Watashi wa 'graduand' desu..

Well it's been over a month since I last posted, which is not very disciplined of me. I believe it is possible to post too often on blogs and I try to avoid this where I can, but obviously there needs to be a balance! So apologies to all, hopefully I will be writing a bit more regularly now the craziness of exams and the end of term has subsided.

It's been a hell of an end to term.. most of it has gone by in a blur. I'll write a couple of posts after this one to go more into detail on certain events so I'll try my best to give a run down in this one. Where to start? Well, in terms of JET-related stuff, I finally received an email from Hyogo prefecture to tell me where I would be placed - Nishinomiya City! I know nothing about the place, obviously, so I have been trying to pick up snippets of information from the likes of Wikipedia and Google, as well as facebook groups and so forth. At first glance the email seems to imply that I will only be based at one big school, but I know from experience never to make assumptions founded on impressions. In any case I'm quite pleased with this placement! The city is in the South of the prefecture, placed smack bang between two very large cities, is not far from the coast and is a perfect location from which to travel! So now I really need to get my backside into gear. Today my flight information came through and it gave the whole thing an air of finality that I expected to get from the two day orientation in London.

Ah yes, the two day orientation in London. Viv and I travelled down in her car the night before, and despite a slight accidental detour into Central London we reached our destination, the Ibis Hotel, in good time. As a little girl I hated travelling anywhere by car and have bad memories involving ten-hour trips to Cornwall with my family which inevitably ended up with me vomiting service station snacks into a plastic bag as my Dad declared that the scenic route (aka mountainous roads overlooking the sea) were a lot more fun. Now I'm a grown-up, however, I do enjoy the occasional road trip in good company. And this one was a lot of fun.

Given that orientation began at Brunel University at 9am on the 1st July, Viv and I had decided to stay at the Ibis the night before so as to arrive bright eyed and bushy tailed at registration the following morning. The best laid plans of mice and men and all that.. after an incident involving a broken cistern, a caretaker covered in toilet water (I maintain that I had warned him of the perils but far be it from me to say I told you so in a blog where he cannot protest otherwise) we ended up switching rooms, whereby we excitedly and nervously filled out and compared paperwork until late. Then, when we eventually switched off the lights, neither of us could sleep for hours because of the stifling heat. Typical!

Having risen but admittedly not shining, we piled back into the car in our suits with our visa applications and handbooks tucked neatly into our bags and set off in anxious trepidation towards Brunel University, praying we wouldn't end up back outside Harrod's again. Thanks to Viv's foresight and the grace of google maps though we were early for registration and soon found ourselves checking into the University accommodation to leave our things, ready for a long, long day ahead of us. Presentations and Japanese lessons took us up to 7pm, by which point our heads were ready to burst with all the information and the new fears instilled by the FCO and, to some extent, the previous JETs. Most of the attendees flocked to the pub on campus for dinner but we headed into Uxbridge to find a Wetherspoons, just to give us a little respite from the overwhelming atmosphere that I found was starting to make me question what I was even doing contemplating a teaching position in Japan.

The following day was much more reassuring. There was something about the intensive Japanese lessons that made the impending change a little less intimidating, and the additional presentation we saw on Life in Japan was light hearted but frank, making it all seem more like an adventure again. Feeling enthusiastic one minute and reluctant the next is all part and parcel of the process of going abroad for a long period of time, and I know this well. Sometimes it is hard to keep perspective but I know this is the opportunity of a lifetime and once I'm actually in Japan the nerves will start to subside. I just need reminding every once in a while!

Perhaps what makes it harder is that Japan doesn't just signify the start of a new chapter, it also closes an old one, which I haven't really come to terms with yet. Attending conferences whilst wearing a suit, receiving free breakfast and coffee upon presenting my name badge and having people refer to me as 'Ms' only made my heart ache all the more for university and the fun times had after exams. I only really left university about a week ago and I already miss my friends, coursemates and flatmates desperately. Life goes on and new adventures start but I think I left a little piece of me on campus. So with that little element of melancholy declared I promise to make my next posts sound a bit more chipper, even the retrospective ones to follow which will detail the Graduation Ball and the Summer Party and so on!

