The other day when we went over to Kuniko’s parents’ house for dinner one of the things they sent home with us was a big plastic bag full of dry shredded wild pork. I opened it up the other day and was kind of at a loss at how to eat it.

It is shredded almost to powder, so I ended up taking a pinch and popping it in my mouth. The flavor is good – it just kind of absorbs the moisture in your mouth and then you have what tastes like an exotic powdery beef jerky. It’s a strange snack to have around the house.

Today is Friday and I’ll be going to visit my old school in Takasago today for part of the culture festival. I was invited by Yamamoto sensei when we were drinking together a couple of weeks ago, and it sounds like it is OK so I’ll head over there in a few hours to check it out and meet my old coworkers and students.

I was a little hesitant because my replacement (Brenda) will be there, and it is her first culture festival. I kind of wanted her to experience it on her own, but I don’t think it’ll matter if I just pop in during the middle and then leave. I have to go back to Kakogawa and teach two classes at Nozaki sensei’s classroom.

Now that I’m dialed in for grad school I’ll need to make a few investments. The first is one that we already had planned – a new computer. I’m going to buy one online in America and ask my parents to bring it with them to Hawaii when we meet up this summer. My computer now works but is slowing to a crawl. Time for something newer to crank out those papers.

Also on the list is a new printer, because the deskjet printer I have now is fine for printing the occasional picture, but unless you use it often the ink cartriges dry out. If you do use it often, then you have to buy replacement cartriges all the time and they are really expensive. I’m not a big fan of inkjet printers. Nozaki sensei has a laser printer/scanner/copier that I was impressed with. I might get one of those.

Well, I should get ready. It’s already Friday and it looks like a sunny weekend after a week of rain. The mountains are calling my name…

Finally something (relatively) interesting to write about. Finally a big event that will change my life forever. Yes, it’s true –

I tried Ice Cucumber Pepsi.

I didn’t set out to try Cucumber flavored soda, but I was shopping for groceries last night and there it was sitting on the shelf. I picked up a bottle and took it home to chill until Kuniko got home from her drinking party.

We tried it together, and it was better than I expected. After trying the wasabi soda a while back I was ready for anything, but this one wasn’t as exotic as I had hoped. When you open it you really do get a gentle but unmistakable hint of cucumber. It’s pretty heavily carbonated and that kind of balances out the sugar level, which seemed kind of high for a cucumber soda. It reminded Kuniko of melon soda which is a staple on the soda fountain machines here in Japan.

I don’t know if I’d buy it again, but it is kind of fun for the novelty factor. It was cheap, too – only 97 yen for a bottle.

Kuniko crashed out but I was still awake so I camped out in the living room with the laptop and surfed the web hoping to fall asleep. There was some good news, however – I got a congratulations e-mail from the grad school I had applied for – I’m in! They are sending the official paperwork by “courier”, which I think it Australian-speak for “mail”, but I’m not sure. Anyway, that was really good news, and the next step will be getting the classes I want, getting the right textbooks, and paying the (gulp) first bill.

Kuniko is in the second of three weeks in a row without a day off. Having a drinking party tonight was a good stress reliever for her, and I was glad she could do it. Hopefully she’ll have another chance or two before the ordeal is over!

Not a whole lot to report for Tuesday. My first class was with the youngest students, and as always it was an adventure. Yuzuha and Karin, her sister, had a big fight right off the bat about where book they could use, and I had to spend 10 minutes just refereeing that fight before we could get on with the lesson. Luckily the other students are patient.

I really noticed today just how high maintenance Yuzuha and her sister are. They haven’t really developed much independence like the other students in my classes. Maybe just a difference in parenting styles. Anyway, they literally can’t do much of anything without direction.

On the other end of the scale my junior high school class went pretty well. The students there were pretty tired out from some school activities, but they participated in the lesson and really tried their best.

