On Friday night Kuniko and I met up with Antoine and Miwako for dinner at SiGassiga, an Italian restaurant in Sannomiya. It had been a while since we had gotten together, and we wanted to hear all about their wedding plans and how their summer was progressing.

We had a great meal (as usual) at the restaurant, a delicious combination of pasta, risotto, grilled pork, and salad along with homemade bread. I ordered a couple of wines with dinner, an Eric Ross zinfandel and a Pepperwood Grove zinfandel. I was a little disappointed in the Eric Ross – it had lost a lot of the varietal flavors that make an expensive zinfandel worth ordering in Japan. The Pepperwood still had lots of zin character, and was a good follow-up bottle.

With more wine we got a little louder at the table – there was some serious merry-making going on. The staff at SiGassiga handled it really well. A lot of restaurants in the area really turn up the snob factor, and god forbid somebody might be having a good time over dinner. The staff on Friday kept us in food and wine and were very helpful.

After dinner they even brought a dessert to our table to share. We had been to the restaurant last year to celebrate our wedding anniversary, and they had remembered and written our names in chocolate along with a congratulations message. Very cool people – I really like the place. We need to visit more often.

Randy Pausch passed away.

Man, I am not a patriotic guy. One of the things that really drives me up the wall is the idea that one country or another is somehow better. While Barack Obama is over in Germany proclaiming his vision for a world united, John McCain is proclaiming that he will always put his country first. Part of why this world is so screwed up is that people have been putting themselves, their countries, their companies, and most of all their interests first. We’re all living here on the same rock – time to work together and fix it.

Kumbaya!

At one of the places I teach English they have increased the security precautions that guests are subject to. At most places I teach I have to go through a security checkpoint, and I have a security badge for each of the facilities I visit. However yesterday’s location had me check in my cellphone so I wouldn’t be able to take pictures while I was there. Our class is held in a pretty non-descript office, in a non-technical administration building, but I still had to turn it in for the duration of my class.

Since I have a class in Kobe once a week it is an ideal opportunity to meet up with Kuniko after work and travel home together. Since yesterday was our “Akashi anniversary“. We celebrated with some burgers and beer at the Belgian beer place. We sat at the bar and enjoyed the atmosphere, talked about our days, and talked a little bit about the future. It was a fun night. We flirted with the idea of spending the night in Kobe at some love hotel but in the end decided to head home since we’d have to go back anyway to change clothes.

We did a little “drunken shopping”, one of our little rituals that we do when coming home from an evening of drinking. The best place to do that is at one (or both) of the convenience stores right next to the station. We try to find some kind of odd Japanese snack and then take it home and try it out. I picked up a can of “microbrewed” beer. Actually it is an ale, and it turned out to be quite good. I ordered some more on the internet this morning, hopefully the porter and the ESB will be as good. It’s nice to see some ales in Japan.

It’s another very hot day today, and I’m staying at home studying today. Kuniko has a short day at work, so we’ll get to hang out in the evening and relax. Our search for a new place to live has been accelerating a bit lately – we’re just looking for the right piece of land right now…

There are a surprising amount of restaurants in Japan, and the nice thing about that is that it gives you a lot of options when you are looking to go out. My town of Okubo is no exception. The other day a flier was delivered to our mailbox with a listing and description of local restaurants that are off the beaten path. I was happy to see my favorite local yakitori listed, as well as a new cafe that opened up a while back that we enjoyed.

Last night Kuniko and I both arrived home late at about the same time, so we decided that instead of going into our hot (34 degrees C!) kitchen and cooking something that we’d go try another of the local restaurants. We walked about five minutes from our house to じゅんぷう (Junpuu), a teppanyaki place that looks remarkably upscale compared to the surrounding neighborhood.

Most of my teppanyaki experience is based around experiences at Benihana restaurants in the San Francisco bay area. You might not be surprised to find out that authentic teppanyaki places are nothing like Benihana – I sure was. The master of this place had a big teppan (iron platter – built into a bar) that he worked. We sat at a table in the restaurant so that we could watch him cook. The place was decorated in a modern style, with lots of hardwood and secondary lighting. They had a lot of sho-chu bottles to choose from, and the whole place was air conditioned with jazz music playing in the background and plenty of cold beer available.

We were pretty hungry so we ordered a couple of beers, a prosciutto salad, tonpeiyaki (pork steak wrapped in egg topped with bonito flakes and a spicy sauce), タイ風エビチリ (Thai style shrimp with chili sauce), and some fried rice that Kuniko ordered – apparently based on the food that the staff gets when they work there. We loved the food and the atmosphere, and the master sent us over some soup to try with our second round of beers. It was surprisingly inexpensive, and we’ll definitely be back.