And to close this post, a sentence I learned in Japanese which should adequately represent my intentions for the year ahead:

Nihon ni mada heta desu, ga gambarimasu! (Which, if I learned it correctly, should read "My Japanese is poor, but I will try my best!" If I got it wrong.. well then I guess it probably sums things up perfectly!)

Off I Hyogo to Japan

My first written exam is tomorrow, so naturally I’m doing anything but revision right now. Not really, I spent a good solid afternoon studying yesterday with my new-found (and highly effective) study buddy, so taking half an hour out to write this entry is perfectly justified.

I got a letter yesterday at my home address from JET – so I can finally confirm to you all that as of the start of August I will be living and working in the Hyogo prefecture of Japan!!

Map courtesy of wikipedia.org

The prefecture, as you can see from the map, covers a little slice of the main island of Honshu. There are a few tiny islands just South of the main island so I guess I could potentially be on one of those too. The capital city of the region is Kobe, which was worryingly the location of the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. I won’t lie and say this doesn’t worry me a little.. but I guess you have to put these things into perspective. The fact that 5500 people died meant that Japan sprang into action to make buildings, bridges and other structures more secure so if an earthquake did occur again the people will be better protected.

So now time for some (hopefully reliable) Wiki facts:

“Hyōgo has coastlines on two seas: to the north, the Sea of Japan, to the south, the Inland Sea. The northern portion is sparsely populated, except for the city of Toyooka, and the central highlands are only populated by tiny villages. Most of Hyōgo's population lives on the southern coast, which is part of the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe metropolitan area. Awaji Island is an island in the Inland Sea, lying between Honshū and Shikoku.

Summertime weather throughout Hyōgo is hot and humid. As for winter conditions in Hyōgo, the north of Hyōgo tends to receive abundant snow, whilst the south receives only the occasional flurry.”

As soon as I get more info about where I’ll be, I’ll post it here for you all to see. It’s all becoming a bit real now, and this is the pre-departure moment where I start to wonder if I really know what I’m doing or if I really want to go. But I know from past experience that this is all part and parcel of the adventure. It was the same for Italy and France, although obviously this time I won’t be able to pop home for a week during holidays. It’s a kind of bittersweet excitement; I’m looking forward to all the new things I’ll be doing and learning and the people I’ll be meeting, but it makes me ache to think of everyone and everything I’ll be leaving behind. I have to remind myself that it is only for a year, so just an extended holiday really (a working holiday, obviously.) It will all be fine! My mantra is, and has been for a long time, that everything always works out in the end!

A Hairy Situation

My flatmate Aimée got her hair cut a few days ago, but she wasn’t happy with the result. The hairdresser got a bit scissor happy, it would seem, and just kept chopping and chopping until it was much shorter than she wanted it. She then proceeded to straighten out any trace of a kink in my flatmate’s normally very wavy hair.

To be honest, I liked the result. It was very different but it was chic and sleek and it suited her face. But us girls, we can be a bit funny about our hair. If it isn’t cut the way we want it then we can be left feeling bereft, mourning the loss of what actually takes months, or even years, to grow. If you ask a hairdresser for a style and they give you something different, especially when it involves a short style that can’t be undone, then you feel violated. Why though? It does all grow back in the end, right? So it shouldn’t really be a big deal.

Except it is. In some cultures women are forced to cover their hair in public because it is a symbol of their sexuality, and I can kind of see why this might be. Every once in a while there will be a documentary on television which delves into the depths of body language, analysing the intricacies of certain behaviour. You will notice that they never fail to mention that a woman, when interested in a man, will exhibit the subtle but significant ‘hair flick.’ A toss of the hair over the shoulder as she engages in conversation with the guy in question is a sure sign that she is open to flirtation – and possibly more. Long (looked after) hair is infinitely feminine, but shorter cuts also mark out a sassy, confident personality that are often equally, if not more, attractive to the opposite sex.