Oh, almost forgot. One of my students decided to quit. I’m not sure why, but it is one of the quietest students in my Tuesday classes. She will barely talk to anyone in either Japanese or English, and so maybe she just is too intimidated by the very vocal classroom. I don’t know why, but there will be one less student for me to teach every week.

Wow, long time no post! It has been nearly a week. What have I been up to?

I’ve been cranking through the work week, and having generally pretty good luck with keeping my students in line. On my way to work I usually bump into an ex-student or two, so even the walk to work can be really interesting. This week I have two junior high school classes, but they’ll be done after tonight, so I can relax a little bit.

Saturday morning Kuniko had to go to work, but it turned out she forgot something at home. She called me and asked me to gather it up and come to Kobe to deliver it. I headed into Kobe in a storm, but by the time I got there it was clearing up.

I walked up the hill to the school, but my timing wasn’t so hot and I had to walk by lots and lots of Kuniko’s students. Nothing like visiting a private girl’s high school in Japan to get the giggles going. Some of the students recognized me and said hello, and if you imagine what a Beatles concert was like with all the screaming you might get an idea of what it was like.

Luckily I found Kuniko outside the gates talking with some of the students from her class, and so I delivered the goods and chatted with them for a while. Kuniko said that she could drive home soon, so I decided to kill the time in Kobe until she was ready. I ate lunch at Taro ramen (free kimchee!), and then had a big black sesame soy latte at Captain Terry’s Coffee Stadium. There are a lot of interesting ways to kill time in Kobe.

Sunday Kuniko had to work again and I took the train to Hoden station and then walked to Kuniko’s parents’ place. I caught a ride with Kuniko’s mom to the family rice paddies, and then spent the day with them planting rice.

It was a beautiful day, and the biggest concern was if I was wearing enough sunscreen. The work isn’t really too tough considering they have a riding rice planter, so we just helped load it up with rice seedlings whenever he drove nearby. Just as we were finishing up in the afternoon a storm appeared on the horizon and quickly threatened the planting operation. We packed things up and got back to the garage just in time. It rained hard, complete with lightning and thunder, and at one point it even hailed. Weird to get hail in summer.

We cleaned up while the storm passed, and then picked up some fresh veggies from the garden for dinner. Back at the homestead I worked on getting their computer up to speed on the internet, and I think they are set up pretty well now. Kuniko came by in the evening, and we all had dinner and dessert before Kuniko and I headed back to get our tired butts in bed.

That’s the update. I’ll try to post a little more regularly this week and onward…

The temperatures are sliding up into the “quite warm” zone, and my walk to work every day seems to get slightly sweatier each time. Luckily for the first time in my teaching career I’m teaching in an air conditioned classroom. I just turn on the AC when I get in to work, and then it’s pretty comfortable the rest of the day.

Work has been going pretty well. The overall behavior of my “problem classes” has improved quite a bit, but there are still one or two students that haven’t gotten the message. I’m going to have to speak with them in the next few weeks and I think we can get them on board.

Yesterday on the way to work I bumped into two of my ex-students from Takasago Minami. I’m always surprised to see them because they look completely different. Yesterday it was two girls that graduated just as I was leaving the school. They were really surprised to see me, and I stood around and chatted with them a little bit. It’s really amazing how many of my students ended up going to the college down the road from Nozaki sensei’s house.

I had a junior high school lesson last night, and we had a new student enter the class. That makes it six students in that class which is a lot. My junior high school lessons are really fun and everyone is pretty comfortable with the environment, so it is no big deal. And it means a little more money for me every month.

Kuniko had some Chinese food that she made for dinner ready to go when I got home, so we had some cold beers and ate Chinese and watched some TV. She had another tough day at work, so we talked about that for a while, and then finally went to bed late.

I got the call from Kuniko’s dad, and so this coming Sunday I’ll take the train to Hoden station and then join them planting the rice seedlings that we prepared last month. That means lots of sunscreen and some serious time out in the sun, but it’ll be fun.

