Brian’s Japan Adventure

March 29th, 2008

This and That

First, I want to let you know that I found about 4 dozen photos in my camera from my final days in Japan.  I have uploaded them all to the gallery.  If you ever wanted to see Y-San, Yakiniku, Japanese versions of Italian Food, and my idea of paradise, check them out right away.

So what have I been up to this week?  Nothing dramatic.  Preparations for my next trip are mostly done, at least for this week. I’ve been listing some stuff on eBay every day.  I’m mostly listing old stuff that isn’t particularly valuable this week.  I’m just not really of a mindset to liquidate the good stuff at this time of year. Between springtime and tax time, I’m thinking I will wait as long as possible to get rid of the best stuff.

The weather has been alternating between cold and rainy to cold and sunny.  The cold part isn’t going away.  Florida sounds better every day.

Overall, not much to say. I’ll get back into this as the preparations for my next adventure begin.

March 13th, 2008

Sayonara Nihon

Hai.  Watashi-wa kyo America-ni ikimasu. Yup. Today, I go to America. I’ve been here Six and a half months, 28 weeks or 229 days. I’ve learned quite a bit of spoken and written Japanese, although not nearly enough.  I know the ins and outs of chopsticks and Japanese variety shows. I understand recycling piles and days. I actually like riding the bicycle and trains to work.  I still haven’t totally mastered walking up the mountains, but I never really had to do it every day. I can order my obentos in completely understandable Japanese and my McDonalds in broken English. I can stand in front of a classroom and babble on about something for an hour without worrying about it ahead of time.  I can do laundry (at one temperature only) and still keep things basically white. I can do the Internet from half a dozen places around town, but they’re all still inconvenient when in a hurry. I can ride a train or a bus pretty much anywhere and find my way back. I even lived with a messy drinker for six months and didn’t kill him even once.

So I have learned to do a few things while here. There have certainly been times when I’d have been on the first plane out of here if the option had been available, but overall, it’s been great.  I learned a lot and taught some people some things too. There’s an old man running around with a beard and a woman who wants to teach Japanese to foreigners.  There may even be slightly better English spoken here, at least by a few. Without a doubt, there are a bunch of little kids who know a lot more than the word “Banana!”

There are a lot of things I’ll miss, and a few that I wont.  I won’t miss tiny little people skittering away from me in fear of the giant gaijin. Seafood everywhere.  Lack of convenient Internet. Hm. That’s not really so much is it?  I worked around the lack of  Internet. Food has been an issue here since day one, but I knew it would be before I came. I don’t like seafood, and here I am on a giant island that has traditionally lived primarily on seafood. There were no surprises concerning the food. I guess part of my purpose here was to be seen in public not eating little Japanese people, so they learn to be more accepting and less fearful of foreigners. Whether they like it or not, Japan is becoming more internationalized, and they’re going to be getting the foreigners. They know this in the big cities, but unfortunately, I was often not in the big cities.

Would I come back? Sure, if the offer sounds good. It would have to be reasonably soon or else I’ll forget all the Japanese I have learned.  Will I come back to do a Phys-Ed job in Fukuyama?  I really doubt it.  I like the school and the people, but I just can’t get excited over teaching kids sports.  Yes, yes, I realize I’m teaching them English while they do sports, it just doesn’t feel like something I’ll ever really like doing.  Now if the same school called me with a classroom teaching position, I’d be all over that idea!

The 40-Hour Thursday Begins

The phone rang at 7:00, and it was Mom wanting to know if I had anything for her to check on or do before I arrived. She told me the Dollar to Yen exchange rate is 108 yen per dollar at the local Dayton bank that handles currency exchange. I don’t know what it is at the airport yet, but I’ll go with whoever is offering the most. Granted, It could change by the time I get to Dayton, but I’ll have to take that chance if the number at the airport is low.  It was 117 yen to the dollar when I arrived, so I guess that means the Japanese economy has gotten worse relative to the US economy. Or maybe that’s exactly backwards; this was confusing six months ago, and it still is.

My Frugality Hurts!

I then took the trash out. I would have taken it out last night, but the clothes I wore yesterday were disposables that I had no plans on packing.  It just kills me to throw out a perfectly good pair of pants, but they were heavy and I never much liked them anyway. Here’s what I remember tossing:

•    1 pair of black pants
•    1 plaid shirt. I don’t even know why or how I ended up owning a plaid shirt.
•    2 pairs of smelly heavily worn sneakers. They should have been tossed months ago, but my only replacement was the leather dress shoes I brought.
•    About a half bag of brand new socks.  I didn’t find those new socks in time to wear them all even once. They just took up too much room in the suitcase.
•    3 pairs of slippers. I do have one pair of new ones that I’m taking home.
•    1 Heavy jacket.  This was a $300 Varsity jacket given to me by someone I used to do web design work for.  We had a bit of a falling out, so I won’t wear it in public in the States since it has the name of his company on it. It would have filled half a suitcase anyway.