Most of us put a lot of effort into our hair. Even those of us that can’t afford to indulge in expensive salon cuts and endless styling products still ensure that it is clean and healthy looking. The majority of us probably own one failsafe conditioner that makes this possible. With the right cut it can frame our faces and accentuate our best features, as well as being an extension of our personality. When it’s gone it takes too long to grow back, and makes the bearer feel exposed and vulnerable, which is why when a hairdresser goes too far and cuts more than she should, it feels like ‘scalp rape.’ Last year my French flatmate (the rather unfriendly one) went to get her already short style trimmed – when she returned her hair had been all but shaved off as the stylist had tried to artistically etch an angular frame around her face. That was the first time I saw this girl cry. Actually, she sobbed as she gazed despairingly into the mirror for hours, trying to imagine how she could undo the horror of the scalp rape she had just undergone. It took a couple of months before it was at a decent length for her to do something with it.

Not many people know this, but if you cut somebody’s hair without their consent (whilst they are sleeping, for example) you can be charged with assault. This goes some way to testifying to the psychological distress a person can experience on losing their hair.

Aimée, luckily, has shorter hair now but it is just as lovely. Once she washed it and her curls came back it was clear, even to her I believe, that it still looked pretty much the same. It’s still long enough to tie up and the style still suits her face. Just beware girls – when you ask the hairdresser for a trim and they get that glint of excitement in their eye, it might be worth going somewhere else. The heartache of waiting for an unwanted hairstyle to grow out can be unbearable. Let’s hope I manage to make myself understood when I eventually go to get mine cut in Japan next year…

Food for thought

So, unusually for me, I managed to find the motivation to get out of bed before 9am this morning and trek off to Tesco to do a decent shop. Back in the day when I was 18 years old, fresh(er) faced and slightly more excitable, the idea of going on a food shop by myself simply filled me with glee. I remember first setting foot in Esselunga in Pavia, Italy, about a week after I had left England, and the wide eyed glory with which I surveyed the many aisles.

Food. Lots of it. And I could buy whatever I wanted.

Goodbye garden peas. Goodbye ready meals and frozen chips. Goodbye all meals over which I had no control. Hello experimentation! The supermarket suddenly became an adventure. I arrived every week with my rucksack and my spare bags and grabbed a trolley, painstakingly inspecting every aisle for new things to try and contemplating the delicious culinary creations I was going to make. Those were the days.

Obviously, the novelty soon wore off when I came to a number of realisations about my own organisational incompetence. First of all, I had no idea how much I was supposed to spend, but it always felt like I had spent so much but had very little to show for it. Coming home loaded with bags full of herbs, balls of mozzarella, tins of sauce, exotic fruit that still needed to ripen, and the thought dawning on me that I was hungry but had nothing to eat – why hadn’t I thought of snacks?? The next week I would stock up on snacks, but feel guilty for it and not have enough ingredients to ‘discover’ (as I was determined I would) a brand new recipe which would take the culinary world by storm. Inevitably I began to make lists but, as is my nature, I never stuck to them.

My grandad posted me a book which became invaluable to me. ‘The student vegetarian cookbook’ it was called. There are many on the market these days, of course, but this was one of the first to be published and was so precious to me in those days of relative poverty. Much to the amusement of my Italian flatmates, I began to recreate recipes from my childhood, starting with eggy bread. We started swapping recipes between us and when I eventually left Italy I had learnt to cook with an Italian accent, chucking in a filo d’olio here and there, adding tomatoes where necessary, and never missing a handful of fresh basil leaves. Food was so exciting back then, I wonder what happened along the way?

Nowadays I have lost my passion for cooking somewhat, and rarely make big meals unless I have friends over for the evening. Even then, I always stick to the failsafe recipes such as risotto ai funghi, toad in the hole (with vegetarian sausages, of course), vegetable lasagne and the like. In Pavia I was seeing someone for a short time, and one evening he turned up to see me, fairly unexpectedly, and I realised to my horror that he hadn’t eaten. I could have suggested we go out for a pizza somewhere, but it seemed a bit cheeky. In a rare display of calm on my part, I told him that if he was hungry I could make a meal for the two of us, and no, it wasn’t too much trouble and I’d be happy to do it.

My brain went into overdrive – aargh!! What was I supposed to do??