Monday at work I adjusted my expectations of how my classes were going to flow, and it made a big difference. The students also had a better attitude about their classes today. What was happening was the payoff from last week when I sat some students down and asked them to cool it a little bit and let everyone study.

One of the best students today was Shouta. He is normally kind of noisy, but today he really gave it a good effort and I was proud of him. He also reigned in some of the other noisy students and kept the class under control.

In the evening I had a private lesson with Yuka at her house. It was my first time walking there on my own, but it I did it OK and only made one brief wrong turn. We spent an hour or so talking about some tests that she had and some more English tests that are coming up. After the lesson Yuka’s mom drove me to the station, so it didn’t take too long for me to get back home.

Kuniko and I met at the station around 9 p.m., and since Kuniko had to do some shopping for a new parasol, we caught dinner out and then shopped and came home. One really cool ad I found inside the supermarket at Saty was a promotion for a “California Festival”. What was featured on the artwork to instantly give people the idea of California? Vineyards? Beaches? Fresh fruits and vegetables? Sunny weather? Nope… Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s smiling mug. I’ll try to take some snapshots later on before they take it down.

As a product of all this running around we were both pretty tired out, so we went to bed pretty soon after getting home. Maybe I’ll have some more time to rest up tomorrow morning….

Towards the end of last week I seemed to have a lot of attention starved students doing everything they could to disrupt the class and get people to either laugh or groan in their general direction.

Thursday was the worst – I had a student stand up on the desk and whip his shorts down so he could show everyone his little pecker. Thanks, man. After I got everything back under control I felt like I had somehow gone through a rite of passage. After classroom nudity things can only get better (or wierder?)

Friday night Kuniko and I went out to dinner in our continuing quest for a new restaurant to replace the now-defunct Graciani’s as our favorite. Tonight we tried a French restaurant south of Motomachi called “Nude Diner”. The dinner was really good, all the food tasted great, but the atmosphere was a little funkier than we would have liked.

After dinner we walked around Sannomiya. We actually bumped into an old college friend of Kuniko’s, and we had a cocktail at a restaurant that featured a big wine list with lots of California wines (they even had Ravenswood!). I had a glass of zinfandel port from Paso Robles, and Kuniko had a lychee drink that was pretty tasty.

Saturday I met up with Inoguchi sensei for dinner in Motomachi. We had originally planned on meeting for Chinese food, but since the restaurant was seriously expensive ($100/person) we decided to bag on that idea and went to a yakitori instead. Inoguchi sensei is still unemployed and not really looking for work. We had fun talking and we slipped back and forth between English and Japanese the whole night. I’m hoping we can meet up again in the future – maybe we can invite him and his wife over for dinner one night.

Sunday has been pretty mellow – just a little shopping and relaxing at home. It seems like it is our only real chance to rest up for the week. Kuniko is starting a 21 day in a row work schedule beginning on Monday. Yuck.

Starting last weekend people have been starting to plow their empty rice fields in preparation for planting. I noticed on Monday that most fields had been flooded with water to submerge the soil, so that means that planting will probably happen in the next week or so.

Not a day after all the fields were flooded I was walking home at night and the chorus of frogs out in the water was almost deafening. Where do they hang out until the water shows up? Why hadn’t I heard them before? Each rice paddy is frog central now.

This also means that we’ll probably get the call from Kuniko’s dad about helping out with the planting. I’m not sure when it’ll happen, but I’m looking forward to going out there and getting muddy again!

How jealous am I of Corey’s trip across the world? I’m glad that he’s keeping his blog up to date, despite traveling in some pretty remote areas. Can’t wait to see what he does in Europe for a month.

I’ve been plugging away at my classes this week and Kuniko has been just at busy at work. We’ve both been getting in late, so I’ve been too tired to post anything lately. I thought this morning that I’d take the time to catch things up a little.

Yesterday I sent off my graduate school application, so lets hope that they see it in a good light and allow me to spend too much money on higher education. The decision making process should last about a month – that means that I should know by the end of June.

