I know most of the entries on here are about strange things I’ve encountered or about things that might annoy me but now that I’m nearing the end of my time in Japan I am getting more nostalgic.   This is due in large part to the fact that I know my time here is just about up.  If I had another year to go I would surely still be griping.

Since I visit so many schools, I have for the last two weeks been having “last classes” with my students.  I just have four more days of school to go and I’m really really looking forward to finishing them all up.  But while I won’t miss my job, there’s plenty about the students that I will miss.  In many of the last classes I’ve taught, the home room teacher has made the students write me good bye notes and passed out a sheet with English sentences they might copy down so that at the end of class I have a million notes that say:

“Dear Tessa,

Hello/Hi/Good Morning!, (guess they don’t understand yet that “/” means “either/or”)

I think you are a very nice teacher.  Thank you for teaching us.“

And several notes like this:

“I don’t want you to go back to Canada.“

Hmm, can’t very well go back to somewhere I’ve never been…

But always, within the stack of dutifully copied drivel, there are a few students who have actually written something from their own head, including:

“Please take me to France!“

“At first I didn’t like English but thanks to you, I like English.“

“Your class is very fun.  I enjoyed English with you.”

It’s these notes and those students that make me sad to leave.  (Not so sad that I’ll actually stay though)

Yesterday, two students came to deliver a sealed note, decorated with stickers and tiny origami cranes and inside were cartoon pictures of little girls holding hands that had been drawn and laboriously cut out.  It said “Dear Tessa, We had a lot of fun with you, good luck in France, don’t forget us, we’ll miss you.” And then they handed me a tiny stuffed Mickey Mouse as a present.  It’s THESE cute gestures that warm my heart. 

So as my days here near their end, I can think back more readily to all the good times I’ve had and all the things that I will miss.  But there are more things beyond Japan that I’m looking forward to and of course, my nostalgia grows only as my time here shrinks.

Actually, closer to two drinks a minute.

Today on my 8 minute bike ride from my apartment to the train station I counted the number of vending machines that I passed.  (I didn’t include cigarette vending machines, of which there was three.)  How many were there??

13!!!! 13 chances to buy a drink in 8 minutes!!!

Let’s not forget either that I live in a small, rural town where there isn’t much to begin with.  Imagine a wide landscape of rice fields and concrete, dotted with strange, brightly colored trees with really, really juicy fruit.  :p

Okay, they’re not really much funnier than any other bands but I’m bored so I’m going to list all the J-Bands I can think of.  Here goes:

Mr. Children

GreeeeeeeeeN

PornoGraffiti

Exile

Hey!Say!Jump!

Ehh, that’s all I can think of now.

No, no, that’s not a band.  It’s really all I can think of.

My gym, like my schools, requires “indoor shoes” to work out in.  I just discovered this the other day when I went with another teacher who lives in the same apartment complex as I do.  She looked at me kind of funny when I didn’t change from my “outside” sneakers into my special “inside” ones.  But I can’t be bothered to buy a special pair of shoes to wear at the gym let alone lug them around with me so I can change into them when I get here.  The point of my story actually is that they have regular house shoe like slippers for people to wear around the locker room (which I never do, ew!).  But yesterday I noticed some funny writing on one pair.  This is what it said:

“Carrot, pepper and Green Peace, Oh how I hate them!”

Next to each noun was a little cartoon drawing of a carrot, a bell pepper and…peas. hahahahahaha!

I’m in! I’m in! I’m in-I’m in-I’m in!!!!!!!!!!

Into the French teaching program, that is. 

I wasn`t supposed to hear anything until the middle of May but today I got an email saying that I was accepted into the program!  I don’t know yet what level I will be teaching and I won’t find out until mid June.  Hopefully I will get my first or second choices which are Teacher’s college and high school, respectively.  Fingers crossed I don’t get primary school because then I may have to scrap the whole thing.  I don’t think I would last a whole school year with rugrats.  Plus, if I am a primary school teacher I will be the main teacher and not just an assistant.  That doubles my workload as I will be expected to do all the lesson planning. 