Right next door (and another listing on the flier of local restaurants) was a bar with the unforgettable name of “Red Spanky”. I had been by the area before in the past and it always looked closed – turns out that it is open from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., so I had just missed the operating hours. This place really stuck out on the flier (not only because of the name) because of the hours. With Japan really shutting down after the last train of the night (usually around midnight or one) there isn’t much reason to stay open. These guys were serving a niche – people that head back to Okubo and still want a cocktail or two before going home.

Actually regular bars are not so common in Japan. Most places serve drinks with food, and it’s a little weird to just go and order drinks. There are the “snack” bars, but with your drinks you need to talk to some woman and pay for her drinks, and that’s not so interesting to me. So I was glad to find out about Red Spanky and give it a try with Kuniko.

The place was very small and dark, with a bar dominating the room. There were some tables in the corner, and about six people drinking there. The first thing that struck me was that the owner and all the customers were young – maybe 21 to 30 years old. The music was mellow hip-hop, and they had a TV playing some movies with the sound off and the subtitles on. We pulled up a chair at the bar, and the had a couple of cocktails. The master of the place made them with great care (we had ordered some things that locals don’t usually order I guess – tequila sunrise and a vodka tonic). We also ordered up some snacks to go with the drinks (some of the snacks had funny Japanese names, making it more fun to order them) and soaked in the atmosphere. It was weird that a place like this had always been right near my house and I had no idea about it. The young people working there were really friendly and talkative, and they made us feel welcome.

We had two rounds of drinks there, and then walked two minutes to the grocery store, and another two minutes home. It was nice to sample more local places – I’m sure that we’ll be back to both places soon.

I’ve settled into a routine with my teaching lately. Several of the courses are high level English classes, and those are quite interesting to teach. The students really enjoy discussions and expressing their opinions, and I can talk to them about more difficult topics (like values, identities, etc.)

I’m on tap to do some substitute teaching over at the Fujitsu factory near our place, and starting in October as these courses start to wind down it looks like I’ll start teaching a couple of days a week at Kobe University. It’s just a temporary position until December, but I want to get some experience teaching college students – that’ll complete the sweep of student age levels for me.

It’s officially freakin’ hot and humid in western Japan, and it has been frustrating as I’ve had both some time and a desire to go hiking – but it would be suicide in this weather. Doing push-ups and sit-ups in an air conditioned room isn’t quite the same thing as getting out and breathing fresh air.

This weekend I’ve got one of my students from Kawasaki coming over for a taco party with his wife and son. I’m looking forward to introducing another group of people to tacos – my eternal quest to introduce Japan to Mexican food continues.

Last weekend we had a good time with Haven and Kerry last weekend – we crammed a lot of activities into just a couple of days. Lots of shopping and walking around, some conveyor-belt sushi, Himeji castle, the Akashi bridge, Denya yakitori, Kobe and Harborland, and even Okinawan food. Kerry and Haven are fun to hang out with – they’ve got a positive attitude about just about everything. I was sorry that we didn’t have more time to spend with them. It sounds like they are living a pretty good life in Boston – they both seem confident and happy, and if that is any measure of success they are doing very well.

It’s finally time to start my last term at USQ. The last of the materials showed up by post yesterday, so I’ll plunge in starting Monday, which should give me a week’s head start on the regular schedule. I received the results from last term, and they were about what I expected – not great but acceptable. I had some serious complaints about one of my classes, but for various reasons I can’t vent about it here. Ask me about it sometime…

Kuniko has a light weekend this time, so we’ll be able to spend more time together than usual. They are just finishing exams at her school, and so she’ll be back to the tough schedule soon enough. I am helping her teach a class at her school’s open house event later this month, so once again we’ll be team teaching together. Just like old times.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged! Things are picking up work-wise, and we’ve got some guests coming in for a couple of days, so I thought I should get this thing up to date.

First work – I started a new gig working at Shin-Caterpillar Mitsubishi last night. I’ll be teaching an advanced English course there once a week, and yesterday was the first lesson and orientation for the students.

The factory mainly makes what the students call “hydraulic shovels” – which look like this. The factory is huge – probably because the products are huge. I’ve often seen them being carried off by truck to ports around the area for shipping overseas.