I had to have one of my noisy students stay after class for a brief discussion about his behavior. Hayaki is always noisy, and he does whatever he can to get the attention of the people around him. Mainly I think he’s looking for attention from the two girls in the class, Ryoka and Manami. Today he was being noisy and distracting, and after I asked him three times to be quiet Manami told me that he was making it hard for them to study. Hayaki heard this, and he quieted down a little bit.

After class I told him that he should at least have the courtesy to not both other students, and that I thought he could be pretty good at English if he really tried. I wanted to say that by goofing off in class you aren’t impressing those girls, and you’re making yourself look stupid. Maybe I’ll save that conversation for the next time he acts out.

In another class this week one of my students was acting up and the other students kind of self-policed him. We were playing concentration, and all the students were really into the game, memorizing the location of cards that I had laid out on the table. Fuwa decided to be cute and mix a bunch a cards up. That pissed off the other students and a girl really laid into him for doing something like that. I was surprised to see him start crying, but I figured it was best to let her words sink in a little.

As you can see my job has a lot more to it than just teaching English. Managing the relationships and behavior in the class plays a bigger role than I had expected. I keep thinking that these experiences will help me down the road in raising my own little munchkins.

It has been a wet week, but luckily I have yet to get caught out in the rain. In the mornings the last couple of days it has been raining hard, but by the time I’m leaving for work things have stopped. On my way home it tends to be just cloudy, so I’ve been lucky.

That’s about all that’s been happening. Not too exciting. I’ve had the travel bug lately, and I’m really looking forward to Hawaii in August. We’re hoping to take a trip to Okinawa sometime after the summer ends, and next year is still up in the air. One destination that is being tossed around is Viet Nam, so we’ll see if that pans out.

Heading to a seminar in Osaka Sunday morning generally isn’t my idea of fun. It usually doesn’t hold a lot of promise for me as a day of entertainment. But sometimes, things work out well.

Nozaki sensei asked me to attend the seminar on teaching English to young children, but apologized that it was being held on Sunday from 10-3. I didn’t mind, but I got up that morning pretty early, and dragged my sleepy ass to the train station – something I haven’t done in a long time.

The ride into Osaka was about an hour long, and from the station it was about a 15 minute walk to the building where the seminar was being held. On the way I walked under the Umeda Sky Building. Directly underneath they were setting up for a concert and what turned out to be a Hawaiian Fair. There were quite a few people wearing Hawaiian shirts, and it looked like they were even setting up some barbecues. I was already looking forward to my lunch break.

I was a little nervous walking into the seminar building because it looked like more of a designer studio/karaoke bar. I did find a sign on the outside saying that I was in the right place, so I went in and followed to signs to the seminar room.

I had imagined a very large venue, with about a hundred attendees. I was talking with Kuniko earlier, hoping out loud that there would be at least one other foreign teacher in the group so I wouldn’t stick out so much.

Unfortunately it was a very small venue, a group of only 10 teachers, all female, and they were all really nervous having me there. The teachers were all private teachers, used to teaching in a classroom usually based in their home, and so seeing me there made them think really hard about their English. They didn’t know me, so they didn’t know if I’d suddenly stand up and shout “You mispronounced “mouse”! What kind of teacher are you?”

I was able to restrain myself throughout the seminar, and luckily the seminar instructor was really professional and did a great job. She came over and asked me if I was OK to do the seminar mainly in Japanese. Nice of her to ask my permission. The whole point of the seminar was to use “all English” in the classroom, so there was a lot of English spoken that day.

The teachers in the class warmed up to me little by little, and there was something about having everyone dance together while “wiggling your hips” that bonded us a little bit. Most of the seminar was about teaching English to the youngest students, so we had a lot of singing, gestures, dancing and goofing around. The seminar instructor knew all the dance moves and was really entertaining to watch. Unfortunately for me it wasn’t about watching – more about participating. We would often play the role of the student, and so we’d be pretending like we were three year olds, and acting appropriately.

