Today it was a little hard to spring right out of bed, and I ended up sleeping through and having to rush through a bath. No time to make lunch, either. That’s what I get for staying out late eating Chilean food with a beautiful woman.
On the way to school it was raining a tiny bit, but it wasn’t enough to postpone the second day of sports for my school. If it was postponed I would have three classes, so I was glad that things went OK. The students are going to be exhausted tomorrow – there won’t be many signs of life in my Thursday classes.
The sports went pretty well, and I spent half my time watching the boys playing kick baseball and the girls playing volleyball. I rooted on the first year students, since they were always the underdogs. I had some good conversations with students, and it was fun to just relax and watch the games. The kick baseball was pretty exciting, but the volleyball was really boring. There wasn’t much volleying going on.
A group of girl students invited me to sit and cheer for their team, so I hung out with them and we spoke lots of English. It was fun to root for their team because they were so bad, but at one point they had a good run and almost caught up with the other team. After they finished I walked around and gave encouragement to the team – they did well even though they lost.
After lunch in the cafeteria I checked my mail and found a message from the staffing company I interviewed with. They offered me the job, and so I sent them a few follow-up questions. I got the answers and I’ll talk it over with Kuniko tonight when she gets home. It was encouraging, though, and if it works out it sounds like it could be fun. I would be teaching at a new level – junior high school, and it would be a job more like a real-life job. Not as much support as you find on the JET program. The pay is not quite as good as JET either, but it is competitive. I’ll mull it over and get back to them tomorrow. It would be nice to have a job waiting for me when I get back from Europe – it would make the trip more enjoyable, that’s for sure.
I stuck around the whole day, even though most of the action died down after lunch. The principal and vice principal asked me separately how the job interview went, so I told them all about it without mentioning that they offered me the job – I want to build the suspense a little bit and also keep my options open. If I don’t take the job I don’t want it to look like I’m too picky… they might not help me out in the future.
It is amazing to me how everyone is asking about me and cheering me on. It is reassuring to know that all these people care about you and your well-being, and that has been nice for me to observe lately.
I survived a blitz of questions from the history teacher. He is making a big push to use up as much of my time as he can before I leave. He’s trying to organize a drinking party with just me and him to say goodbye, but I might dodge it. He wants to invite the new ALT as well, in a bid to trap her in his web of long-winded English questions. I’ll really have to warn her when she arrives.
When I arrived home I found that the railpass tickets had been relayed successfully from my parents, and everything seems to be in order. Whew – what a relief.
Tonight should be a pretty mellow night. Kuniko thought she would get home early tonight, but I haven’t heard from her yet. Hopefully we’ll both have some downtime tonight before things get busy again just before the weekend.
