The rain was coming down hard all last night, and so I was ready for a wet one. I put on all my gear, grabbed the extra large umbrella, and went outside in the downpour. Once I got out there it wasn’t so bad. The downside of the large umbrella is that it catches the wind easily, so I have to be more careful about holding on to it. <\/p>\n
I had four classes today. My first class started but no Japanese teacher showed up. The class and I waited around for about five minutes, but it seemed liked nobody was going to come. I had no idea who was supposed to be there, and I didn’t want to leave the class there while I chased all over the place looking for the teacher. I made a judgement call and taught the class alone. <\/p>\n
Some of the exercises had to be adapted because I had designed them with two teachers in mind, but really it worked out just fine. The students did pretty well – I think they were amused to see me working without a net. It was a first year class, so they haven’t been around long enough to know how abnormal the situation was. I handled things in English throughout the class, and switched to Japanese when students got confused. <\/p>\n
After class I found out that Mr. Kimura was supposed to be there. He was pretty embarrassed that he forgot, so I think I’ve got a free beer coming from him one of these days.<\/p>\n
Mr. Hayashi finally booked my flight back to the USA today. I fly from Osaka to San Francisco on July 16th, with a couple of hours stopover in Seoul. I get to spend about two weeks in California, and then I get back on the plane on August 2nd and fly back to Korea. I have to spend a night in Korea, which saves me some money but also costs me some money in hotel bills. I think it’s some kind of kickback system by the travel agencies, but that’s fine. It’ll give me a chance to eat some more spicy food before I get back to Osaka.<\/p>\n
After school I met up with one of my ESS students, Harada-san. She normally takes her bike, but the rain was so heavy that she took the train today. I rode the same train back, and she sat next to me and we chatted in English only the whole time. I noticed that we were getting lots of dirty looks from other passengers. I have a feeling talking with students on the train and maybe sitting next to them is a bad idea. I’m not sure, but I took my cue from Harada-san and enjoyed the chat. A while back she asked me only to speak to her in English so that she is forced to learn, so our conversation was slow but pretty wide-ranging. <\/p>\n
Back home I organized a couple of loads of laundry and decided to fire up my new grill. It’s just a ceramic bucket with a grill on top and a little air duct on the bottom. I tried to get the fire going, but it was pretty smoky, and there wasn’t much heat. Luckily I had a backup plan, and had a pan ready to fry up the meat if the BBQ didn’t work out.<\/p>\n
While I was waiting for the rice to finish cooking, I peeked out the window at the barbecue, and while I was in working on other things, the charcoal had turned red, and that sucker was putting out some heat. I threw some more charcoal on the coals, and in five minutes I was grilling my meat. <\/p>\n
The meat is really thinly sliced here, so it cooked fast and I was in business. I grilled up beef and also pork. I had marinated the beef, and the pork went on just with a dusting of black pepper and some spicy stuff my folks had sent me a couple of days ago. <\/p>\n
The meat tasted great, and my whole back porch smelled like roasted meat. The lady next door came out of the balcony to see what was smelling good, and I gave her a big wave and a grin. She was probably getting a big cloud of smoke blowing into her place when I was trying to get the thing started – I’m lucky she didn’t call the fire department on me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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