So last weekend I went down to Tokyo for the weekend to see my friend Kaori’s wedding ceremony. I was pretty excited to see a Japanese wedding, as well as to see Kaori and Kazumi from the JASGP. I had to rush from work to the train station, but I made it on time and started my long trek to Tokyo.

The journey took a little over 3 hours total, but was quite comfortable. The inside of a shinkansen looks a lot like the inside of an airplane at first, until you sit down and realize you’ve got about an entire extra foot and a half more leg room than in a jet. And the trains are surprisingly quiet (at least when you’re in them — not when they ride past your window at 3 am…). Continue reading →

I’m passing through Nagoya on the shinkansen right now. I had forgotten how big this city was, having been in tiny Takefu, the 2nd largest city in Fukui, for so long. I also had forgotten how fast the shinkansen go! There’s an alarm, and then a blur that last for all but a second as space-time is folded and the train warps past.

Actually, I’m a bit worried that when I get off this train, all my friends and family will have aged 5 years, and I will have aged only 3 hours…

It’s been a fast week, and a busy one. I had a study meeting earlier in the week up in Komatsu, and missed the first train… so ever since then it seems everything happening this week has happened double-time!

Tomorrow, I am going to Tokyo right after work… in fact, I have to run from my work to the train to hopefully make it on time for the last train to Tokyo. Sunday is Kaori’s (from the JASGP) wedding ceremony, and I’m pretty excited. I’ll get to see Kazumi and Kaori again for the first time in a while, and then see a bit of Tokyo. It’s going to be quite an expensive weekend, but it should be very fun nonetheless. I’ll probably buy a new digital camera and take some photos with the hopes that I’ll get to paint something from them in my free time.

In the meantime, I have to do some extra classes tomorrow, so I’ll be going to work early. I’m going to go pack for Tokyo now, and then prepare what I can for tomorrow, and just crash… huuuuu… I’m not going to get much sleep this weekend I fear, and next week and weekend will be busy too. I think when I finally do get some time off I will use it to sleep for 24 hours!

That’s hard to believe… Halloween is over… and I’ve been here for more than 3 months now. Crikey!

The rest of Halloween week was fun. Angel sent me some authentic Halloween decorations from America, so our school was quite festive looking. And my students all loved the monkey suit and the other teachers’ costumes; a couple of them couldn’t look me in the eye during class without laughing. Outside of classes, we had a lot of fun going over to the Heiwado supermarket in our costumes and enjoying the shocked reactions from stoic Japanese people who have no idea what Halloween is. Akiko, Yumi, and I went out to our local bar in our costumes halfway through the week as well, exhausted and in dire need of beer and cheese. As fun as it was, though, it was really exhausting, and I can’t believe it was only a 4 day work week! Today is Culture Day here in Japan, and a very welcome day off for me.

So today on my day off I got to do some extra chores. I needed long sleeve shirts, as it’s getting cold, so I found some (for only 700 yen!) and bought my first truly Japanese clothing. What I mean is that the shirts look girly, and are covered in ridiculously bad English. However, as I am wearing them under my weirdo American t-shirts, it doesn’t matter what’s printed on them. But now I’m looking forward to buying more clothes.

I also needed a haircut, and rather than buzz it myself in the bathroom again (ugh) I went to a hair salon next door. It was my first time ever going to a hair salon (first time spending more than $13 or 20 minutes to get my hair cut too), but fashion is serious business here in Japan, and every one — man and woman — gets their hair styled up specially. I’ve also had the same hairstyle since I was… born, so I couldn’t really change it much. I did however get a straight perm, and I am looking forward to no longer having hair that can be called “beast” or “pit bull fur” or “pot bellied pig bristles.” Today is the first day in my life that I’ve felt wind move my hair. It was quite interesting.

The rest of my day was spent singing with Pi-chan, painting, and touching up my blog to give it a bit more style… I feel quite productive toda, and I’ve still got 2 days of weekend left, yay! So tomorrow, I think I will travel around Takefu a bit and take photos of the Chrysanthemum festival before it’s over, and maybe try some new sushi places. 3 day weekend!

So the other day, Nova collapsed. The whole company… it was the biggest foreigner employer in Japan — there are now 4000 foreigners without work in Japan, and most of them haven’t been paid since September. There’s also something like 6-8000 Japanese staff that are now out of work. That’s a huge number of people to just lose their jobs with no pay!

Nova had been having financial trouble for a while, but they continued to dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole — hiring more and more teachers that they couldn’t pay for, defaulting on apartment leases, taking out too many loans, false advertising, not having teachers available for students, and then refusing to refund students who bought lessons but had no teachers.

To think, I had applied there in the spring, but thanks to advice from former foreign language teachers (and former English language school students from Japan) — all people whom I met through the JASGP — I went with Aeon. The feeling I got during the interview with Aeon was also much better than with Nova, but I’m really happy for all the advice I got back home.