I’m not sure what the business relationship is between Caterpillar and Mitsubishi, but because there is so much international emphasis at the company they want their employees all to have a solid grounding in English. There were three beginner English classes taught by Japanese instructors (who were too scared to chat with me in English) one intermediate level class taught by another foreign teacher, and an advanced level class.

My students are the top level students, which makes the class much easier for me to manage and prepare for. The students can generally communicate in English, so now we are working on making presentations and discussing issues. Almost none of the usual games and roleplaying. The first day we just talked and got to know each other a little bit.

Towards the end of the class we could hear some rumbling noises outside, and I figured they were closing the doors to the big factory buildings and getting ready to go home. As it turned out it was the sound of thunder, and by the time I left the rain was coming down so hard that you could barely see outside. The students pointed me towards a company bus that took about 60 people back to the nearest station – the company bus runs every day and is a nice convenience especially during the heat and humidity of summer.

Tonight Haven and Kerry will be coming into town to visit. They are on a business trip in Japan and they are going to stay with us for a couple of nights before heading off to Osaka on Sunday. We’ll probably cook dinner for them tonight, and since Kuniko has a school party tomorrow I’ll take them to Denya for yakitori. Hopefully we can squeeze in some sightseeing between all the eating.

Today I took some time to go back to Futami to visit Ito Yokado. Since I had the day free, I bought some tortillas at IY, and then on my way back home stopped in at Akashi Nishi high school.

Akashi Nishi high school was just up the street from where I was living in Futami, and my upstairs neighbors were working there as ALTs. I was always a little bummed that I had to take a train all the way to Takasago to go to work while my neighbors could sleep in and walk a few minutes to work. On top of that, Akashi Nishi is designated by the prefectural government as a “Super English School” – an experimental school that has three times the English teaching resources as other schools (as well as three ALTs) as an experiment to see what the student English proficiency level is compared to “normal” schools.

Anyway, the reason I dropped in was because I had heard that my ex-vice principal was now the principal of Akashi Nishi high school. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years, so I thought I’d pay him a visit.

The role of public high school principals is interesting – they have a very low workload, and a very high level of responsibility. Ultimately if anything happens at the school, good or bad, they are on the hook. The job is very ceremonial – they have a private office (very rare in Japan), they make speeches to the students a couple of times a month, and they meet and greet guests to the school. They don’t have to teach any classes, and they have very little paperwork. In fact, many of the principals I have known are pretty lonely sitting in that private office all day.

As I said before, Tona sensei was the vice principal at Takasago Minami while I was there. He’s a really nice guy, he helped me all the time with my Japanese, we spoke in English quite a bit, and he even came to our wedding (I broke protocol and invited him instead of my principal).

I was surprised to see that one of the office workers that I knew at Takasago was working in the office at Akashi Nishi, and so I was able to explain why I was there to her much quicker than if it had been a total stranger. The rest of the office was giving me looks (it is not often that a strange foreigner comes walking off the street and asks for the principal), but soon Tona sensei came out of his office and greeted me warmly, and we retired to his office for some tea and conversation.

We caught up on what we’ve been doing – he wanted to hear all about my job and my studies, and he told me about his new post at Akashi Nishi (it doesn’t pay that well), a trip this summer to Australia (he has to make a speech in English), and how his son is working for Osaka prefecture as a supervisor of transportation.

One thing about shooting the breeze with the principal of the school is that you don’t really have to worry about anybody else breaking into the conversation – he’s the boss and the school was at our disposal. I asked if Kimura sensei still worked there, and he got on the phone and ordered (!) him to the office so we could chat. I asked how his three ALTs were and he called somebody and had them brought to the office to meet me. It’s good to be friends with the boss.

We talked for about half an hour and then I begged off – I felt bad for taking up everyone’s time – but he encouraged me to come back anytime. I’ll take him up on the offer – it was nice to be back in that environment for a while.

In a weird coincidence I bumped into the Denya master on his scooter going to work, and so he stopped and we chatted for a little while. I’m hoping to visit the yakitori on Saturday the 5th with Haven and Kerry and introduce them to a real yakitori experience – he was happy to hear that. I sure wish I lived closer to Denya so that I could visit more often.

My last stop on the trip was at MaxValue. I brought the tortillas that I had bought from Ito Yokado and requested that they stock them in the store. I told them I would be a steady customer, so hopefully they’ll be able to bring them in. The manager didn’t sound too optimistic, though.

I’ve been put-putting around the house this week since I wrapped up my last paper on Tuesday. I wasn’t happy with the paper – probably the weakest one that I’ve written so far. Unfortunately, I was just out of time, and there wasn’t time for a re-write. Hopefully it will be good enough to pass the class.