Still, with the exception of the shoes and slippers, all of this stuff was essentially still good.  At home I’d have given it to the Goodwill or something, but here?  It went in the trash. Some foreigner would probably be thrilled to get that stuff, but I don’t know how it could be done.

There’s also a lot of stuff I am leaving behind for the next person here at the apartment. All the fiction books that I brought, bought, or was gifted, as well as all my giant comic books are staying. I would have liked to have brought one or two of them home for the kids, but as I said, they’re the size of a phone book (they probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for the kids anyway).  I’m adding to the “teacher book library” by leaving behind a few teaching items. The four sets of flashcards Mom sent, as well as the Reader Rabbit books sent by Ptuny are staying here. So are the various “craft supplies” such as pipe cleaners and colored cotton balls; I never did anything with those. Of course, there are the two famous paper Christmas trees and a 500-piece Thomas Kinkaide jigsaw puzzle. I probably would have attempted the puzzle after Marc left, but it was buried under other stuff and I only just rediscovered it.

Leaving all this stuff behind and throwing out all the clothes is just killing me. There’s no alternative, the stuff is not worth the cost of shipping it back home. Still, I am notoriously cheap, and throwing out perfectly good clothes just bugs me. No, I was specifically instructed not to leave clothes in the apartment. The person following me is a girl anyway, so the clothes wouldn’t have done her any good anyhow.

It’s now 8:10am and I just wrote all the preceding stuff right after getting up.  The iPod charged all night, and I think it should be OK as long as nothing goofy happens with it again.  I’ll also take my Palm Pilot on the flight, but the battery s only good for about four hours when playing audio on it. It’s not really meant to be an MP3 player. I can get several additional hours out of it by reading ebooks instead. I’ll also have the Nintendo DS in my carry-on bag, but I don’t do much with that. Essentially, my carry-on bag is all electronics and toys. I’ll also take along “Freakonomics,” some kind of “secret economic conspiracy” thing that Marc said was a good read.

And that is al I have to say about packing. The apartment is clean, the big suitcases are ready to go.  All I have to do is shove stuff into my backpack and walk out the door. Oh wait, it’s only 8:15 now. It’s gonna be a long morning.

The above was written before the plane trip.  The rest comes afterwards.

7500 Miles To Go

OK, So I am back and I survived.  Y-San piced me up at 12:30 and took me straight to the Okayama Station, where I had no problem buying my ticket exactly as Hyperdia suggested.  As I waiting on the platform for the Shinkansen to arrive, an old American guy walked up and introduced himself.  He works for some pharmaceutical company that does business all over the world, and he has been coming and going from Okayama for 20 years. I told him this was my first time getting to the airport, and he gladly volunteered to show me the ropes. He stuck with me all the way to San Francisco, and was a huge help speeding me trogh the trains and Kansai airport. I could have done it on my own, but he definitely made it go faster.  There was a two hours wait at Kansai, and he used his “Red Carpet Club” membership to get me into the private club there.  We had snacks and drinks and waited there very comfortably until it was time to board the plane.

He explained how currency exchange works, so I took care of it right there on the Japanese side of the ocean. I got about a 4% better rate than the bank in Dayton offered the day before, so that was a couple of hundred free dollars for doing my research ahead of time.

The trip was long, but essentially uneventful. The only time I started getting stressed out was in San Francisco. I had a two-hour layover, but I had to go through both Customs and Immigration.  This was largely a smooth process, but it took almost an hour before they sent up the checked baggage from the flight. I had to pick up my checked bags, walk them through customs, just in case they needed to be searched, and then re-check the bags for the next leg of the trip.  By the time I got through security and onto the plane, I only had 5 more minutes till they shut the door, so that was much closer than I would have preferred.

The third leg of the trip was on a smaller 50-passenger plane and we were supposed to be flying through rain, so that had me a bit worried.  I don’t know if we flew around the rain or over it, but we avoided the rain somehow and actually ended up landing in Dayton 15 minutes early. Since I had already done immigration and customs, it was just a matter of picking up the checked luggage and walking to my Dad’s van.  Mom, Dad, and even my brother had stopped in to pick me up.

Naturally I wanted a burrito, but it was after midnight before we got anywhere.   About the only place open was Waffle House.  How many times have you heard me say I miss Waffle House? Never. I don’t even particularly like Waffle House, but it was open.  It wasn’t even that bad.  Sausage, eggs, and hash browns were great, but I really just don’t care for waffles. We mostly just talked about things that had changes around town since I was gone.  My absence has been blamed for four or five restaurant bankruptcies in the past six months.

