(written June 13) today I found out this account worked.....hence the move

So I still haven't figured out what's up with my other account. I guess I'll just write in this one. Many many things has happened that I wanted to write about.... but cuz I had been lazy/ waiting for the blogspot page. Oh well.... so I'll try to cover my past 3 weeks real quick. So basically my dad came to visit me. And we had a GREAT 2.5 days visiting *almost* everywhere in Tokyo. And then the week after my lovely cousin came for like 8 days. We had an awesome time. And we watched some TV and of course made fun of some stuff. We even sang this song we saw on "show wa Hey!Say!". nai nai nai..... lol..... But then she left....boo hoo. And now I am alone again. I was starting to get used to being able to speak good English consistently everyday and otherwise have someone to talk to.

But some thoughts on my work: at the beginning.... I didn't like it. Because, well it was different from what I expected. Everything seems different from what I expected. Mainly I didn't expect it to be so tiring. Cuz I'm not the most extroverted person, but the Japanese students are REALLY shy.... sometimes I can't hear them. So it's up to me to make the class lively. That's fine. But then I have like 27 classes/week so it's hard to have that energy. But after a month..... getting the hang of teaching..... it's quite fun. That is when the student's level is high enough so we can talk about something interesting. I actually like a lot of my kids classes too. Cuz they are oh-so-cute. Soooooo cute! And some of them are soooooo young..... cute. But the young ones are a mouthful too. Of course my opinion about teaching changes day to day too.

The craziest thing was that today I found out this one female student I have that seems very delicate and otherwise lady-like..... she majored in engineering! I was surprised so I asked her why and of course I was curious how many girls were in her class. She said the numbers of girls was OK and it was 10/400 O_o But then again, I expected no girls in Japan to study engineering..... so I shouldn't form my own pre-conceptions. Well.... I thought my ex-manager said she wanted to be a programmer, and I was amazed.... but I don't think that's what she meant. Actually I'm not sure but I should've probably tried Japanese back then...lol.


Some interesting things I see:

-the other day for the first time i saw litter....a hs girl trying to be all badass by the pachinko threw away an ice cream wrapper....lol

-boys here really like riding on the backs of the bicycles of other boys....and girls. I even saw two business men!

-Japanese TV really like explaining the "why" to everything

-it is a country full of contradictions

-they don't seem to like helping out when they are needed (of course another over-generalization) but specifically, today, this lady and young man were waiting at our office. Since I was the only one w/o a lesson then, the lady came to talk to me and said a long string of Japanese. I caught 7:30? And since the other teacher's class starts at 7:30 I thought it was a student. So I tried to talk to her more to make sure there's nothing wrong. And we were trading limited Japanese and even more limited English while the other student watched. But then later, my student came and he helped me out. It turned out she was the korean teacher. And the other student....the korean student.... spoke REALLY good English. Like better than my student....I was like....WTF. So I told her some more stuff via my student....sort of a bad situation. And finally I remembered that there were supposed to be korean lessons and my ex-manager had hyped about how hot the guy student was and knew English. Because we were on the subject of guys and I was telling her how Japanese guys were not good for me cuz they didn't speak English. And she was all raving about this guy. Next post....less words and more pics.