Super Late Post!

Hey everyone! So sorry for the ridiculously long wait. Things have been incredibly busy here as always. It's strange to think that it's been a month since I last posted about my summer vacation. My time here in Japan is roughly 1/6th done O_O. I've had a lot of experiences since summer vacation and I'll do my best to recount them in as much detail as possible given the time I've had to forget them >_<.

My classes are all going really well. I was observed by an AEON trainer for four of my lessons shortly after summer vacation. It was more of a teaching exercise than an evaluation, and the trainer gave me feedback/tips about how to improve each lesson. He even physically gave me a helping hand in my class of 3-year-olds, which was desperately needed. Since I had never observed a class for students that young and never practiced it in training I was pretty much flying by the seat of my pants until he came and helped me out. I think my lessons have improved since then, including both adult and kids lessons. I'm also starting to accumulate stories of the "difficult" questions that I get from students, as in things that I would normally breeze over but in the mind of an English-learner I can understand being quite confusing. For example I recently explained the difference between "backseat" and "back seat" as well as the use of "here" in "Now we live here in India." You begin to realize just how little sense English makes when you don't grow up speaking it.

One weekend I went with Rodney and his girlfriend to a Costco somewhere "near" here. Driving is pretty  much the only way to get to this Costco and luckily Rodney's girlfriend has a car. It was awesome to finally be able to buy a bunch of stuff from the States that I couldn't find anywhere else in Japan (at least not that wasn't insanely expensive). For example I bought a giant tub of peanut butter for my lunches, a box of miso soup for my breakfasts, razor blades for the next year and a half, and an air mattress which has blissfully replaced my futon-on-hardwood situation. It's a queen-sized air mattress with a double-sized fitted sheet and a twin-sized regular sheet. Oh, post-college life. It takes up most of my one-room apartment but if I ever need the space all I need to do it lean it up against the wall, which is nice.

Two weekends ago Cheryl came to visit me in Fujisawa! She took the train from Fuefuki on Friday night and spent the night here, then explored Fujisawa/did some shopping Saturday while I was at work and then Saturday night we went to the same shabu shabu restaurant that my coworkers took me to. That was a true test of our cumulative Japanese skills as the restaurant didn't have any English-speaking staff. We managed to make do, and left very full. On Sunday we went to Kamakura. While there we walked around, saw a few shrines, and looked around at the shops (though we didn't buy anything). We did try some ice cream cones which were a swirl of green-tea (green) and sweet potato (purple) flavored ice creams. The taste was oddly delicious and next time I'm in Kamakura I'll probably try to get some more, haha.

Cheryl standing in front of a smaller shrine that we passed by while walking around the less-frequented areas of Kamakura.

A long path up to the largest of the temples we visited. This place was sort of off the beaten path so there weren't many people there, haha.

At the end of the long path from the picture above you come to a platform where you can view the temple itself. This is pretty  much as close as you can get.

I got news from my manager that I'll be able to take time off to take the GRE Math subject test on October 19th, which I'm happy about. Since I didn't do so well the first time around I've been studying almost every day for this second time and I think I'll be more prepared. The kicker: I'm taking it in Seoul. This'll be quite an experience and I hope to get a good story out of it since I'll have a day and a half after the test to explore. I've got my test seat and my flight reserved. Just gotta find a well-located and reasonably-priced hotel >_<.

Last weekend I went to Fuefuki to visit Cheryl! Saturday night after work I took the time to change out of my suit, grabbed a quick dinner, and then hopped on a train for Yamanashi. On Sunday Cheryl had to go to a Junior High School cultural festival and invited me so I tagged along ^_^. It was pretty interesting. There was a long opening ceremony with a bunch of people giving 3-4 line "speeches" in Japanese (I of course had no clue what was going on for the entire duration of the ceremony), an hour-long play put on by each grade-level, and some other presentations. After lunch there was a tea ceremony put on by the students and when they saw Cheryl and me standing in the back, students sitting in the front were immediately displaced so the foreigners could get front-row seats. As all the students were aware that I'm Cheryl's boyfriend, every eye was glued to me as I went through the "ritual" of the tea ceremony (which was somewhat abbreviated due to the time constraints and number of people). The staff at her school seemed really nice though and in the Japanese way showered me with gifts, in the form of bottled beverages in this case. Then on Monday we slept in (since we got up early for the festival on Sunday) and because of the typhoon that was raging at the time, we stayed indoors and watched Hulu. Then at 3:30ish she dropped me off at the train station. The trains were a tad off schedule because of the typhoon - my first train was delayed for an hour and 35 minutes. But I did make it back safely to Fujisawa.

That brings me back up to now. Unfortunately I'm lacking pictures of myself, but anyone who has Cheryl added on Facebook should be able to see some more of me that she took. My goal for the next blog post: to have it posted less than a month from now :p

Since I don't have pictures. I'll end this post with another bullet-list of interesting short-stories.

• In Japan there are a lot of escalators. The unwritten rule is: stand on the left, walk on the right. It's really funny therefore to see at the station a long line of people waiting to get on the left side of the escalator while the right side is completely empty. My willingness to walk has let my bypass many crowds...
• Rodney and his girlfriend have a GPS system for her car that I assume is somehow associated with a famous wrestler, so on our way to Costco we kept hearing things along the lines of (in Japanese) "WAAARGH TURN RIGHT! YEAH!"
• There's a ramen shop that I go to pretty frequently that gives you a little peel-off sticker thing every time you order a bowl of ramen. I always assumed it was a win-or-lose thing, so I would always peel off the sticker, see that there was nothing written underneath it, and leave it on the counter when I left the restaurant. Apparently it was a collect-this-many-and-exchange-for-prizes thing. Perhaps I should brush up on my Japanese because who knows what I missed out on.....XD
• I went with Cheryl when she put gas in her car for the first time. It was an exercise in patience for the both of us and I'm sure the nearby Japanese were cracking up internally as the machine continually yelled instructions at us in Japanese and we continued hitting random buttons until we magically made the thing work. If you asked us to reproduce the results right now I'm not even sure we could, haha!