田舎Life: The First Day

My internet seems to be pretty steady and fast at the moment so I'm gonna try and do this. Still don't have my good fiber optic internet yet. The guy came to look at the set up and gave me a form to be stamped by my landlord giving me permission to get the wire and internet installed in my apartment. The funny thing is the JET before me had the same internet set up so the wire is already there and in my apartment. So basically I'm forced to wait another two weeks for the internet company to receive the form from my landlord saying it's ok for them to install the wire (which is already there) for the internet in my apartment. Gotta love the formalities of certain things in Japan, right?

All that aside, today was the first day of the second semester. We had our opening ceremony and I was formally introduced to all of the students. I had met a fair deal of them in August as I wandered the school watching various club activities, but this was the first time I've "officially" met them all. After that was cleaning time and I wandered around a bit chatting with some students. The baseball team students seem to have already taken a shine to me and they spent most of the cleaning time teaching me about popular gags, their nicknames for each other, and other subtleties of the daily life of a Japanese 2nd year middle school student.

I also had a bit of fun with the kid, who's name I have yet to learn, who seems to be similar to the student body president of a Western high school as he gave a little speech at the opening ceremony welcoming my supervisor teacher who is returning from maternity leave and I. We were up in the dojo and he was trying to grab me and I just tossed him around like a rag doll for a little while. He kept trying to best me, but just didn't have what it takes to tackle the T-Mac just yet.

There were no English classes today so I still haven't taught, but tomorrow is a double lesson with all of the 3rd year students. 100 minutes with 65, 15 year olds should be quite fun, especially when I'm doing an introduction lesson with pictures and all kinds of personal information.

Anyway to wrap this all up since my internet seems to be moving quite well today I'm going to try and upload some pictures of my apartment. Let's see how this goes...

Nagayama Heights

Entrance

Sink at the end of the entrance hall

The washing machine and doors to shower and toilet

Shower. It's a little separate room and not part of the bathroom like in Western houses

Toilet. No bidet, but the seat is heated.

The kitchen. I didn't buy the Pooh towel. It was in the closet and I just hung it up

More kitchen

The living room. I bought the "sha-cho"(company president) chair and the cushions because the ones that were in here before were paper thin and cushioned jack squat.