The End of an Era

April 1^st in Japan will mark the end of the Heisei era as the current emperor will abdicate and pass control to his son.  It will also mark the end of the era of me working for my suck ass company, as they decided to not renew my visa and are flying me home on that exact same day.  I was originally scheduled to stay for another month to help train the new teachers, but inexplicably the plan changed after they had already started the paperwork with immigration.  My best guess is that they don’t want to have the liability of being my visa sponsor for 11 months after I leave Hellos and potentially wreak havoc in Japan.  Oh well, my work is pretty much done here.   Many of my coworkers share this sentiment as six Americans and two Japanese are leaving next month.  They are shipping in four brand new Americans to take our places, and three of them will arrive over spring break, so they’ll teach the first day of the school year without ever having sat in on a class.  Good luck kiddos!

The only big news I have is that I ran an Ekiden last month!  Our team of seven runners finished the 44 kilometer course in an unimpressive time that currently escapes my recollection.  I ran a cold, windy 9.3km leg in 37:03, which was exactly what I expected.  Amazingly my club fielded two teams, and the seventh stage runner of the second team was also named Michael.  We had three hours to sit by the side of the road while waiting for our team to arrive, so I got to know him a little.  He’s a lawyer with a wife and kids that just moved to Japan and even more amazingly he has a super similar running background to me.  In the race he beat me by just 7 seconds!  I chopped off his head with my Katana to avoid the shame.  After the race we went to a bath and then an all you can eat restaurant where we got pretty hammered at 3pm.  Fortunately it was only a mile from my house as the guy who drove me was plastered and have to leave his car there.  It was a fun experience I haven’t had in a long time, and has motivated me to train more and run less slow-ass times.  I’ve actually been running almost every day since fall, and have built back up to where I can jog 8 to 10 miles on Saturday and feel fine on Sunday.  Now I somehow need to figure out how to do that at 7 minute mile pace instead of 9…

So tomorrow starts my last week of teaching, then I have a week to hang out before the 1^st.  The last couple of months I’ve been enjoying teaching more than ever before, probably because I’ve flogged the resistance out of most of my trouble makers.  I’ve especially had fun with my first graders, who in the past had always been exhausting.  I’ll miss them and I’ll miss the coworkers that have slowly warmed up to me as I’ve shaken off my reputation for being bitter and burned out after last year.  On the other hand some teachers have been less than friendly all year, so now seems like a good time to leave.

As for my last week, I’ll say goodbye to my friends that are leaving on the 26^th and then go explore for a few days, probably on a small island somewhere.  Then pack up and head home!  See you soon and let me know if anyone needs a good English teacher in Minnesota!

Vietnam!

A few words of update before I disappear back into the mysterious orient for a few more months!  Since my last post I enjoyed a wonderful white and slightly above freezing Christmas in Minnesota and then got promptly back to work in Japan.  2019 is off to a smooth start with no major changes to my classes or work schedule.  In case you were wondering I was back for a total of three weeks before I went on vacation again!  Phew, I was getting worried about burn out there.  This week I took a short trip to Vietnam with two friends from work (Sam and Emily the same two as Malaysia in September).  It was supposed to be four days, but we applied for the visas too late and it wound up being only three.  We got $250 tickets out of Osaka for an early Monday flight, so we took the train three hours on Sunday and stayed in a little town to the airport.  Then after getting up at 6 on Monday we were denied boarding due to lack of visas and had to spend another 24 hours in Osaka.  Who knew you needed a visa to visit counties the United States formerly bombed?  So on Monday we went back into Osaka and spent the day visiting the instant noodle museum.  It was like Asia’s version of the Spam Museum!  Then three trains back to small airport town, get up at six, make the flight by five minutes due to visa printing difficulties, blah blah blah.  Anyhow, we got to Hanoi at 1pm, messed around with immigration for an hour, took an uber for an hour, checked into the air BNB and then literally ran a mile to the start of our 5pm food tour.  Running through the old quarter of Hanoi was probably the most dangerous thing I’ve done since trying to drive a moped in Indonesia in 2010.  Very invigorating.  Hanoi has roughly 100 pedestrians, 200 street vendors, 400 mopeds and one square meter of open space per block.  Also no stop lights of traffic laws.  You gotta just stop thinking and go baby! 

