I had a very busy morning schedule today – three out of four classes. Once I knocked those out, however, things got really quiet. I had the afternoon free, so I walked around a visited each of the sports clubs that were practicing. I watched the kendo club, the ping pong club, the badminton club, and the basketball clubs (boys and girls).
At each club I sat and watched for about 10-15 minutes. Sometimes students would come over and talk to me, sometimes nobody had the nerve. Everyone would stop and wave or smile at me, though.
When I went over to watch the basketball teams the girls all said hello and came over. Some of the team members are pretty active in my classes, so they were happy to get a chance to talk with me outside of the classroom.
Okamoto sensei, the girls’s basketball coach, was sitting there, so I sat with her and we talked about the clubs, what I’m going to do next, and her family. The nice thing about watching the club with her around was that I didn’t feel like some kind of pervert watching 16-year old high school girls running around on the court.
After school I met up with the English teachers and we went to a local Takasago restaurant to have a welcome/farewell party for the teachers that came and left this year. The place was a really nice restaurant/pub that I had never been to before. Takasago is not known for upscale restaurants, but this place was really nice.
Dinner was pretty good – I had the meat dish which turned out to be a short, thick hot dog wrapped in a tender piece of beef. The rest of the course was quite good – seafood spaghetti, French onion soup, a salmon and potato salad, and even some pastrami with mozzarella cheese cubes.
The party was a little stiff – there were a couple of speeches, which is part of the experience of a Japanese party. Usually these kinds of parties work in stages, with the next one seeing the party becoming louder and the final stage is outright anarchy, with people walking around pouring drinks and lots of hysterical laughter. Most work parties that I have been to in America have jumped right to the final stage, but it takes a little work to get there here in Japan. If the mix of people is just right, things become fun quickly.
Unfortunately there were a lot of new people and people that haven’t met yet, so it took a while, and by that time it was time to go. I had a good time, though, and since the entire conversation was in Japanese, it was good practice for me.
Another thing that struck me while I was sitting there, surrounded by twelve English teachers, was that only three of them had decent English skills – at least decent enough to teach the language. Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with that? Today Mori sensei tried to get me to repeat her example sentence “I step your toe” to the students – why is someone like that held up as an example to students? I guess it all adds up to job security for me, but it was still a little disturbing.
I came home relatively early, and Kuniko and I played lots of Nintendo DS before eventually hitting the sack. Tomorrow I have an informal interview for an English conversation school job in Kobe. We’ll see how it goes!
