The gallery has been fixed! Photos from the last post are up, and new ones from this weekend are up as well. Take a look!
This week was a long one - holiday, two days of training seminars (this time I was teaching), and then a good weekend. Saw plenty of films (El Mariachi, Harry Potter (Azkaban), Howl’s Moving Castle (much better when you don’t understand it), and Harry Potter (Goblet)). Also took part in a pub quiz, and helped out some on the science catagory.
Today, one of the teachers at school asked me to write for the school’s yearly publishing: a book of sorts. They want to know my impressions of Japan, hear my memories of high school, and see what I’ve been up to. I think it’s pretty cool - my first Japanese essay assignment. They give writing lengths in dimensions. Whereas an English teacher would ask for 750 words, a Japanese teacher wants a piece 35 characters wide by 70 characters tall. Heh.
The seminar, while mostly a waste of time (for 2nd and 3rd year ALTs and repeating JTEs) did have some highlights. I got a chance to talk with one of the JTEs from my school, and we became a little closer. It’d be nice to get an opportunity to spend a day with each of my teachers.
Somehow Japan seems to be in my way now. I still want to have a rich experience here, and I’m still seeking out new trails, but my mind has definitely made a course change to post-Japan. Not so much in what I’ll do outside of Japan, but what I’m looking forward to: close friends, hugs (Japan is a hands-off society), good conversations, in-wall insulation. Japan has turned into a strange fast, an extended lent. Things were taken away, and I’m excited to be able to choose the ones I want back again (and not choose the others I don’t want). A nice pruning, I suppose.