So the first night I had like three dinners of bomb ass Vietnamese street food like Pho and Banh Mi.  I also learned that Hanoi is super touristy with plenty of English speakers and also that Vietnam is like totally communist but also totally capitalist.  Our 27 year old tour guide was totally stoked about Ho Chi Minh, Lennon and one party elections, but also loved Americans and accepted visa.  So you wind up with a country with free health care and no homeless people or beggars, but Americans can go anywhere, say anything and even pay with US dollars.  No surprise it’s one of the fastest growing economies.  Anyhow that’s just a first impression, I don’t really know anything.

Anyhow, the second day we explored on foot (literally one foot as we were hopping over squatting-sidewalk-coffee-drinkers all day) and checked out a couple of temples and a water puppet show.  If you want to know what entertainment looked like in an 11^th century rice field I recommend this!  We also caught a show at a Jazz club.  The next day we did an art museum and tried to check out Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, which sadly closes at 11am.  We wrapped up with the 65 story Lotte tower, where we watched the sun set through the hazy  polluted sky. Then we caught a red eye home followed by a miserable and heavily delayed 4 hour train ride home.

Overall it was a crazy but great trip.  The air BNB was gorgeous, almost like a hotel room, but tucked in skinny four story building on a back alley.  The weather was 60-70 degrees the whole trip, but unfortunately very hazy and polluted.  If I could do it again I’d get my visa on time and spend a night or two outside the big city.  The people were so friendly I don’t think it would be a problem, even with zero Vietnamese.

So I’m back now, and getting ready for a 9am free lesson tomorrow (Sunday).  Take care and keep in touch!

A Pre-Holiday Update

Day pass into weeks, weeks into months, and now we find ourselves in the closing stage of the reign of the Heisei emperor.  If you didn’t know, the emperor of Japan is retiring at the end of the fiscal/school year, so the traditional Japanese calendar will start from year zero next April.  Who knew the emperor was allowed to retire? 

So I have largely been neglecting my blog as my life has settled into a routine that feels very little like the adventure of my first year or two here.  Work has settled down and classes are finally as easy as they were by the end of my first stint in Japan.  My kids know me, and the fear of being hit with ever-present balloon seems to deter most bad behavior.  My large apartment is nice, although these days few of my friends come to visit.  I started running again almost daily in October, because I signed up for a relay race in February.  I’ll be doing it right here in Ogaki with some old buddies that I used to run with years ago.  My time is widely expected to blow.  Oh well, my teammates mostly have full time jobs and kids.  I learn a tiny bit more Japanese every day, although I don’t really use much at work.  I passed the top level of the Japanese language proficiency test back in July (I got the result in September).  I now feel fully qualified to read a newspaper article and answer a multiple choice question about it with 70 percent accuracy.  I’ve done a number of things that I’ve blogged about in the past, but don’t really feel like re-reporting.  I went to the Ogaki festival in October and caught flying rice balls.  I went to thanksgiving at a coworker’s house and cooked mac and cheese this time, which outperformed last year’s crappy potatoes.  We had a Halloween party for the kids and I crossed dressed again, this time as a witch.  Our Christmas party is coming up next week, and I’m going to be sort of an anti-Santa; I basically plan on walking around with a big sack of crappy presents like newspaper and old socks.  Should be a good time.  I’ve been on a couple mediocre tinder dates, which wound up feeling more like language exchanges than dates (that is to say work, where I get to speak Japanese!)  I’ve done some bike rides and hikes as well, but at this point it just feels like normal exercise rather than exploration…

If this blog seems like a bit of a downer, don’t get the wrong idea.  I’m enjoying myself more than last year or even the first half of this year.  I just haven’t done much that I feel like bragging about on the internet.

Looking forward I’m coming home as usual for Christmas.  For the second year in a row I got super cheap tickets, this time $740 for the 12/24 to New Years.  Speaking of cheap tickets I also snagged a $250 ticket to Vietnam for our January break.  I’m going for 4 days to Hanoi with the same two friends that went to Malaysia in September.  I’m pretty stoked for that because it seemed like they weren’t going to have enough money to make it happen for a while.  Plus who knows when the next time I’ll be able to travel Asia with two 25 year old women again??

Well, we are nearing the end of 2018, so have a merry Christmas, jolly Chanukah, festive Kwanza or whimsical pagan solstice celebration.  Let’s start 2019 on the attack!

Malaysia!

Wow, since my last blog post I flew home for 10 days, came back, taught for two weeks, flew to Malaysia for four days, and came home barely missing a record setting typhoon.  Minnesota was great as always, although I somehow managed to book my return flight for the wrong day and missed a day and a half of work.  I got some really dirty looks and a deeper understanding of the meaning of “nonrefundable ticket” (turns out you can’t even change the little bastards).  So then I worked 10 out of 11 days and got up at the ass crack of dawn to fly to Kuala Lumpur on day 12. 