We had a one hour break for lunch, so I walked over to the Sky Building with seven of the other teachers. The place was packed with people, and on stage they had lots of people dancing traditional Hawaiian dances. The tents were serving up Hawaiian food, and one tent even had Hawaiian beer. I was excited to try some new foods.

The other teachers in my group looked around and decided that it was too sunny, too noisy, and they started looking for a traditional family restaurant where they could eat safe, familiar Japanese food. Come on ladies, do you want to live forever? I told them that I’d see them back at the seminar and waded into the crowd.

It turned out to be a great decision. I ordered up a BBQ chicken fajita at a stand that was also selling Kona beer. I didn’t order a beer (the sacrifices I make for work) but I talked to one of the employees about where I could buy some in Japan. A long time ago Carrefour had them for a while, but then they disappeared. At 400 yen a bottle (about $3) they are expensive, but pretty good compared to the usual beers I find.

The guy didn’t know anything about where to buy Kona beer, but he was a cool guy and we chatted for a while. I think he was just a student being paid to sell stuff. Note to Kona Brewery: train your employees better. I headed over by the park and sat down on a bench and watched the dancers for a while. Everywhere people were walking around and I got a big culture shock when I smiled at a bunch of hula dancers walking by – instead of giggling and walking away they giggled and walked over. Turned out they were actually from Hawaii and in town for this festival as part of some community group in Hawaii. There were 12 girls all together, mostly in their twenties. I talked with them for a while and it was nice to use English at full speed after the first few hours of the seminar.

I wished them a good time in Osaka and gave them a few things to try (okonomiyaki and takoyaki), and then they headed backstage to get ready for their dance. Since it was my big chance to eat more Hawaiian food I went back to another booth and ordered a “Hawaiian burger” that was like a fat pita roll, filled with potatoes with some kind of yogurt sauce, spicy ground beef, salsa, and a big slice of spam. Yum. To top it all off I got a shaved ice from two bikini wearing sisters that were attracting a crowd of horny men.

So it was time to head back to the seminar, and I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t think about skipping the second half of “wiggling my hips” with a bunch of nervous older women. The temptation of hanging out backstage with my new hula dancing Hawaiian friends was great, but in the end of course I went back, and settled in for the rest of the afternoon.

The rest of the seminar went well, and I think I picked up some good tips. The seminar was run by the publisher of some of the textbooks, so of course they want you to buy and use their textbooks for your classes. Some of the ideas were nice general ideas, and so I think it was a pretty positive experience.

After it ended at three o’clock I found that I was the only one heading out the door. The other teachers were sitting around socializing and I really felt like an outsider then. I thanked the organizers of the seminar, and headed back to the station.

In order to get there I had to cut through the Sky Building once more, and this time the place was even more crowded with people watching the dancing and drinking the beer. As I walked through the crowd I felt a hand on my arm, and when I looked back there was a couple of guys holding TV cameras and asking for an interview. One of the guys I recognized from the Kona beer booth – I guess he had vouched for me.

I said sure, so we stopped in the middle of the crowd, right in front of a food booth and we did an impromptu interview. They asked about where I was from, what I was doing, and some background questions. I just joked around with the interviewer for a while – it was fun.

During the interview I talked with the guy that I had recognized from the Kona beer booth, and I told him how much I liked his beer, and said that we should go back there and have one. He misunderstood, and bought me a beer from the stand right next to us – a Suntory lager. So they filmed me drinking a cold beer, and I gulped that thing down in two swallows. It hit the spot after the long seminar.

Nothing attracts a crowd like a TV crew, and before long a group of people were standing around trying to figure out if I was famous or not, and we started to create a traffic jam. Two of the girls that I had met from Hawaii earlier came walking by and said hello, and I tried to pawn them off on the interviewer, but they were smart and kept moving. Finally we wrapped it up and I told them I had to hit the road. They offered more beer, and it was tempting but I declined.

