The Truth is Never Simple

How did people live before the internet? What did you do on a daily basis? I can't remember. I simply cannot remember. I was a kid at the time so I would write, I would play but I cannot remember what else I would fill my time with. It has been many days with no internet in my apartment. 21 days now. Why? Well, I have a brand new apartment and that means no previous occupant had set up internet in the place. So that means I have to do it. When you come as a JET many things can happen. You can be told you have to do it on your own or perhaps your Board of Education (BOE) or Contracting Organization (CO) will help you with it. My BOE has been helping me with everything, from setting up my phone to being with me in my apartment when the gas company came to set up. This means they have also been helping, or rather controlling, the internet situation. The problem is...I do not want to pester them and they also don't speak English. So I have no idea of the ETA on my internet. No id...

The sky the morning before the typhoon hit us If you're moving to a coastal area you're likely to experience the dynamics of the ocean. My city, and my prefecture in general, face the Pacific Ocean. This means something very important: typhoons. We have a typhoon season coming up at the end of August and beginning of September. I was lucky, or perhaps unlucky, enough to experience one days after arriving in Shimanto. A typhoon was headed towards our area and hit us on the Sunday night into Monday. We were quite fortunate that it lost speed and intensity when it hit us and we did not have a rough time but I can describe to you what happened. I'm from the greater Toronto area and that comes with living in a bubble. We don't get much terrible weather. Perhaps a small snow storm or two but the lake effect tends to shield us from more intense snow fall. We don't get tornadoes. We're far from the ocean so there's no hurricanes to speak off. We're not cl...

The following day was once again incredibly busy but I count myself as very lucky. Not everyone has people at their Contracting Organization (CO) that help them out with everything. Mine has been incredibly helpful and I'm very grateful for it. I arrived at the Board of Education (BOE) right on time to start my day. We then began filling out a bunch of forms. I-san, the lovely woman assigned to be escorting us and helping us all day, had made copies of the important forms and filled them out in Japanese. Then all I needed to do was copy the forms she had done on to the actual form. I wrote my address out in Japanese many times and started piecing together which kanji were which. That took about an hour and then we were off to the bank. We had already filled out all the forms but the bank still took a while. There were some things to note about banks in Japan. 1. There is no online banking as we know it in North America. Online banking has only come so far as being able to check...

View from the plane Some people arrive by train, some by bus and some by plane. I took a flight that was a little over an hour to Kochi Airport and was greeted by my Board of Education (BOE) supervisors and two of the ALTs from my city. They had made an adorable sign for myself and the other ALT that had arrived with me. I haven't asked permission to use any names yet so for now I'll return it to letters. From there we got in the BOE car and headed off. We arrived at 11:00am and we didn't make it to my city until about 3:00pm. We did stop for lunch in the middle. It was on this car ride that I was able to take in the sights of the island and it was gorgeous. I also got information on my placement since I hadn't yet been advised where I was working. Turns out I would be working at one of the largest Junior High Schools and one of the largest Elementary Schools in the area. I would be based out of the Junior High and would have a desk there. The other new ALT, K, wo...

Jetlag is overwhelming sometimes. It's almost as though your body has forgotten how sleep works. It seems persistent in stopping you from getting a proper full night's rest. The first day of orientation my roommates were up at 2:30am but I managed to stay asleep until 4:30am. At that point we decided to just get up, get dressed and head down for breakfast at 7am. It was buffet style with meat, eggs, breads and fruit. It was pretty good. The scrambled eggs were, by far, the best. Then it was meeting after meeting. Lots of information and some meetings were dry and others were entertaining. It didn't help that JET lag set in every so often. We were provided lunch and I was able to sit with some new people from San Francisco, Vancouver and Oregon. We went out briefly after lunch and I ran into the other JET headed to my city. Success! During the afternoon I ran into more JETs from my prefecture. They came from New Zealand, Montreal and the USA. It was so great to meet these ...