Who nose what's acceptable in Japan?

14th August 2010

Hello everyone. Well, it’s a Saturday night and I’m sat in with a green tea peel-off face mask on (I pray that it won’t stain my face green. That would certainly give the kids something to talk about!) So whilst it’s drying into a peel-able form I thought I would write and summarise the past week. That is to say my first full week at work.

It’s going to be a bit difficult for you all to work out what point I’m at, which is purely because without the internet I can’t upload these posts as I write them. So if you find yourself getting a bit lost, please refer to the diagram:


Clever isn’t it? I didn’t even realise I had Microsoft paint on this netbook. How handy.

In the time that I wasted making that little doodle my face mask dried, by the way. My face wasn’t stained green, although I did nearly lose half an eyebrow to the peeling process. What a moron.

Anyway! So I’ve been organising various things, such as signing up for my alien registration card, internet, phone etc.. you get the idea. Japanese bureaucracy, aside from the obvious fact that it is all conducted in Japanese, is a lot less frustrating than that of the Italians or the French. That is except for one small thing. Dates. In Japan the date is written year-month-day, which isn’t such an issue as I guess it’s just as logical as writing it day-month-year. But their years are different!

On all official documentation they don’t write 2010, they write 22. Every time a new Emperor takes over they start from the year zero - this is such a pain in the backside when you’re trying to backdate things and especially when you have a deadline to meet! But I guess it’s culturally quirky, one of the whole reasons I set off on this adventure.

The parts of my week that weren’t taken up with trudging around shops and offices have been spent planning lessons and reading books on team teaching. In Japan, when you start a new job (and I am told this is standard) no one talks you through what you’re meant to be doing - they just sit you at your desk and expect you to pick it up from watching other people. It’s quite unsettling really, but I like that I don’t get watched all the time. I like that I’ve had the time and opportunity to read through the materials that are available, even if it has led me to realise that I am way in over my head here (seriously - how am I going to teach English to these kids? How?)

On the Monday I was summoned into the principal’s office and given an insight into what was appropriate attire for a public servant. Earrings - ok. Make up - ok. Nose piercing - no way José. So here is a picture of my beloved nose piercing as I beheld it one last time:



I took it out that same night (reluctantly) and within an hour it was but a mere dimple. Of course, I knew there was a possibility of this happening, but I was still really upset about it. Still. Them’s the rules.

So aside from these little discrepancies, things are going alright for the moment. The Hyogo Jets have been summoned to prefectural orientation next week so I’ll have to go away to Yashiro institute for a few days. According to previous JETs it is much like a prison… I remain optimistic. As long as it has Western toilets, I will handle it. I think.

Funny things I have seen so far..

A few random photos I have knocking about from the first week in Japan.. The first is a poster on the Tokyo underground, advertising (I think) the latest Cats and Dogs movie. The dog, as you can see, is an aeroplane. On the wing, possibly a bit too dark to make out, a pigeon is perched as the two are pursued by a cat sporting a jet pack:


Also of interest, especially to a particular friend back home, is a demonstration of how the Japanese are keen followers of a certain British band:


I don’t know what exactly inspired me to take that photo.. I guess it was just seeing familiar popular faces in such an unfamiliar environment. It’s a bit trippy. Speaking of trippy…


…now THAT is weird, right??

Finally, as a treat for all you frenchies out there, one hilarious example of how using French to appear chic can go drastically wrong:


Tee hee.

Food and drink 1

I’m hoping to do a few of these blogs because I think they might be interesting for those of you back home. If nothing else there should be some cool pictures. So, drinks and snacks that I have found in Japan!

First up, the ‘lemon water’ I discovered in Japan at Tokyo train station, awaiting the shinkansen. On an incredibly humid day I was attracted to this drink on the top row of one of the many vending machines on the platform. ‘Physical drink’ was the English description on the bottle. Perfect! A refreshing sports drink for a hot day spent lugging a heavy bag on and off trains. In went my 150 yen and out popped the bottle.


Lemon water my foot. It tasted like ‘resolve’, the hangover cure I resort to at my lowest of morning-after ebbs. Bleugh. It was pretty thick and didn’t taste anything like the lemon cordial I had imagined. Major letdown.

Next, the apple juice. I think it was apple juice anyway, it had pictures of apples on it:


The flavour was so full of apples, it was incredible. But it also tasted like a lot of added sugar so it didn’t taste particularly healthy. On the day in question this wasn’t an issue; I needed the sugar!

