IrishOboe

Before I launch into boring details, I thought I'd mention what I wonderful time I had at orientation.  To find out, skip over the days and take a look at the evenings.

I wish I could say the workshops for the local orientation were more helpful than the ones in Tokyo, but sadly, I got about three helpful bits out of workshops, and the rest of the time I entertained myself by writing down my own teaching ideas, doodling, and interpreting for the nonexistent deaf in the room.  Actually, this last exercise was quite helpful in that it showed me just how much I’d forgotten and just how much I know of ASL.  Of course, I was as discrete as I could be . . .
 

Thursday morning I planned to catch the 8:55 train, but I misjudged how long it would take to walk to the station in high heels and suite skirt.  (BTW, I believe it is Aunt Nancy’s old suite that is serving me very well in my professional engagements here)  I actually made it in time, but the doors closed right in my face and I didn’t know you could open them again since the train sits on the track for another 10 seconds or so.  Oh well, another train came in 30min and we were still 1 ½ hours early to our destination.  I used the time to take pictures of other JETs and get their info into my cell phone.  Yes, I’ve turned to the dark side . . .

We had a brief opening ceremony in the Citizen’s Plaza which was televised, though I don’t know who watched it.  We all had to stand up and bow as our names were read.  It was funny to see the awkwardness of gaijin bowing.  I’m sure we’ll get the hang of it by the end of the year.  I think I bow like a Chinese person because my freshman roommate was from Taiwan and she would bow a lot and I kind of pick it up, strangely enough.

Anyway, after the ceremony we went to the Kosaku restaurant for houtou, a kind of soup that Yamanashi is famous for.  It was very, very good, though as with everything, there was too much of it!  It had noodles and vegetables (pumpkin included) and all kinds of stuff I wish I could describe.  After lunch we took a bus to the hotel, but our rooms weren’t ready yet so we changed into hiking clothes in communal dressing rooms (thankfully split by sex).   We then all bussed down to Minobu where the temple was that Niko took Mark and I to before.  This time I chose to take the path.  It was much easier!  On the bus there I talked with Mike and Kasia more.  Since I’m bad with names I’ll try to give a reminder as to who I’m talking about when I mention someone, so let me know if I’m confusing.  Kasia is the cellist from Eastman (though we didn’t know each other there) and Mike was a group A who’s a chef (his specially is French and Japanese fusion) and kept buying strange Japanese food for us to try (like the dried octopus and squid on a stick).  Anyway, Kasia and I made great plans for music we’d like to do here and I’m totally excited.  I think I may crack open my oboe today! J

The temple wasn’t nearly as nice with so large a crowd, but we did get the tour this time.  On the way back I talked with Jonathan (actually, he’s another Jon!), who was a group B and went to UF as a composition major (piano) and is a CIR (vs. an ALT – don’t worry if you don’t understand that) and speaks great Japanese because he had a Japanese exchange student in his house for four years when he was age 4 to 9.  I can’t say I completely restrained my jealousy.

We had a few minutes to change back to formal attired for another reception.  I can’t say as I enjoy them, but the food spread was very good.  I had escargot for the first time, learned to eat small cooked shrimp with the shell, and some other things I’m forgetting.  I can’t say that I loved the escargot from the start, but I can see it as something I grow to really like.  I did particularly enjoy the aftertaste, which I can’t describe, but it was very good.  As a side note, I wasn’t worried about finding food here, but I wasn’t sure how much I’d like the greater variety of it.  I did not like sushi growing up, and it wasn’t until college that I began to enjoy it.  Helen’s spread at the Maggie sure was delicious and I have been pleasantly surprised by how I’ve not just been able to stomach everything I’ve tried, but by just how much of it I really, really enjoyed a lot.  Hurray for changing taste buds!

