I am sensei, hear me snor... uh, roar.

It was our last day of training today! There was lots of ‘Yay!’ a little bit of ‘Awww!’ and I heard “gambatte!” (which means ‘do your best’, and is interjected into conversation with regularity) more times than I care to remember.

Mostly we’re focusing on the ‘Yay!’ since we’re all totally excited about finally being able to stop living out of suitcases and settle down into our apartments. Personally I’m totally itching to finally get down to Sasebo and see what the place is like in person after reading and hearing about it for so long. I’m looking forward to getting some of the basics of my high-tech, information dependant and horrendously decadent life back; lack of stuff like a cell-phone, broadband connection and a set of speakers so my mp3’s sound decent is starting to grate; and I’m totally looking forward to getting back in contact with the rest of the world! (That means actually posting this stuff instead of just writing it out in Word)

Me with the AEON kids mascot (I forget, but I think he's called 'Muffy'). I love the fact that he has fangs... I can just imagine Buffy kicking his arse.

Anyway, we did our last round of information cramming today, nothing too strenuous, just some pre-school stuff (I don’t have any pre-school lessons anyway, which I’ve decided is cool… if only because it’s one less set of structures and materials I have to memorise). The Honbucho (regional manager) took us all out to lunch at a very nice Italian restaurant, which was very nice… we were all a little stressed, because, well, she’s the regional manager of this giant company we work for, but actually she was really nice and just asked a lot of questions about us all; it made meeting her for our ‘graduation ceremony’ a fair bit less scary too. Basically she just pinned our AEON badges on us, told us we were great and to ‘gambatte!’ then sent us out into the big scary world of teaching. Yaaay! We’re all officially *name*-sensei now!

The AEON class of April, 2007; (from left) Me, Lauren, Gerry (our training guru) and Christi. Don't we all look ever so spiffy?

We celebrated in the time honoured fashion of eating ramen, wandering the streets for a while, then walking into a pub. The fact that we had to be up, packed, dressed in formal attire and checked out by 10AM meant that the night wasn’t too wild, but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Even though I know I’ll see them around soon I’ll really miss having Cristina and Lauren around, there’s nothing like having friends around to take the edge off the culture shock.

Right, I’m gonna sign off because I have the (aforementioned) early start and full day of (watching) teaching tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Gambatte!

Practice makes perfect...

Training, training, training; I’m pretty much into the rhythm of things now, the city streets are becoming familiar and I’m into the swing of how things work, getting intermittently stared at by strangers is still a little disconcerting, but even that is starting to feel like just a ‘part of life’, it’s not menacing after all, just curiosity. Being an ethnic minority is still kinda novel and fun, I can see how it could get on your nerves after a while though.

Practice lessons are running smoothly now to the extent that I was comfy today ‘mixing it up’ by teaching the students how to say “he’s a bit of a prat” in my class on ‘describing people’. The students are really fun to work with, they’re enthusiastic and just soak up whatever you give them to learn. It’s great to just chat with them in the lobby and hear them open up about their lives. The classes are really diverse too; two days ago I had a club DJ and yesterday a civil servant.

Mostly life for us is still divided between training, food shopping and sleeping, but on Thursday we managed to get out and hit a bar with Kelly (the teacher who Lauren is replacing) she had a lot of great advice about the job, the company and the country so that was excellent. I continue to be amazed / appalled by the price of alcohol, I asked for a scotch on the rocks and the barman poured a third of the bottle into my glass and charged me 500 yen (about $5) schooners of beer cost 100 yen, how this country maintains any order on weekends is a serious mystery.

This one's for my dad, it's a Fukuoka telegraph pole; it looks messy to me, but maybe it's a work of engineering genius... it doesn't look very earthquake-safe though, right?

Other wackiness includes:

- Being ‘forced’ into having my photo taken with a child and someone dressed as sonic the hedgehog. Why the childs mother wanted me in the photo is beyond me.

- Having to explain what a ‘caravel’ was to a businessman in-between classes, it turns out he reads history textbooks in English as a hobby. Hmmm… strange, but at least it's a hobby that doesn’t involve schoolgirls I suppose.

- Meeting Yorn, the drunk Swedish student who wanted to know ‘where the cool parties where’… I didn’t know, but by the looks of him he’d already been to a few ‘cool parties’ that night.

- Going down a side street and seeing a group of Japanese kids dressed in full-on ‘streetwear’ (like puff-jackets, backwards baseball caps and insanely baggy jeans) having what I can only assume was a ‘rap battle’ while their friends breakdanced in the street.

Today was a half day so I got to wander, I window shopped for a while then went down to the Fukuoka museum of Asian Art in the afternoon… it was about 80% Indian works, with the rest from Thailand (I guess the other nations of Asia will have to wait for representation) but very interesting. Bollywood posters are great!

Tomorrow we all have the day off, so we’re going to meet in the morning and try to plan another excursion. So much to do… no time to sleep.

Much Fukulove,

Shaun.

Still on the Train(ing)

Training is intense; there’s so much stuff to learn and it all seems to be compacted into a tiny space of time: interviewing, lesson structure and teaching techniques, Business management, time management, corporate structures… it’s all interesting in its own way, but keeping up with the flow of information can be daunting at times. I guess I’ll just have to trust the manual which claims ‘everything will become second nature after a short while’.

We had our first ‘live-fire’ teaching practice today (that means we got to work with real Japanese students… ones that didn’t have to pay for the lesson). It mostly went well, although there are still some wrinkles to be smoothed out; I need to cut down on my ‘verbal static’ and learn to let the students take over more often, but overall the technique is there. I swear, this job will be the best public-speaking training exercise ever; challenges abound, but its nice to stand in front of a group of people who want to learn, and watch their eyes light up when they get something right. If I was half as motivated about learning Japanese as they are about mastering English then I’d probably be bi-lingual in no time at all.

Ok! It's Engrish! (or NESglish if you prefer) I wasn't brave enough to actually enter this establishment, but I'm still curious about the burger menu.

While my Japanese is still fairly shoddy (although I’ve learnt a new phrase every day) I’m slowly starting to culturally adapt; I don’t stop to stare at the individually shrink-wrapped bananas in the supermarket anymore, I’m getting accustomed to canned vending-machine coffee (endorsed by Tommy-Lee Jones!) and I’ve developed seriously awesome chopstick skills (one step away from Mr. Muyage, I swear!) Food is still fascinating; I had deep-fried pieces of cheese in broth today for lunch, yesterday I had tofu-ramen, as slurped (with gusto) by salarymen nation-wide. Big culinary horizon-broadening, yay!