My friends Emily and Sam found $300 tickets and an air B&B on the 22^nd floor of a high-rise for like $40 a night.  Our place had a pool and restaurant on the 37^th floor roof top.  The place had four towers and so many people we had to wait 5 minutes for the elevator to come.  We had a studio with a mattress on the floor for me and a semi-broken AC unit.  It worked out though.

I was a bit nervous going with friends that I hadn’t traveled with before, but we got along well and didn’t have any emergencies except when a monkey stole a bag of souvenirs from us.  We did a bunch of touristy stuff like going to temples, mosques and shrines and going to the top of an 88 story tower.  We did a food tour one night with a random local guy we found on the internet.  He fed us Chinese street food and we got caught in the middle of a huge Chinese ghost festival parade.  (I didn’t know before going that the gates to the spirit world were open in early September).  Other highlights included feeding parrots an aviary and visiting an enormous cave guarded by a 100 foot golden statue of a Hindu war god. 

Overall the city was super huge and built up but it was easy to get around with uber and nearly every one spoke English.   The people are super diverse and there are very active Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist communities.  The city was also super developed and we didn’t have any problems with scammers, feral dogs or human refuse being thrown out of 2^nd story windows.

Now I’ve been back taking it easy and gearing up for another work week.  We have a meeting tomorrow before work for the full staff 200+ Shimon staff, then on Wednesday I teach at my new branch for the first time.  I’ll be in touch.  Tootles.

Gunpowder and Ass Sweat

Ah, my half-packed duffel is sitting on the kitchen floor, my laundry is drying on my dining room chairs and in the distance I can see the lights of the bullet train flickering between tall buildings.  I must have made it to summer break.  It wasn’t easy this time thanks to a record setting heat wave that has seen temps pushing 100 almost every day for three straight weeks.  This week I had two extra summer lessons, which meant showing up to work at 9am with sweat dripping off my ass.  We decided it would a good idea to have a summer cram session theme this year, so the kids just sat at their desks studying vocab for 3 hours.  All I had to do was test them when they were ready, which was easy, except when I had to fail an 8 year old three times because she couldn’t remember the phrase “you’re right”.  Irony.

Yesterday I got back from English Daze, our annual teacher-student camping trip.  We went to a sprawling nature center an hour away with 40 youngsters for an overnight.  The first day it was literally 101 degrees and the students did an orienteering activity where they walked around with maps for three hours.  I just sat in a little hut in the woods and waited for the kids to find me.  I had the furthest station and nearly died before any of the kids reached me.  Somehow they all seemed to be fine in the heat.  The second day I was supposed to take my kids to a petting zoo, but it rained so I played alcohol-free beer pong and had a paper tower building contest.  This year was a little better than last year, since a few of my kids actually came but still sucked due to getting up at 6am two days in a row.  Well that one’s in the books.

Before that?  I went to the beach on lake Biwa with a couple friends two weeks ago.  It’s kind of shallow and full of jet skis, but it hit the spot on a 95 degree day.  You can also see my study abroad school from the beach.  After dark we walked around Hikone while I reminisced and my two friends caught Pokémon. 

Last week was there was big fireworks festival in Gifu city.  I went with one American and one Japanese coworker and we spent over an hour wandering through crowds trying to get to our other two friends.  Fireworks are a huge deal here, probably because you can’t buy any of the good ones legally.  The two newspapers in Gifu each sponsor one event, and always try to outdo each other on the first two weeks of August.  I hadn’t been since 2009, so it was nice to go home smelling like gun powder and fried meat again.  We never found our friends though…

Well, that’s about all that pops into mind for my summer.  I’ve been out and about more than last year which is nice (although mostly after sunset, like a heat vampire).  I’ll be attempting to return home tomorrow, although a typhoon is currently heading for Tokyo which may delay me.  Hopefully I can fill you in on my life in person soon, and also hear about any scintillating adventure you have been on!  Until then!

Fun in the (dangerously hot) sun.