On the way home I stopped at the bookstore and bought the new Dick Francis paperback book and Candy Land (the board game) to play with my students sometime. From there it was an hour long train ride home. I met up with Kuniko on the train, and we came back and had cheese, crackers, beer and wine for dinner.

It turned out to be quite a day, and a lot more fun than I expected it to be. This week will kind of pale in comparison, but I gotta bring home the bucks…

Kuniko had to go in to work on Saturday, so I had most of the day to myself. I left for Kobe in the early evening, and Kuniko picked me up at a prearranged secret location in her car. From there we drove into Amagasaki to raid Carrefour. Our mission was to buy a nice bottle of wine for one of her coworkers.

While you can find wine in places closer to us than Amagasaki, we wanted to get a good one, and for that you have to travel a little bit. We found a pretty nice bottle of Pinot Noir, and dropped it in our basket with two other bottles of wine (for us). I bought their last two bottles of Negra Modelo beer, and we stocked up on cheese and other fun stuff. They also had a Thai food “fair” going on with lots of sauces and noodles, so I bought a little bit of those too. This store has become more dangerous the farther it is away from us.

We ate in the food court at McDonald’s (Tamago Double Cheeseburger) and then headed back home the long way in the car. Kuniko still had plenty of energy to drive us back home, so we cranked up the stereo, opened up the windows, and let the warm night air blow through the car. It was a really nice way to make the longish drive go by quickly.

Friday night I met up with Antoine for dinner and drinks. We decided to try all new places today, so we started at The New York, which had a good atmosphere but a little too quiet. We had two beers there and then chatted with the bartender to try to get restaurant recommendations. It turned out he liked Western music (i.e. American/British) and spoke quite a bit of English.

He consulted around and recommended 金魚 (goldfish), which was not a dish but the name of an Okinawan restaurant in town. I had always wanted to try it, so it worked out great. I liked the bartender – the next day he was off to hit the beach in Guam and practice his English.

金魚 turned out to be pretty good. Pretty healthy food, too. We had rice with goya, pork and kimchee. Also, we ordered up tofu with a peanut sauce, okinawan stir-fried noodles, and some sweet fried pork.

They sat us in the middle of the dark restaurant next to a big indoor pond full of goldfish. Because of the location we were at the center of attention, and everyone was watching to see how we ordered, how we handled our chopsticks, what we ate, etc. Lots of pressure. I didn’t really mind – it kind of goes with the territory nowadays.

Most of the night with Antoine we talked about the status of his relationship with Miwako. While over the past couple of years they’ve gone through numerous “rough patches” involving separations and such, Antoine is convinced that this latest one is the last. He considers himself single, and he told his parents as much a little while ago. So I guess the wedding is off. Anyway, we covered that topic to Antoine’s satisfaction.

After dinner we hit a small bar that I had walked by a while back and wanted to try. After a beer there we decided to wrap things up and call it night. I walked Antoine back to his station and said goodbye, then I headed to meet up with Kuniko since she was in town drinking with some coworkers. She had had a tough night, so we went out for a coffee and a piece of white chocolate torte to commiserate.

By the time we got home I was pretty tired out, not just from the drinking and walking around but also from the listening and talking – I felt like a psychologist just getting off work. It was a fun night, though, and certainly better than staying home and watching baseball on TV.

A ride on the sushi conveyor belt in Tokyo.

Not much going on Wednesday. The temperature around here is heating up quite a bit, and that makes for a little bit sweatier day. My students and I can enjoy air conditioning complements of Nozaki sensei. That’ll make a long hot summer a little easier.

Kuniko had a stressful day at work today, but she still found the time to cook me a big dinner that was waiting for me when I got home. Beef, mushrooms and garlic stir fried together with some salmon rice on the side. Yum. I washed it down with some pinot noir and it hit the spot.

Not much more to add – it was a seriously unexciting day. Maybe I should cut down on the blogging for a while until some more exciting things happen. Hmm…