This morning I walked to the train station dressed like I am going on a polar expedition. Thick socks, underwear, long johns, and slacks on the bottom half, t-shirt, thermal long sleeve, dress shirt and jacket on top. I was also wearing gloves and scarf that my grandparents sent me for Christmas.<\/p>\n
I’m walking to the station, and women are riding by on bicycles wearing skirts! I’m worried about whether my snot will freeze in my nose and they are pedaling by in skirts and heels. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a warm weather guy for sure.<\/p>\n
I recognized one of my students on the train, and she said hello in English. She sat a discreet distance away from me to make sure that she wouldn’t have to speak English with me on the train ride, and went out a different door so she wouldn’t have to walk with me to school. Despite things like this, I feel like the students enjoy talking with me at school, especially outside the classroom, and I feel like I’m making a positive impact at school. I’ve heard stories of JETs getting burned out and indifferent, and so I’m hoping that doesn’t happen to me. The lack of positive feedback can be frustrating for some people.<\/p>\n
During the day the history teacher came by to sit down and talk with me several times. We joked around quite a bit, and we keep trying to set a time to go “bar-hopping” as he put it. He’s looking for a girlfriend, and I’ve promised to “give him some tips”. He’s a really conservative Japanese guy – I’m surprised that he talks with me at all. He’s got a very traditional view of Japanese women and their role in the family. <\/p>\n
After school I stopped by the local grocery and picked up a 10 kg bag of rice and loads of vegetables. Tonight was a vegetarian meal (if you don’t count the piece of beef jerky I snacked on while I was waiting for the rice to cook). Tomorrow is more of the same – I’m trying to use as many of the fresh veggies as I can before they go downhill.<\/p>\n
Melanie turned me on to a new source of Guinness in cans in Akashi – I’m going to have to make a beer run in the near future. No plans yet for the weekend, but we’ll see how it pans out. I’ll probably stay local this weekend. January and February are pretty slow for events in Japan. The weather is so cold that festivals don’t go over well. There is a big snow festival up in Sapporo, but that’s a long ways to go for me and it’s a bit last minute. I’ll wait until Spring, and then there are tons of things to do. I’ll also have spring break to explore and 15 days of paid holidays that I can burn before I get a recharge in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I walked to the train station dressed like I am going on a polar expedition. Thick socks, underwear, long johns, and slacks on the bottom half, t-shirt, thermal long sleeve, dress shirt and jacket on top. I was also wearing gloves and scarf that my grandparents sent me for Christmas. I’m walking to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-3G","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}