Summer is upon us!  Last week we had 72 hours of straight rain but it finally gave way to blinding sunlight and 99 degree heat.  July and August are indoor season in Japan, but I got in couple of good outdoor days in June at least.  I hiked up to Gifu castle which was pretty cool, but we got to the top of the mountain just minutes after the squirrel petting zoo closed.  Shoot.  The employees started chasing the squirrels around with nets just after it closed, so they must herd them inside or something.  Squirrels are actually pretty rare in Japan, so it’s fun to watch Japanese people freak out when one darts towards them.  Also my old friend and colleague Izumi came for a visit (just a month after I met her in Hawaii) and we met up with our old running crew.  We did the 10km route we used to do every Monday night, and we got to see cormorant fishing at the river.  Ukai, as they call it in Japanese, involves letting a cormorant catch a fish out of the river, but with a metal collar one it’s neck, so it can’t swallow the fish.  Then the fish is squeezed out of the bird’s throat and presumably eaten by a human.  It’s a strange custom, but it’s a very popular tourist attraction around here.  People line the river banks at sunset to watch.  Afterword we went out for beers, and I vetoed the fish restaurant. 

Two weeks ago I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which was as hard as I had imagined.  It’s possible that I passed, but I felt like I was answering with about 70 percent confidence on most of the questions.  Not great considering it was a multiple choice exam.  I find out the result in September.  Pass or fail I have a disappointingly long way to go before I’m fluent.

Last week we had a banquet to celebrate the arrival of our newest teacher and the start of another school year (never mind that it started in April).  We rented a private room in an Italian restaurant and had an amazing five+ course meal, including sushi, pizza and snails.  As always there was unlimited alcohol of every sort.  After about an hour of drinking, or new teacher Sam put her parents on video chat from Texas.  Our boss drunkenly remarked to them “I am not stable but the company is stable”. 

So looking forward, tomorrow is my birthday!  And looking backward, we actually had the party last night.  All six of my local coworkers and one Japanese friend came to my new apartment.  My coworker Emily baked cookies and my friend Mai gave me a slightly ridiculous sun hat (see pictures).  Now I have to wear it whenever I see her because she has a matching one.  I bought a Chromecast recently, so I can play any video on internet on my TV.  We spent the night watching SNL videos and complaining about the weather.  I was pretty happy just to be able to enough space to have friends over though.  Well I should get back to cleaning up my place and mentally preparing myself to be 33 years old.  Stay cool friends.

New Apartment!

Greetings from the east friends!  I see I have not posted since Golden Week, so get you all up to speed let me start by confirming that I was indeed nearly volcanoed a month ago.  My trip to the big island was wonderful, and I got to see the lava coming out of the volcano the day before the eruption caused the closure of the viewing area!  Overall we stayed one step ahead of the volcano the whole 6 days and didn’t experience so much as a travel delay!

Back in Japan things are normal.  I work more hours this year, including a grueling 11am-10pm Friday, but classes are much more stable.  At the Friday meeting each week I get to hear the other teachers complain about the branches they took over from me, but other than that I have nothing to do with any of my students or coworkers from last year.  Oh well, moving on…

Last weekend I moved into a new apartment!  I had been contemplating it for months and finally pulled the trigger.  I moved just across the street and have the same land lord, but my new place is probably three times the size.  I have a nice big living room to have friends over, a veranda and two Japanese style Tatami rooms that I plan on never using or cleaning.  Let me know if any of you need a place to crash in Ogaki!  I’m also on the 5^th floor so I get a constant cross breeze.  I had my AC cranked up in my old place, but now don’t need it at all!  My rent is about $100 more a month, and I have to buy furniture still, so no loans for any of you this summer!

Besides that weekends have been a bit more fun and social lately.  I went to a strange rock concert in a one room venue in Nagoya.  After we paid and went through the door, we almost went into the wrong show because there two simultaneous concerts in adjacent rooms.  My coworker helped an American band fly in to perform, so I am one of maybe 50 people who have seen the Balinda Butchers live in Japan.

What else?  I found a free one room art gallery inside of a bank near my house.  I ate Hawaiian food for the first time after coming back from Hawaii (the restaurant Gravy Sauce is 20 minutes from my house).  I also spent a Sunday serving ice cream to kids at our annual ice cream party.  This year my students were actually invited which made it more tolerable.  Sadly no one brought red bean paste as a topping this year. 

I also signed up to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on July 1^st.  I’m taking the top level this year so if I pass, I can actually say I speak Japanese.  Woo!  I’ve studied a ton over the last few years, but it always seems like there are a million things I’m still missing.  Oh well, wish me luck!

And hey don’t let me forget, I’m coming home over summer break.  I’ll be in MN from August 9^th to the 20^th.  See you then!

Okay that should do it from my end.  I am off to search for a sofa at the recycling shop.  Keep it real!