DearScotty

I have internet at the house! Holy shit! Oh, and the town newsletter that has a brief write up on me comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’m also going out again to Fukuoka to meet some JETs and Theresa’s coming along. Well, it’s been raining non stop for the past few days, and I’ve had to ride my bloody bike in the rain to the town office. But the weather will clear up tomorrow so, it looks like tomorrow should be a fine Friday indeed.

It appears as though the school has showed their might with regards to the housing situation and is dropping it. They haven’t mentioned it to me all day. The boss, who I don’t really know or like, started talking and joking with me today. He’s never done that before so, I think know that he feels some sort of power has been defined he can relax. I got a haircut with Masumi at her friend’s shop and when I came back, the boss said I was cool with my new haircut. He had never complimented me before. Oh yeah, my hair is pretty cool. The guy gave me a messy Japanese style haircut, or course, tomorrow it will go back to it’s boring self.

So the drama with the housing has cooled off, and Theresa will either go with the host family or rent an apartment. If she “stays” with the host family she will still see me quite often, but if she rents an apartment, she said she might stay there more since she’s actually paying for it. We are also going to hopefully buy some scooters this weekend so we can get around town and make commuting to see each other easier.

We also got her a phone yesterday. It’s pretty rad, but no TV.

Boy was I wrong in yesterday’s entry! Lifeless day at the office? Ha! Shortly after writing that entry my supervisor gets off the phone and tells me that Theresa is down stairs. I was a bit confused but, I thought maybe she came with her translator just to say hi to me, or ask a silly question. So, I quickly ran downstairs before my supervisor because I didn’t want him to talk to Theresa’s translator and find out that she was living with me. Too late! Theresa was at the booth of the office that gives the alien registration cards. Theresa’s translator had taken her to pick of her gaijin card at my town office since she was living here. Big mistake! When my supervisor got downstairs he told them not to give her the registration card because she can’t live at the apartment. Once that was cleared up, we went up stairs to talk to the superintendent and the other boss, his title eludes me. We apologized, and tried to explain that this was temporary. I think they bought it, and gave Theresa one week to find another place.

Theresa, her supervisor, and I went to have lunch to talk things over. That’s when we told the woman that we were trying to be secret about everything, but now that it’s out in the open, we have to change those plans. The translator is going to introduce Theresa to a host family and try to see if they will accept mail for her, and help her get an alien registration card. I also figured out, Theresa can get a phone through me, so she actually doesn’t need the card at the moment. Well, hopefully things will work out.

Theresa arrived yesterday so I now have someone to vent all my frustrations.  She’s going to be taken to her school today and hopefully get set up with all the bureaucratic necessities to get by in Japan.  I get to enjoy another lifeless day at the town office.  I don’t have the translator today, so that means I sit here and let my soul and dignity burry themselves in a rice paddy outside.  On a not so brighter note, I have to prepare a speech in Japanese for my introduction at the School’s opening day ceremony on Friday.  I wasn’t really nervous about it until I bombed my short introduction at the opening ceremony for a three day camp for about 15 students.  The kids were quite lifeless and didn’t respond to my cheerful “Good Morning!”  So I’m hoping the kids at the junior high on Friday won’t be such retards.

Pop Rocks and Humidity go together like baking soda and vinegar. Before you begin to open the package you can here the little bastards popping and crackling inside. Once it’s opened and you pour the pop rocks into your hand, one big chunk is pasted to the wrapper and won’t slide out. After managing to tear the package apart and pull out the goods, you’re stuck with a lifeless jumbo pop rock that can’t be removed from your hand. Now this all happened to me at my desk next to the educational office workers so, needless to say, I felt like quite a spazz licking my palm clean from the sour goodness of my Pop Rock. Thanks mom! I’m sure this will be a hit with the students. If English isn’t going to be hard enough, they’re going to have an English teacher trying to kill them with toxic American candy.

I went bird watching today with my translator couple and some of their students. My translators met at a bird watching club, got married, had a kid, and now chauffer the dumb foreigner around. They are actually really really nice so I was actually a bit excited to go; well actually I was more excited about the barbeque afterwards. We went to a really beautiful valley sandwiched between mountains that also had a gorgeous river running through. We hopped on with a tour group and trekked around the area. The fellow bird watchers were equipped with huge telescopes, special binoculars for hawk watching, and really cool fanny packs. So I was with a bunch of pros. About ten minutes in, the group stops and sets up their tripods. Spiders are all around me, so I try to keep on walking, but realize, they aren’t going to continue because they’ve spotted something. I make my way back to the group, which is rotating the children to look through the telescopes. I got onto this carousel and took a look at this fine bird, perched atop an electric line. To my utter amazement, I had traveled across the Pacific Ocean to Japan so I could see a sparrow.

