August 22, 2002 - 8:39PM
Wes Ehrlichman

First of all, I've got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is. I'm starting to get settled. By next week I should have a reliable international phone service, ISDN 24 hour Internet, a plane ticket to Tokyo for the 20th-22nd of September for the Tokyo Game Show and the Ghibli Museum, and last but not least (wait for it, wait for it), a car!!!

Woo hoo! Earlier this month my supervisor Mr. Yamaguchi and I went to the car place and asked them to keep an eye out. I call it a car place because I honestly can't tell if it's a scrapyard or a repair shop (there's an extremely well behaved dog and a not so well behaved goat on the premises). Anyway, while I was at orientation they called him and told him they'd found a cheap car. It's a white Pontiac Sunny Morning (or something like that). It's got 60,000 km on it, and it's actually extremely cheap. It's so cheap that I got paid today, and if I needed to I could pay it off with a month's salary and have plenty left over.

Now for the bad news... the English teacher that I am supposed to teach with broke his elbow playing baseball. He has surgery tomorrow, but will apparently be unable to come in for a month. Soooo, guess who has to teach alone? What?! I don't know how to teach! Actually I think I'll be fine. I've been trying to hang out with the kids more and a few have been very welcoming. I also learned a lot of games to teach with during orientation, so they should be able to learn at least a little bit from me.

Here's some flash cards I made to teach with:

Some of these third year middle school kids are far more diligent than they should be at that age. They study like studying is going out of style. I have heard that they do this because there is a big test that decides whether or not they get into a good high school. The third year high school test is supposed to be at least twice as important as this middle school one too, so I'm thankful that I never have to teach them.

Over orientation I got to know several of the nearby ALTs.

One night I hung out with Moizza from Matsuyama-cho the entire night. In the middle of the night we did Puri-kura, which is short for Print Club. It's those stand up arcade machines that take your picture and then allow you to put stamps on it for a few minutes before printing out a sheet of small stickers. It was a lot of fun. Here's our set. Moizza's going to be mad that I put the second one up...

The one in Miyanojo is named Brad and apparently he got a little flack from his Board of Education for not dancing in the festival when I did. He wasn't even there! They didn't even tell him about it though, so it's not really his fault. We're gonna trade Playstation 2 games some time.

Another ALT that I know is Sue, who lives one town over in Satsuma-cho. I met her one night when I went to Kagoshima with Yumi, and I saw her again here. She's British and she seems pretty cool, but I didn't get to talk to her too much because she was hanging out with mostly other British people. There seemed to be a lot of segregation between the British JETs and the American Jets The Canadian Jets may have been segregated too, but I can't tell who's Canadian. Unless I hear an "Eh," I just assumed that if they didn't sound British they were American. Is that wrong?

What's strange is that these and nearly every one of the other ALTs that I know best are going to be in the same level of Japanese as me at the week-long language training camp next month. That should be fun, and hopefully when I get back I'll be a lot better at Japanese.

It looks like a lot of Japanese people have started to read my journal so I'm gonna put up some stuff from America. Here's my girlfriend Christina. She's coming to Nagoya Japan on September 2nd to go to the prestegious Nanzan University to study Japanese. Hopefully I'll get to see her if I go to Tokyo on the 20th.

Ok, well I didn't have a topic for today's journal so this might have been a bit boring. Tomorrow I'm gonna try to have a topic, so check back.