I got home around 1:30 and had to unpack a few things for the next day. I hopped on the computer very briefly before bed, but not for long. Then I finally got to bed around 3:00 Dayton time. As far as I can tell, it was a 40-hour day for me.  I got up at 7 am on a Thursday and got to bet at 3:00 am on a Friday morning, but with the traveling and time zones, it was a 40-hour “day.”

I`m between classes at the Culture Center now, typing on a goofy Japanese keyboard cause I didn`t bring my own.

My iPod crashed again this morning, and the last time that happened it took a trip to Megalo to get it fixed again. Do I really want to deal with that tomorrow morning? Do I raelly want to fly 18 hours without it? Sigh.

March 11th, 2008

My last real day in Japan

That’s basically true. Tomorrow is a full workday, and I leave pretty early on Thursday. Today was my last day to do what I wanted.  I started off by cleaning up some last-minute trash, plastic bottles and metal cans to go in the proper recycle bags.  As I mentioned yesterday, I won’t be here on recycle day. Still, I cant leave that stuff in piles in the kitchen! 

Y-San drove by exactly on time at 9:30 and very quickly walked through the house. She asked if we had changed the air filters (she can’t reach them) an looked at the drain under the sink. Other than those two things, she didn’t really look at any of the stuff I spent so much time cleaning. Ah well.  She had me put the recycling stuff in the back of her car and we drove it up to the university and put it in their trash area. Problem solved! 

Aha! A Mystery No Longer!

While we were up there, we went to the office and the head of the department handed me my certificate of completion. It’s a nice little bilingual certificate in a folder. I asked if I could get a photo of Y-San, but she was really trying to avoid it. I did talk her into a photo with me and the director of the department. So there is only one photo of her, with the two of us on either side.  So what do you think? Is she secretly an international fugitive or undercover assassin?  They don’t like their pictures taken either. No, wait! I know! I HAVE finally seen a ninja in Japan. Y-san is secretly a ninja! That explains a lot, don’t you think?

While I was in the office, I posted yesterday’s blog and then left. It wasn’t even 10:00 and my day was done. I rode the bus downtown and wandered around a little bit. There really isn’t anything there that was any more interesting or photo-worthy than last week, so I stopped in and had lunch at Freshness Burger. I had the salsa burger, a cheese-dog, and fries. Not bad!  I stopped in at a little shop I walk by all the time and looked at their Shogi and Go sets.  I’d like to buy one, but they weigh a ton and shipping would be crazy.  And there really isn’t any point in spending more than $150 for a wooden board and then having no one to play with anyway.  So I walked to the station and rode the train home. Hmmm. It wasn’t even 1:30 yet.

A Day To Kill

 I decided to do all my laundry.  There wasn’t much, so that didn’t take long. I sat outside for an hour or so listening to podcasts. I came inside and loaded up my iPod and Palm Pilot full of stuff for the trip.  It’s not just the 18 hour flight that I have to sit through, but six hours of traveling and waiting before ever getting on a plane.  Thursday is going to be a looooong day.

That’s pretty much it.  It’s a relaxing day before the big trip. I plan to go to the Kamodoya Carryout for the last time in a little while, and then sit outside and listen to some more audio stuff.  I’m really just killing time today; how often do I really get an opportunity to do nothing, really nothing?  Not very often.

The End Is Near

Tomorrow, I will carry a few gift bags with me.  I don’t have any lessons prepared, so all I have are the gifts and a plastic bag with my slippers in it.  I have to change shoes to slippers for walking around in the kindergarten.  I usually have to wear slippers at the culture center too, but not tomorrow, since I won’t be in the classroom.  So after kindergarten, the slippers are gong in the trashcan. I have a second old pair of slippers that will hold me until I throw them away on Thursday morning. So I should be coming home tomorrow night empty-handed. At least that’s the plan.  There might be gifts involved with my later classes, but I kind of hope not, since it’ll be tough finding a place to pack them. A card or something would be good. I’ll figure it out if there is something. Tomorrow will be a long day like every Wednesday is, but it’ll be fun; I assume it will go a lot like the day before Christmas break.

Last week the computer room at the Culture Center was open.  I’ll check in there between my two classes.  If you read this post before the weekend, then you know the computer room was open; otherwise, I’ll post this one after I get home.

I’ll get home around ten pm tomorrow night and probably get right to bed.  Thursday morning I’ll get up, finish packing and wait for Y-San to drive me to the Okayama station, the first step in the long trip back.

March 10^th, 2008

 Three Days To Go 

Yup, 72 hours from now I’ll be on a plane bound for the West.  It’s funny that I have to travel east in order to get to “The West.”  That’s just plain counter-intuitive!  We’re down to a two-digit hour count now.  Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock!