The plan for the evening was to . . . *drum roll* see a Japanese art performance? Maybe visit the castle? How about visit an interesting local shopping area?  Nope, it was to go to The Vault, which is one of the two dumb gaijin bars that JETs go to whenever they are in Kofu.  Just why are we in Japan?  Needless to say, I was less than impressed and planned to turn in early since I have not been getting sleep as I’ve mentioned a number of times before.  However, Kasia had the brilliant idea to take a walk around Kofu, so Mike, Kasia, Ashleigh and I took a nice walk.  Ashleigh is Kasia’s neighbor and she also happened to be one of my three roommates for this local orientation.  Most people had single or double American style hotel rooms, but 12 lucky people got Japanese style suites with 4 futons to a room.  We had a front hall for shoes, a toilet and sink, a large tatami mat floor and a little wooden strip along the windowed wall separated by paper screens with a little table, vanity, tea and fridge space and large window shelf area (which was great for holding my suitcase).  The view was a rather plain, but nice Japanese garden and then the city, though we were shrouded by taller bushes and trees.  But on to the evening’s entertainment.  After walking around for a bit and looking for a coffee shop to stop in, someone had the bright idea to have tea in our place.  We stopped in a conbini (convenience store) and bought cookies and such and brought them to the suite, which had a low table and four floor chairs (basically L-shaped wood with a cushion).  We had a lovely evening drinking green tea and eating interesting Japanese sweets (chocolate covered peanuts in the shape of acorns, mochi covered red bean paste, strawberry yogurt covered wafer sticks, chocolate rice cracker puffs, etc.).  It was one of the best conversations I’d been in since I’d arrived in Japan and it was very refreshing.  The only topic in particular that I remember was homeschooling, and believe it or not I didn’t blab on about it because people were open and listening.  That doesn’t mean they agreed with everything, but we had a healthy and respectful conversation.  For good or ill, they were surprised to hear I was a homeschooler.  Why?  I wasn’t “odd.”  I take that to mean I am no more odd than they are, which isn’t saying much.  I like odd people.  They are interesting!  I love to break down the stereo types about homeschoolers whenever I can, but this was a particularly easy going conversation.  I wish I could describe the whole evening more, but you can’t really do that with this kind of delightful conversation.  You’ll just have to take my word for it that I had a great time!

After Kasia and Mike left, Ashleigh and I got ready for bed and as we did I asked if she was a Christian.  I’d been seeking for people, but it seems that JETs are worse than college students in terms of being liberal and anti-Christian.  Don’t read too much into that, I just mean that with all my looking and hint dropping (I like to first advertise my believe to other believers so that I do not scare nonbelievers before they get to know me some), I didn’t get hardly a nibble until that night with Ashleigh.  Hence I had the guts to ask her directly, and I was right, she is Catholic.  I know some people disagree with me, but if a Catholic calls himself a Christian, that I believe him and have no right to tell him, God, or anyone else that he’s not.  We talked for quite a bit about our faith, being here on JET in Japan as Christians, what our walk was like back home and what we hope for here, etc.  I have much work to go as far as knowing my Bible, but I had just read a verse that was so applicable to Ashleigh’s worries that I shared it with her.  We encouraged each other and went to bed very much glad to have found a sister in Christ.  Oh how could I forget?!  Part of this conversation was held in the hotel’s onsen.  Since our room had no shower, we had to use it, and it was quite lovely.  I’d never bathed in the nude with others before, or at least in recent history, but wasn’t nearly as strange as I thought it might be.  We put on the hotel’s kimono-type robes and went into the steaming room with one large hot bath that overflowed in the shower area with three shower units.  We washed all over then soaked in the warm bath.  Ah, it felt so good to be in the warm water, and I have to say, it is nice to bathe without the restrictions of a suit.

The next day (Wednesday, Aug. 10) we had workshops on team teaching all morning, which were not too helpful since I fell once we get to our respective schools we will find how it differs from what we were told and will quickly learn to adapt with or with out this “preparation.”  The seminars after lunch looked more helpful as they dealt with practical topics such as post office, doctors, etc.  I wish they would just put the info on the web so we could access what we needed rather than having us sit through stuff that is often not applicable.  I sound negative, but it was really helpful to have old JETs around to ask questions of and everyone is really friendly and wants to help.  It just didn’t always work.  Like I said, I did come away with some very valuable info (like a Yamanashi map in English and a translation of the train station schedule which is only in Kanji).

