed back to us.

I’m not usually a fan of Canada Post but I must say that I was impressed when we sent the required documents to Japan at the end of Nov.   I mailed them on a Thurs. morning and by Sunday evening we’d received an email letting us know that they’d arrived!  We sent them priority post and paid accordingly, of course, but I was still pleasantly surprised by how quickly they got there.

Is it just vanity on my part or do passport photographers make everyone look like a terrorist?  When I applied for my last passport back in 2005, the first photo I had taken was so bad that I refused to use it.  Unfortunately, the second one wasn’t a lot better.  I remember telling the photographer that it wasn’t very flattering and being somewhat taken aback by his response.  He assured me that after twelve hours on a plane I’d look that bad.  Thanks, buddy!

Since we already have valid passports, that’s one thing we don’t have to take care of before we head off to Japan.  We do, however, require more recent passport photos in order to apply for our working visas.  We had those taken today and once again, mine looks like it belongs on a Wanted poster!

We have always been interested in other cultures and believe that the best way to learn about another country and its people is to spend time living and working there. It has long been our dream to spend at least a year teaching English somewhere in Asia after retirement. Over a year ago, when we had decided for sure that we were going to retire in June of this year, I began searching the internet for possible employers. Though we also considered Korea, a trip to Japan in the spring of 2005 to visit our son and daughter-in-law, who were teaching there at the time, had convinced us that we wanted to spend more time there and it became the main focus of my search. I found http://www.aacircle.com.au/forums/ most useful for checking out up-to-date job postings. Fairly early on, I came across an ad for MIL The Language Center and checked out their website at http://www.miljapan.com. Call it intuition, a gut feeling or the Spirit’s leading but whatever it was, MIL immediately became my first choice employer. I read every detail on the website many times over and every time I became more excited. We were encouraged by the fact that MIL encourages teaching couples but one thing that especially drew us to MIL was the fact that they accept applications from people of all ages. Most of the people hired to teach conversational English in Asia are fresh out of college and we were very aware of the fact that our ages might be a handicap in finding jobs.

In June of this year, in the midst of preparing final exams and attending retirement celebrations, we began working on our resumes. In early July, we polished them up, wrote cover letters, added the required photographs and on the 10th of that month, I held my breath, whispered a quick prayer and pressed the send button. Our applications were off to MIL! The very next day, we received an application package containing more information about the school as well as two sets of questions for us to answer. We were asked to complete the applications and return them in late September if we were still interested in positions for early 2008. Not wanting to put all our eggs in one basket, we sent off resumes to several other employers while we waited.

In September, we began working on the MIL application package and on the 21st, I hit the send button again. We had been told that we could expect to hear from MIL within two weeks if we were to be offered a telephone interview. When mid October rolled around and we hadn’t heard anything, I sent a quick email letting them know that we were still interested and we left on a three and a half week holiday visiting friends and family in various parts of B.C.

Two days before arriving home, late at night on Nov. 7 while visiting our good friend, Rod, at Cranbrook, I decided to check our email and there it was – a message from MIL offering us an initial interview! After that, the process sped up! Over the next two weeks we had three telephone interviews, the first with Dana, the school’s teaching coordinator, and the other two with Margaret, co-owner, teaching director and the lady who makes the final hiring decisions. By the third interview it was obvious that they were as interested in us as we were in them. They checked our references; we read and agreed to their contract of employment and working regulations and on Nov. 25 we received an email welcoming us to MIL!

My Dad and I have long attributed our love of travel to our Gypsy blood. Twelve generations before me, my first ancestor to cross the Atlantic and settle in North America was Augustine BeArce, a Romany Gypsy. Throughout Europe these nomadic people were persecuted and accused of crimes wherever they wandered. Born in France in 1618, Augustine moved to England and at the age of 20 was deported to America with others of his kind because he was a Gypsy. One of 88 passengers on the Confidence of London, Augustine sailed from Southampton, England landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts on April 24, 1638. He settled, married and raised a family at Barnstable, Massachusetts where he became known throughout the community as a man of good character. As I cross the Pacific Ocean and settle for a time on the far side of the sea, it only seems right to give credit to Augustine and the Gypsy blood I inherited from him.

Richard and I have just accepted positions teaching conversational English in Japan. This is a one year commitment and we’ll be leaving in mid March. The main purpose of this blog is to share our adventure with friends, family and anyone else who’s interested.