Ah, these are the blueberry ‘sours’ that I bought on my way home from my second day at school:


I didn’t want them, or need them, but I thought buying random sweets was a good way of meeting the shopkeeper. He was a friendly old guy, but we couldn’t understand each other. Still, my Japanese will improve and I hope to have a conversation with him by the end of the year! The sweets were quite nice! But not sour. Hmm…

Finally my can of Fanta Grape. My little brother tells me this doesn’t really exist as a standalone flavour in the UK; apparently the grape flavour gets mixed with other berries.


Anyway, this tasted… like anything but grapes, actually. How bizarre.

Shinkansen

8th August 2010

Ah, what is more symbolic of Japan than the bullet train? Apart from cherry blossom.. and Sake.. and sushi.. Well it’s still up there in the top ten of ‘things that represent Japan’ anyway. My first trip by shinkansen took place on the way to my placement town from the Tokyo orientation. As I didn’t book the trip myself (it was done by the JET crew) I don’t have any tickets to show for it.. although in Japan the ticket machines tend to eat your ticket at the end of the journey, so you can’t keep them as souvenirs anyway. Sad face. This also means that I don’t know how much the journey actually cost, but some pre-departure research suggested it was in the region of about £100. Ouchy.
I would have paid it, however. In fact, I don’t expect that was my first and only trip by bullet train, I do intend to return to Tokyo at some point this year to visit my friend Mai. We met when she did an exchange year at my University when I was in first year and we lived together for a while. This is a very pleasant upside of this placement, seeing people I never thought I would see again!

I digress. At the request of someone back home, I took the opportunity to take a few photos. So here they are! Firstly, an arty attempt (I stress ‘attempt’) at a diagonal shot of two trains side by side:


Here is a more serious attempt:



With an added shot of the carriage for good measure:


So you get the idea really. Very aesthetically pleasing, sparkling clean, plenty of leg room, and discreetly speedy! I say discreetly as it never really seemed to be going that fast, though the distance covered in a couple of hours suggested that it clearly was. For those of you who are interested, here is a video clip of the scenery, just for a minute or so. Nothing much happens in the clip, I just thought it might be nice to capture the landscape as the train rushed by:



As one final point to add, the Japanese sell lunchboxes at train stations, often including the local delicacy of the area. At 1,000 yen I can’t help but feel the lunchboxes at Tokyo were slightly overpriced (and they do seem to be cheaper in small towns). I had the surprising good fortune to find a box containing only vegetables and rice! It was even easy to spot amongst the meat alternatives, as you can see:


All in all, a great experience! Why can’t we have such great trains??

Arrival in Tokyo

1st August 2010 Keio Plaza Hotel
Local time: 19.47
UK time: 11.47
Status: Knackered.

Unfortunately even though I’m writing this blog whilst it’s relevant, it may be a while before I can track down an internet connection to upload it, so there may be a surge of posts from time to time. I did spot a starbucks earlier with a wi-fi connection so if I can get time to go there during the orientation then I will do.. But it may be hard :(

This won’t be a long post anyway as I will probably crash out in bed soon. I got on the plane at 19.15 UK time on Saturday and arrived in Japan somewhere around 14.45 local time.. I still can’t get my head around the time difference but I suspect I have been robbed of an entire night of my life. The injustice! I don’t expect to recover it on the return home next year either, the world doesn’t work that way. Ah, the ramblings of the sleep deprived.

I have now truly, truly experienced jet-lag. It feels remarkably like the day I handed in my dissertation.

At Narita airport, Tokyo, I experienced the infamous Japanese toilets for the first time ever. There was a control panel next to the bowl with various pictures of things (bidets, bums, etc) and symbols in Kanji with English ‘translations’. Whilst searching for the flush I found a button labelled ‘flushing sound’. Ah! Thought I. Surely a mistranslation, probably just a warning that the flush is loud. So I pressed it, only to hear a recorded flushing sound (no actual flushing) and buttons flashed, encouraging me to increase and decrease volume. As it turns out, the Japanese like to muffle the sounds of their bowel movements with various different noises, from the less obvious (toilet flush) to the more obvious (bird tweets, so my room mate told me this evening.) Consider this your first strange fact about Japan from my voyage of discovery!

To compliment this blog, see below for a photo of the toilet in our hotel room. Considerably less high tech, but the drawings on the panel are most enjoyable. Note also the possibility of electronically controlling the water pressure of the bidet or ‘spray’ (I have not managed to work out the difference, but I’m sure as heck not trying!)

Actually here are some more photos of Japan so far. My in-flight vegetarian meal:


And the plush bathroom of the hotel:



That’s all for now folks. More updates soon! First day of training tomorrow!