 Travel Research 

I started off this morning with a trip up to the office to check a few things on the Internet. It turns out that I am allowed 50 pounds (23 Kilos) per bag, so I’ll have to do some fiddling with my “done” bag to lighten the loaf a bit.  I can actually pack the bag up to 70lbs, but there is a 3000Y ($30) charge for that, so I’m gong to try to avoid that. I’ll pay for one overweight bag if necessary, but I don’t think I’ll need to pay for two.

I also did some further research on the train trip to the airport. If you want to find out how to ride the trains to get anywhere in Japan, there’s a great website called http://www.hyperdia.com that you put in your starting location and ending location and it gives you all the transfers.  When I put it in a few weeks ago, I told it I wanted to be at the airport at 4:00, and it gave me a really complicated route with Shinkansen, local line train, subway, and even some walking in downtown Osaka between terminals. Crazy stuff!  Today I put in my starting time from Okayama, and it gave me a nice simple route that looks an awful lot like the ride we took to get here on day one.  Shinkansen to Osaka, and then a local line train right to the airport; much simpler.  It’s still an 8000Y ($80) ride to get to the airport, but I am far more confident that I will not run into any trouble on this new route.

 I’d Have Worn Shorts, But They’re Packed Away Already 

The weather for the rest of this week looks calm and nice, so I shouldn’t have a rough time on this end of the flight. I know they had pretty serious snowfall last week in Ohio, but I don’t know what the forecast is for that end of the trip. It’s actually really warm here today; my thermometer said it was a little over 70 today.  That’s the warmest it’s been in months.  I sat outside on the steps of the apartment, listening to my iPod for about an hour today, while watching students ride down the hill from the university. I left my jacket inside to do it too. Spring is coming!

I did end up going to Happy Town this afternoon.  I ended up buying a similar gift to the other one I discussed. Not exactly the same, but the same type of object. While there, I had my last McDonalds meal in Japan and did my last grocery shopping.  Unless I have forgotten something important, I think I’m done at Happy Town.

 How Do You Keep A Gaijin in Suspense? 

Around 3:00 the phone rang; it was my expected call from Y-San about the job.  She got tired of waiting for an answer from Fukuyama and called them.  They told her that they couldn’t make a decision until all candidates were interviewed. So I was right the first time when I said there would be no decision until next week.  But then she said something that didn’t quite ring true to me; she said that I would need a new visa if they hired me anyway, so there is no point in getting an exit visa now. Hmmm. That may be true, but there’s no way I can get a new visa in two or three weeks, right?  It took months last time.  At least with my old visa and an exit visa I can get back in for a few months while they sort out the paperwork on my next visa.  Maybe it’s faster the second time. Or maybe they told her that hiring me was unlikely, and this was her way of letting me know it’s not happening.  But I didn’t argue; I guess I won’t be getting an exit visa.

Either way, I’m not too worried about it. I definitely wanted the Fukuyama offer, and I may very well have accepted the job.  But it would have been a huge stretch and long-term challenge, and it may well have been the case that I would have hated it.  If they do end up saying yes, I’ll give it more thought (remember, I don’t really even know what the pay & benefits are yet), but if they say no, I’ll look at it as a good thing that I won’t have to make that decision.  I’m indecisive at best, and that would have been the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make. I think it would be a lot easier if they did in fact say no. Avoidance may not be a good thing, but I’m willing to live with it.  Then again, I stand by my reading of the situation last Friday, so I think there really is still a good chance they may want me. However it works out, I’ll live with it.

 Do The Math: I Am Not Putting on Weight! 

Meanwhile, today I have to get the apartment finished. Y-San will do a walk-through tomorrow, and she gave me a checklist of things to have cleaned and fixed up. I went through Marc’s entryway with a broom & mop, since he forgot to do that.  Slackass is still causing me work and he’s 7500 miles away! I wiped off the living room table and put the sink in the bathroom back together (don’t ask!).  Then it was back to packing.  I switched out a few things from the formerly “done” suitcase and its now at 48.9 pounds, which is as close as I’m going to risk.  The suitcases won’t fit on the scale by themselves, so I have to weigh myself, and then weigh myself holding the suitcase and subtract. There’s just enough variation in results that I want to leave a pound or two leftover for possible scale errors.  Oh, and by the way, I weigh exactly the same as I did when I arrived here and used the kilogram scale for the first time.

So that’s pretty much the situation as it stands Monday evening.  There will be no news on the job until next week, and I suspect by then I will have decided against it, having been spoiled by American food all weekend.  I probably will have gained ten pounds by next Monday anyway.  I’m mostly packed, and mostly done cleaning. First thing tomorrow is the apartment inspection and shortly thereafter is my certificate award ceremony. That’s all before ten o’clock. After that, I’m pretty much free for the afternoon.  I’ll probably just go for a long walk, just my camera and me. Wednesday is spoken for and a full work schedule, and that’s going to be pretty much it. I doubt I will see the Internet again or post anything else before I get home, so stay tuned!