I shoved him in front of the television and shut myself in the kitchen, putting a pan of water on the stove to boil in order to give me time to think. I thought about jumping off the balcony and leaving him with the number of a home delivery pizza service, but alas we were on the second floor and I did not think I would survive the escape. So I boiled some rice. Then I mixed some eggs with some milk, salt and pepper, adding the mixture to the now cooked rice. I rifled through the cupboard – why couldn’t I find anything even remotely appetizing? And why had I bought a tin of asparagus heads – did people even eat those things?! Aha! A tin of tuna and a tin of sweetcorn. In they went. Before long I was frying the mixture with some olive oil, and my guest wondered back into the kitchen to see what point I was at.

Then, after we sat down at the table with my ‘creation’, he wolfed down every last bite and asked for the recipe. I was left speechless, still in shock from the socially impossible stressful situation of making something from random things in the cupboard. A personal victory, I conceded.

Now, a disgruntled and unmotivated final-year university student, food shopping has become a chore. In fact the only thing that really excites me in a supermarket these days is when I discover Haagen Dazs is half-price, or that there is a buy-one-get-one-free offer on teabags. Despite my adventurous spirit in terms of travelling and exploring, I’ve become a bit of a fraud in the kitchen. I guess this morning’s trip to Tesco really did give me food for thought.

Finalmente uscita dalla selva oscura

Here I am again after yet another long break from updating my blog. I did have the very best of intentions when I started this, but I find it hard to justify updating it when other things are happening. Also, as there is no single thing that I’m writing about this evening, this entry is probably going to turn into a miscellany of small events. My apologies.

I expect you’re all sick of hearing about my dissertation. Well, I’m sick of talking about it. However it is now completely finished with 80 footnotes, a bibliography, a contents page and various headings and formats. Roughly 9000 words of textual analysis that won’t interest anyone apart from the markers and myself. It feels a bit self-indulgent really, which is terrible because had I known I was going to be self indulgent in 9000 words then maybe I would have written about something more interesting to me.

Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. For all the stress and heartache that has gone into my dissertation this year, I have learnt such a lot from it and I am sorry that I no longer need to study Dante anymore. The fact is, it has taught me a lot about myself as a Christian and that is something I never talk to anyone about. Unless you are part of the Christian Union and mixing with zealous students, telling people around you that you’re a Christian can lead to awkward silences and embarrassed glances, so I never really talk about my faith to anyone. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have it though, and although the Divine Comedy is essentially a piece of fiction, it puts forward interesting theories on questions a Christian would ask themselves in a moment of doubt.

For those of you thinking oh no, she’s another evangelist trying to convert us, don’t worry. I still believe faith is a private thing and this blog isn’t going to turn into an energetic diary of divine proclamations, it’s just something I have been musing on recently and thought I would write it down before I forget it.

So, having finished the longest essay of my life and formatted the margins and double spaces, I had my second exam on Friday. Italian Oral. It didn’t go brilliantly, I’ll be honest, but I do feel relieved to have got it out the way. Italian is my stronger language, and Erasmus students and Italian friends alike often compliment me on my Northern Italian accent, but I was so sleep deprived and jittery on the day that I fluffed my verb conjugations, made the wrong points, and generally did not do very well. Non importa. I’ll just have to try harder in the written exams I suppose.

The weekend didn’t bring too much respite unfortunately. Exhausted from balancing writing, the exam, watching the election results (at least for as long as I resisted) and trying to keep up with the outside world and friends on campus, I was faced with working at the Open Day at the University on Saturday. Armed with the world’s bulkiest, most absurd mp3 recorder, I had to record welcome meetings to make podcasts for the website. I won’t bore you all with details of how nothing worked, how it tipped it down with rain, and how deeply offended I was by the attitude of an arrogant biology lecturer who didn’t know he was to be recorded.. so I’ll just mention the highlight of the morning when I bought a bottle of lemonade and opened the top to find the following message:

The average person spends two weeks of their lives kissing.

I’ll resist the temptation to revert to my grammar militant ways and state that the ‘lives’ should in fact be ‘life’, and ponder the reality of the statement. Two weeks. When I reflect on it, I guess it is a long time to be kissing consecutively with no breaks for eating or sleeping – hopefully it doesn’t make me a bad person to have initially reacted with ‘two weeks? That doesn’t sound a lot!’

And yet, it’s certainly a lot less than the amount of time I wasted on facebook in my first year alone. Now that makes me feel like I have wasted a lot of time whilst at uni.