Graduation Ball

The past few days have been pretty hectic with so many things going on so I’ve hardly had time to think about my blog, but as promised I just thought I’d write a little note on the Graduation Ball, just to give a lasting idea of the end of term in final year at University.

In past years our University has always organised an event called the Final Fling - aimed principally at final years but inevitably people from other years went as tickets went on sale to everybody after a period of time. It was a slightly strange event.. Not, actually it was downright bizarre. An amalgamation of two seemingly different events, it consisted of a slap up meal in a giant tent in the middle of a giant park, followed by music and a fairground, with firework displays later on in the evening. There were kebab vans and portaloos, with dodgems, a rhythm rider and other carny attractions. Yet people were dressed up to the nines, with guys in rented tuxedoes and girls in cocktail dresses. The meal part of the evening was undoubtedly classy, fitting for a finalist event, but the addition of a fairground in a field was, if nothing else, confusing. I went in my second year as there were good friends of mine graduation the following summer (the year of my Erasmus experience in France) and I wanted to have one last good time with them before going home. Most of them bought dinner tickets (I don’t remember the price of these but I believe it was in the region of about £60) whereas I settled for an after-dinner ticket for about £35 if my (terrible) memory serves me well. I was glad to have gone, but only because I was in the company of amazing people that I was sad to be leaving, but the event itself was.. well, to put it bluntly, a bit rubbish. I spent most of it wandering around a cold field in high heeled shoes, freezing cold and looking for a first aider to give me a paracetamol for a headache which only really developed once I got there (probably because of the cold; it was a very chilly summer evening).

Anyway, I didn’t intend to spend this post whingeing and moaning about the previous events, I merely wanted to highlight that I understood the Student Union’s stance this year when it decided to break down the Final Fling into a Graduation Ball and a Summer Party. It received a fair amount of opposition at first, mostly due to the overall increase in cost (£65 for the Ball, £35 for the Party), but despite being one of the original nay-sayers I’m glad that they did, and even more glad that Emily talked me into going to both events. To have a Ball dedicated to final year students felt like quite a novelty, although unfortunately a huge shortage of tickets meant loads of people were left disappointed. So here’s the low-down of the night.

The afternoon of the Ball was arguably a huge part of the fun. Lucinda came to my flat around lunch time to get ready, and we had lunch and chilled out listening to music, getting ready very slowly compared to any other night out. Hair was conditiond, nails were painted, skin was moisturised etc etc and the whole while we caught up with each other’s lives post-exams.

The ‘coaches’ were due to leave campus from outside the library at about 5pm so our plans were to receive our respective fellas at my flat, then meet Emily and co. for champagne / cava and photos before gliding to our carriages. Once the photos were taken and the drinks were downed, we caught the luxury coach (photo below) to the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. Cool kids, of course, always sit at the back. So we did.

A red carpet awaited our arrival and we must have spent at least another quarter of an hour taking photos before going in. I was fairly surprised to see it was actually quite a glamorous set-up - girls wondered around in ball gowns underneath chandeliers, searching for the tables they had been assigned, whilst the guys generally pondered ‘so where are the motorcycles?’ A man with mutton chops and a suspicious moustache danced away to 20’s music in a corner. In fact, until we got into the halls and discovered the ‘bar’ (serving beer and cider, with bottles of wine at extortionate prices), the place seemed almost quite decadent.

As a vegetarian I was not hoping for much when it came to the meal - vegetarian options are always pretty poor when substituting roast meals - and I was half expecting a blob of goat’s cheese on pastry (for the record, I LOATHE goat‘s cheese.) But I was surprised! All of the dishes were not only edible, but really tasty! Apart from the dessert. It might look vaguely impressive:

but it was just weird.
We all agreed that the meal was pretty good, but the provision of a glass of wine for each person would really have made it worth the price of the ticket.

After dinner the entertainment was extremely well thought out - surprisingly enough for our dear student union. There was a ‘speakeasy’ bar which served only spirits, a main bar, a photo shoot area, a dance floor with Charleston dancers giving lessons and, later on in the evening, a full on swing band… it was an amazing night! In true student union style, however, at midnight when the band went home the classic songs from Top B were played for the remaining three hours. Mr Brightside, of course, as well as cheesy classics from the 90’s.. which wasn’t a bad thing (bad dancing is acceptable when confronted by bad music).. But when the DJ began playing ‘I’ve had the time of my life’, most of us went into cheese overload and decided it was time to call it a night.

So there we have it! A strange event at times, but definitely worth going to. Just a shame not everyone could go / get tickets, as there are definitely some holes in my pictures.

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!)