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Went out to the city last night to party with the JETs. Partying with JETs is like partying at your high school homecoming where the kids dance to what ever shit the DJ throws out. I was lucky enough to find a few JETs that weren’t of this spazz JET type. Fun was had, that’s about all I remember until I heard “Keisin desu” at which point I woke up, got off the train and made my way home.

I have failed. After a half hour of eating food gestures and sloppy Japanese I have failed to convince them that eating sushi without rice or soy sauce doesn’t taste good. They kept insisting that I must add soy sauce to make it taste good. No matter how much I tried to tell them that I understood their point, and it was their point that was insane, they kept insisting I eat sushi with soy sauce. I told them that an apple needs nothing else to taste good. God made it taste delicious just the way it is. But sushi needs things to taste good, and so, it is not delicious. I was able to ask them, which tastes better, cooked salmon or raw salmon, both without any fixings. They all agreed the cooked was better. But then told me to add soy sauce to the sushi. I give up.

Almost adopted a dog today. During a drive around town my translator and I went to the lake and had to go up a mountain with a winding trail. We almost hit the little guy, and my translator just kept going. I told him to stop the car and so he did. I got out and the pup went up to me, pretty happy that someone was there to pet him besides the thousands of ticks and spiders in the area. I took a picture and sent Theresa an email with the picture to see if she thought it was a good idea to take the dog. We couldn’t get down from the fence so I let the dog choose. I administered the dog get into car test. Well the dog chose not to get into the car. So instead of taking the dog against its will, I decided to let it suffer the consequences of making the wrong decision. Poor pup though, because I’m pretty sure the little guy chose to stay there and wait for his abandoning owner. Well, maybe when Theresa gets here we can go back there and see if he’s still there. Of course this time I won’t have a car so I don’t know how it’s going to pass the test the second time around.

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Pay Day. After not working for over two and a half months this day couldn’t have come any sooner. My translator arrived 5 minutes early and apologized for being late as usual. Knowing there was nothing to do, I asked him to take me to my bank so I could check my balance and withdraw some money. I wasn’t sure how much money I would be getting because I didn’t know how much they were taking out for health insurance, pension plans, and school lunches.

The atm is at my train station so Naoki waited in the car while I waited outside the vestibule. After sweating off 2 gallons of Pocari Sweat (a delicious. Flavorless version of Gatorade) I was able to enter the ATM after the woman had finished. So it’s not just in America where women take hours at an ATM. It must be a global issue. Would it really be so bad to have a male ATM and a female ATM? Guys take about 1 minute to withdraw the necessary funds. Woman take about 20 minutes to check their balance, deposit four checks (separately), buy stamps, transfer money from checking to savings, and another 5 minutes to put all the junk back in their purse.

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They are insane. Last Friday I bought a phone from Vodafone. Actually it was free with a one year contract but also came with a lot of grief. Buying the phone appeared to be easy. I was helped in choosing one, so I got a pretty good one, high quality screen, good camera, mp3 player, good stuff, but nothing we don’t have in America. The phone is a bit bigger than American phones, so I wasn’t really too happy with the purchase, but I needed a phone. After we got everything straightened, they took my bank account, my copies of my passport and alien registration, then they told us to come back in an hour.

Well, later that night I went to my translator’s house for dinner. He has a really huge house, and believe it or not, it’s a Japanese style house! Of course, I’m kidding, but actually I’m not. It was a pretty sweet house, with a joining tea room, and other mysterious rooms you’d only find in a Japanese home. His kids were thrilled to see me and even sang “America America” to me. Not sure what cartoon it was from, but it was definitely cute. Dinner was pretty good, no horse meat, or whale. I also tried shochu for the first time. It’s like a harder sake, so of course that meant they had to water it down. So it was like sake and water, they don’t really mix well. I did the stupid foreigner thing and popped out an edamame that flew across the room and at which point they all laughed at me. The sucky thing is is that I’ve been cooking edamame my first week here, so I really don’t know how the hell I messed that up. Anyways, back to the phone.

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