23 December 2009

hello, goodbye



Our last days in Tokyo are a bit of a blur, although we did (finally!) manage to drag ourselves to Tsukiji Fish Market for an early morning sushi breakfast like we'd been planning to all semester.

Less delicious and much more sad, however, was saying goodbye to everyone, especially my students. I know I said it before, but I really lucked out by getting some of the friendliest, funniest and just generally all-around-awesomest students in Tokyo. As you can see from the pictures below, we found lots of highly educationally enriching ways to commemorate the end of the term.



 (Clockwise: me, Ryo, Hiroe and Akio).

Like making everyone wear funny hats.



(Left to right: Mari, Haruna and Yuka)


And letting them make snowmen out of marshmallows.



And doing the limbo.

After that, there was a frenzied rush of leaving-the-country footwork (re-entry visas, post office runs, bank transfers, packing) and a even more frenzied rush of goodbyes (last drinks with our teacher friends in Shimokitazawa, a last *amazing* shabu-shabu dinner with Teiko and Yoriko, and an equally amazing shabu-shabu dinner with some of the students. Finally, at six am Monday morning, we crawled out of bed and - nearly 48 hours later - arrived safe and sound, if freezing - at Iain's family's house in Aberdeenshire, where it is snowing and where we find ourselves waking up at five even though the sun doesn't rise until well after eight. Oh, circadian rhythm. I really thought I'd have killed you by now.

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07 December 2009

long overdue update

DSC_0226


Exactly one more week of work to go, and I am getting way too sentimental at the thought of saying goodbye to my students, all of whom are amazing and who are by far the single best thing about this job. I've gotten so used to seeing most of them so often throughout the week (some of them every single day!) that I'm really dreading saying goodbye. I'm doubly lucky they're so amazing because the pre-ordained lesson plans for this last week of teaching are painfully awful, and fortunately I can at least count of students who will be sweet and funny and good-natured, and who can usually be counted on to be irreverant enough to make the worst canned lesson entertaining. Today's lesson on performing! skits! (because that's a skill I think we can agree everyone needs) included improvised tales of woe ranging from murder to being buried alive to two-timing to, my personal favorite, an inexplicably tiny man who steals women's underwear.

At any rate;  I know I've slacked off quite a bit with this blog lately; part of this is because I've been trying to set up an actual website with the fairly massive collection of photos I've been sitting on for the last three years (edited, don't worry), and part is because this schedule, as I may have whined before, is absolutely brutal in terms of having free time,  and I'm generally pretty embarrassed by just how exhausted I am all the time. I'm hoping, very very much, that this won't be a problem next year when we're back, because (hooray!) we just accepted job offers in nearby Numazu, which is about an hour and a half away from Tokyo by Shikansen. I don't know too much yet except that it's a small school (Iain and I are the only full-time English teachers) and I'm going to have to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road. So: more plans (and more updates in general; I swear, about ninjas and that bike ride that amounts to the most exercise I got the whole time I was here, and talking to ALL THE HALLS on Skype) to follow, but for now, sleeping. 



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18 November 2009

fireman

Fire-Festival--11.2009-515

An impressively bearded fireman watches the last of the flames. 

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17 November 2009

watching the fire

Fire-Festival--11.2009-351

Iain and Ben both called me out for for stalking this little girl and her dad with my camera.

It's almost four weeks to the end of my contract! My students are hilarious, all of them, and they are obsessed with learning slang, idioms, euphemisms of any sort: the lights are on but nobody's home, dealbreaker, gold-digger, sleazy. Today I taught them that rocks! -  mostly to offset their growing tendency to imitate my bad habit of saying awesome! while giving a thumbs up, which they do in spades, exaggeratedly, all the time.  It's like looking into a really horrifyingly perky mirror.

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09 November 2009

fuchu shrine


DSC_9489


The shrine near our apartment in Fuchu, whose name I don't know yet. It gets dark early and the weekends go by too fast here; while Iain was off playing guitar with some of the other teachers on Sunday, I went for a walk around the shrine, past festival-style booths selling okonomiyaki, garish chocolate-and-sprinkle covered bananas, and a strange savory pancake that, when opened, turned out to be filled with an unidentifiable mince of vegetables and meat. 

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05 November 2009

heron


heron

At Engaku Shrine in Kamakura; herons always remind me of my mom and dad, so this photo is for you guys :-) 

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04 November 2009

engakuji

Kamakura--11.2009-021

Two stone pagodas at Engaku Shrine in Kamakura. I love the shrines here, especially on the weekdays when they're not swarming with people and giving me Perfume Pagoda flashbacks. In Southeast Asia, I was always a little overwhelmed by the over-the-top-ness of the temples, so I love the comparative serenity of the shrines here. 


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03 November 2009

daibutsu


daibutsu
We have a few days off from work, which we are spending unadventurously in Tokyo, studying, reading good books, playing guitar (Iain) and knitting (me), and staying warm in the sudden cold. Part of me wishes we were using this time to travel somewhere new, but both of us are pretty worn out from our schedule, and so sitting in cafes and cooking big dinners at home suddenly seems more appealing than anything else.  Lazy reclusiveness aside, we did manage to make it to Kamakura yesterday, where we hiked our way to the giant, bronze Buddha who looks just as big now as he did when I was sixteen. 
daibutsu

In other news, today I figured out how to make instant almond gelatin! My mom used to make it when I was a teenager, and it's the quite possibly the best dessert in the world - who doesn't like the synthetic taste of fake almond? (Most people, apparently, Iain included, which means more for me!) Also, a perk of learning the Kanji for my name - 美加 - is that, thanks to the meaning of the second syllable (addition),  I can now make some headway in figuring out cooking instructions! You could probably argue that the adding part of the recipe was obvious thanks to the drawing of a maniacally cheerful anthropomorphized jug of milk pouring itself into the boiling hot pan, but that would be far less cool. 


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12 October 2009

wishes


wishes

Multi-lingual wishes at Meiji Shrine.

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11 October 2009

ohayo!

bamboo

Things I love about being in Tokyo: the food, having our own tiny little apartment after six months of living out of suitcases, the food, my awesome, friendly students, the stationary shops, the bottles of water on the street that supposedly keep the cats away (?), the weather (for now), the way I can just wave my wallet containing my train pass over the gate to make it open, finding copies of a rare Haruki Murakami book in English, and, in case I haven't mentioned it, the food - all of it: the cheap ramen and don restaurants near my apartment, the rotating sushi bars, the grocery stores. Really there isn't much I don't love, except maybe the insane, impossible crush of bodies that is my daily subway commute, and even that is surprisingly less hostile, if more crowded, than my daily rides on the R back in Brooklyn. 

At any rate, we were whisked away by our employers the minute we set foot in Narita, and have had very little free time since (nine-plus hour days + two-plus hours on the train + most recently, Japanese lessons!) so, apologies for the radio silence; I love being here but most days I'm so exhausted by these twelve hour days that I haven't been able to keep in touch as much as I'd like. Today's a school holiday, however, which means I'm going to try and catch up on some e-mails, study Japanese, and explore our neighborhood a bit (finally). More soon! 

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