We were free for dinner, and having past an organic café where people were playing guitars the night before, we (Kasia, Ashleigh, Mike and I) decided to go there for dinner.  However, the word got out and the group expanded to 10 people.  This would have been fine, but the café was small and we mostly a place to drink special drinks and they were not prepared to make so many dinners.  We ended up ordering 4 dishes between us and we all got a bit more than a taste of them all.  It actually turned out to a lovely evening anyway.  I had an 800 yen bottle of aged grape juice (that’s about $8 US), and it was quite something.  It was not the sweet water grape juice we have in the US.  It was dense, so more like the skin of the grape and not the inside.  It wasn’t fermented, just aged, whatever that means.  It was quite tasty.  I spent that much on a drink because it was a local specialty of Kofu.  Like my Dad I’m a sucker for such things.  When it came time to pay the bill my mathematician skills came into good use.  As you know, my arithmetic is no better than the next man’s, but my estimation skills allowed me to call the person (with the calculator) on her calculations.  I only bring this up to mention another example of the sad state of our education system.  One girl asked how many kilocalories were in a calorie.  I understand the question behind this since the US somehow thinks it’s too hard to but kcal on food products and we wrongly call 1 calorie what is actually 1 kcal.  The part that is sad is that they (for this turned into a discussion that took much assurance on my part to put to rest) did not know the most basic element of the metric system.  1 kiloanything is 1,000 anything.  1 kg=1000g, 1km=1000m, and so on.  I understand maybe not knowing giga (if you’re not into computers) or micro, but kilograms and grams and kilometers and meters are time, and we’re not even talking about converting to feet or pounds or miles!  Okay, the end of my little rant.  No offense meant to anyway.  I’m the first to admit my knowledge of history has equally appalling holes in it, but that’s my own fault since I was in charge of my education, and thus are more guilty than they.

So, moving on.  After dinner most people went on to Karaoke, but Kasia, Mike and I had made better plans since we did not care to spend hours in a small dark room full of smoke, drink and unbelievable loud noise.  It came out in conversation that Mike was a ballroom dance teacher for a year and he had his computer with dance music on it with him.  So, we pushed the futons to the edge of my suit and got rid of the table and chairs and after a phone call to friends we had a group of three couples learning to salsa, mombo, chacha, swing, and even tango.  Mike was a great and patient teacher and you could tell he was really in his element as he helped us along.  I couldn’t compete with Kasia’s elegant long neck in the tango, but it sure was fun.  I didn’t think I’d like the tango, but it was actually a neat dance.  It was neat to see how Mike dealt with the one guy who was quite awkward at first.  It was even cooler to see how it worked.  They guy could really lead after a half-hour or so!

Sadly, the evening came to an end, but not before Mike had convinced Kasia and me to go for a run at 6:30am.  It’s a good thing that Andy had broken me out of my shell because Mike runs 12-14 miles a day and I would have been way to embarrassed before.  After packing I went to bed

The next morning (Thursday, August 11) I got up at 6:20 refreshed and ready to run.  I met Kasia on the way downstairs and she didn’t feel well enough to run, so I met Mike and we went without her.  He was very nice about going at such a slow pace and I was surprised how long I was able to go.  We ran from the hotel to the foot of the mountains and around the track of a little park there.  I told him he could go on and I’d go back to the hotel alone, but wouldn’t.  I think he started breathing harder just to make me feel better . . .  Anyway, I’m so glad I went because it felt so great.  Now that I’ve started I hope to keep up with it.  It’s not to bad in the morning since the nights are cool.

The morning’s seminars were alright, but I was glad to be done.  Mark, Adam and I took the Chuou line back home, and I’ve pretty much been on my computer since.  I’m going to try to start separating experiences and putting them in categories so people can more easily read what is interesting to them and skip the things that are not.  Any suggestions for particular topics are more than welcome!  Some idea I had were: Japanese objects (a description of interesting objects from toilets to roofs to articles of clothing), cultural insights (observations and reflections on cultural differences), and philosophical musings (thoughts triggered by events and experiences in Japan).

More soon!