It’s the morning after a holiday, and most of Japan is going off to work while I spend the day here at home pondering my future. With the heavy lifting done for my degree now it is just a matter of figuring out what kind of job I can land starting next April. An hour of surfing the internet found some interesting jobs out there. Right now 90% of the teacher jobs posted are for positions starting immediately teaching kindergarten or elementary school level. While I have no problem teaching at that level, I wouldn’t have much of a chance to use my advanced degree, and I do feel like I need more of a challenge – I don’t want to get bored right away. I’ll keep up the search and see what happens.
As I said, yesterday was a holiday, and while Kuniko was working at a school event I was hiking with Yoshi (one of my students from Kawasaki) and his 7 year old son Akira. We climbed the mountain behind Suma beach and then looped around in a three hour circle. At one point while we sat eating some snacks on the trail an old guy came walking up and started a conversation – he learned English in India, and it was interesting to chat with him and hear his heavily accented Indian English mixed with his Japanese accent.
Afterwards we had lunch at a newly opened Danish hot dog place in front of Suma station. It was run by the same guy that ran a similar place in Takasago that I had visited before. I guess Takasago pretty much dried up and he moved to greener pastures. It seemed to me he was doing a pretty good business there.
During the hike I had gotten a “missed call” on my cellphone, but it didn’t log the name of the caller – possibly because I was out of range up in the mountains. When Kuniko got home that night she said that she had tried to call. It turns out that the event that she was doing at her school was like a bazaar for all the volunteer and international clubs in the area. They had lots of food booths selling foreign foods like Chinese steamed buns, Brazilian sausages, and Japanese traditional sweets. She wanted to invite me over to enjoy some of the food so I was sorry that I missed the call. She also said that some of the girls from one of the schools were from Brazil, and they put on the samba outfits and were doing traditional dancing that opened up a lot of eyes among the staff. Like I said, I was very sorry to miss that call.
This week is an easier week for me. I have the regular classes on Wednesday and Friday at Kobe University, and then a night class Friday night at Sanyo. Sanyo was recently acquired (or is soon to be acquired) by Panasonic, so it’ll be interesting to hear what those guys think about that.