The weather has been pretty nice lately, but today is the first day that you can actually feel the humidity. I was hanging laundry out this morning and the air felt like hot soup outside. The weather is changing – we’re stuck in the middle of the rainy season and summer is coming on, so it makes for lots of sweat and soup.

I love to read articles like this.

Two things came to an end this morning – one was my one-week old beard that I grew just to show Kuniko what I look with a beard. The review was positive, but summer is the wrong time for a beard so I shaved that off first thing this morning.

As for the other, I wrapped up the last paper for one of my classes, leaving just one more paper due in a week or so. It’s always a great feeling to submit a paper and know that you are finally finished with a course.

Today I’m teaching a class at Kawasaki, and so I’m going to have to plan a lesson this afternoon and then head over. I might meet up with one of my students after class for a beer – he’s a really nice guy and we walk back to the train station together after every class. I’m looking forward to finding a local drinking spot in Nishi Akashi – I don’t know anything about the neighborhood there.

I just wrapped up another busy weekend. Truth be told, the weekends have been busier than the weekdays lately.

Saturday was the big opening of MaxValue across the street from our place. You might remember that for the first year that we lived in this apartment there was a supermarket across the street called Jusco. They tore it down about six months ago because it was pretty old, and Saturday marked the opening of a brand new supermarket to replace it.

People were lining up two hours before it opened, so I waited until the afternoon and walked over to check it out. It’s a nice store – it has a bakery and a flower shop. They stock avocados but have a crappy cheese selection. No tortillas, but I’m going to try to get them to stock some in the future. Actually, the set up is pretty much the standard one for this area – no frills. It’s much better than what was there before, and we can always walk another five minutes and get cheese at Vivre. So, life is going to be pretty convenient again.

Saturday night I met up with the Denya gang and we went drinking at a rooftop beer garden in Akashi. Everyone was looking good and seemed really happy – we had a good time. We actually closed the beer garden and ended up heading back to Yamashita-san’s place for more drinks. It was a good time, but I was nursing a hangover on Sunday morning.

I attended a seminar on teaching students how to get a good score on the TOEIC test – a popular English proficiency test in Japan and Korea. I had taken the test myself for the first time last week, which turned out to be timely as most of the seminar involved talking about the different sections. I would have been lost if I hadn’t taken it. The seminar was put on by Nozaki sensei, and there were about 15 attendees. I was the only native speaker of English there, and of course the seminar was in Japanese, but I could understand most of what was going on. I enjoyed the day despite the hangover. There is a part two to the seminar in a couple of weeks, so I’ll be sure not to drink the night before.

Kuniko came back from her overnight trip and we had some cheese from Carrefour for dinner and just relaxed at home in the evening. Then it was a long bath and bed for us. Kuniko is getting more and more busy at work – there’s no end in sight for her right now.

Today I was pretty much home-based (as I’ll be for most of the month) and I spent the day doing research on the web and starting to write one of the big papers due soon.

For a study break I took a walk over to Vivre for some shopping after lunch. The rain was just starting to let up, and even though I brought my umbrella I never really had to use it.

When I was walking by the local yakitori (Komedorishokudo – a little harder to say than Denya) I bumped into the master coming to work with his wife and baby. His baby and his wife were both really cute – later Kuniko said that she expected as much since the master is so good looking. They were really friendly and it reminded me that we need to drop by soon and have dinner there.

Kuniko got home early today, and we had some cajun rice for dinner, and pretty soon we’re heading out to Vivre and Saty to do some more shopping. This Saturday the big supermarket that they have been building across the street from us will be opening up, and I’m looking forward to shortening our shopping distance significantly.

Tomorrow I’m taking the TOEIC test in Kakogawa, and then it is back to the study grind for the rest of the week. I’m looking forward to testing my English ability tomorrow!

I’m back from the weekend trip to Nagoya for the JALT CALL conference. Overall the conference was pretty good and at a pretty nice venue. It was my first time in Nagoya, and I had some local food when I got the chance and brought back some local omiyage for Kuniko.

Now everything changes this month. Last month I was busy working hard for various companies making lots of money, and this month I have just the one class for Kawasaki on Mondays. It is really dumb luck that I have the rest of the time off, since my papers for this term are coming due and I’ll have to start a new (and final) term soon. I’m going to have to get things wrapped up in the next three weeks, and the final push is always pretty intense. The free time will help a lot.

So look for more blogging this week, both here and at callteacher.net.