I’ll be in Montpellier Academy which was my first choice!  (I got to pick three areas I wanted to be placed.)  BUT, the Montpellier Academy covers a wide area and doesn’t mean I will necessarily be placed in the city itself.  In fact, I could be as far as 5 hours away.  Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that! 

Even if I’m far from Montpellier, I have heard that the entire region is really nice and beautiful.  If I can’t be in Montpellier I hope to at least be near a beach!

This Saturday I went on a day trip to Nagasaki.  It takes about 2 and a half hours to get there by bus from Fukuoka.  I went by myself which was really nice because traveling alone can be quite enjoyable sometimes and I haven’t done it in a while!

Nagasaki is a really pretty city.  It is easy to walk around and you can see a lot of Portugese influence in the city architecture.  I saw four Catholic Churches, one of which had been rebuilt after the A-bomb.  I also went to the Atomic Bomb Museum.  It was really interesting.  I expected to see a lot of “woe is me” exhibits but was surprised to find that there was instead a lot of scientific description of the bomb and it’s effects.  There were also testimonies from survivors and one survivor who acknowledged that many of the corpses left on the site were Koreans as the rescue workers were discriminating even then and collecting only the injured Japanese people.   I also found it to be pretty interesting that for the most part, the museum managed to skirt naming America as the perpetrator of the bomb.  Captions were phrased as “When the bomb hit…” or “The Atom Bomb was dropped at…” Overall, it was a really interesting and worthwhile place to visit.  Most of the museum is dedicated to the abolition of nuclear armament and testing and for promoting world peace.

I also ate castella which is a kind of pound cake originally from Portugal that Nagasaki has “claimed” as their specialty (read: they can put it in packages and people will buy a lot of it to bring back as a “souvenir”.)

There were other nice things in Nagasaki too but nothing that will sound as great in a blog as it was in real life.

I had a very fun trip.

…and that was how I spent my weekend.  Thank you.

Okay, I’m sure anyone who has visited Japan has had the inevitable shock of buying what they thought was a chocolate-filled pastry only to find out that it was filled not with chocolate, but a disappointingly gritty paste of brown beans.   No, this isn’t a practical joke.  These folks over here actually like the stuff.

Now, after MY first initial shock, I have gotten used to all sorts of bean-filled sweets.   Bean filled pastries, bean filled doughnuts, bean filled bread, bean filled rice balls…the list goes on and on.  Additionally, there are a million different KINDS of bean filling, red beans, white beans, green beans, soy beans, smooth beans, chunky beans, blah blah blah.

It has taken me nearly two years of living here to finally put my foot down.  NO MORE BEANS!!!!!!  It’s one thing to have them as an option (as we have jam, pudding, chocolate, whipped cream, etc. as optional fillings for our desserts) but it seems the only option we have here is what color of the friggin bean paste we want.  And here’s another newsflash: It’s NO REPLACEMENT FOR CHOCOLATE!! It’s edible, but it ain’t great.

I’m soooooo tired of BEANS!!!!!!!!

Due to the continuing controversy over China’s extreme mishandling and abuse of Tibet and it’s people Scotty and I will no longer be traveling to China over the summer. Our original plan was to travel around China for a month, spending about a week in Beijing for the Olympics, visiting Shanghai and seeing the Great Wall among other things but we have since nixed those plans in support of the Chinese and Tibetan people and to protest against the oppressive regime of the Chinese government.

This is our *new* (tentative) plan: At the end of July we will fly to Singapore and after a few days there take a train to Malaysia where we will hop a ferry to the Perhentian Islands and spend about three weeks there lazing about on the beach. Then spend a couple of days in the Taman Negara rainforest before heading to Kuala Lumpur for a visit.

I have to admit, I’m probably more thrilled about our new plan than I was about China. I’m very excited to give one last hurrah to Southeast Asia before heading back west.