I went into work today with a purpose. I had lots of things to take care of, some of which have some long term implications. Since I had no classes, I used my time to do lots of odd jobs. For example, I worked on renewing my passport, which is a little bit trickier than you might think considering I’m living in a foreign country. The passport needs to be renewed so that I can travel this summer. The scariest step is putting your own passport into the mail and hoping that it arrives safely. I’ll be without a passport for the next month or so.
Dealing with all the passport paperwork ended up taking lots of time, and I spent more time than I wanted to at the post office. They were very patient with me and my poor Japanese, and we somehow got through the whole thing.
Next I sent off an application for two certified copies of my Japanese exam results, so that I can flash those to potential employers if necessary. I talked with the vice principal and got his permission to use his name on my resume as a reference. I cleaned up my desk, and got rid of lots of junk that had been cluttering things up.
That left me with time to catch up on my vocabulary, and work on my correspondence Japanese course. By the end of the day I was pretty tired out. However, I stuck around until a little bit later to meet up with some other teachers to go out to dinner.
I joined a group of younger teachers (actually, the youngest teachers), and we went out to eat and drink at a local Takasago restaurant. I’ve hung out with a similar group of teachers, with some of the same members, but this group was all from my school, and apparently they meet regularly. I was happy to get invited, and they were very patient with my slow Japanese.
The restaurant was really good, and two of the employees turned out to be recent graduates from our school. They watched their teachers get loaded and joke around, and I wondered what exactly they were thinking. They were new and so they were very nervous. They took our orders very seriously, and didn’t have a very friendly attitude – just trying to be professional, I guess.
Most of the fun was with Ageshi sensei and Matsumoto sensei. Ageshi sensei takes a lot of heat at school, so it was nice to see that he had an outlet to vent his frustrations. I found out that he is planning on getting married this summer, so that was good to hear. Matsumoto sensei played perfectly to his act, and together they were cracking everyone up.
We didn’t stay too late; I was back by 9:30 or so. Ageshi sensei had too much to drink and so he spent five hours at school sleeping it off, and then drove home at around 3 a.m. to be back at school at 7 a.m. That’s hardcore.
