Week One of not really teaching....

So…..on September 1^st I went to one of my Junior High Schools. It was a half day the 1^st, but I had to give a short introduction at the sort of opening ceremony. I was kind of nervous, but think I’m getting used to that kind of stuff.  I’ve been going since the 1^st but so far I’ve only actually done 2 lessons. They had their semester tests so I wasn’t scheduled to teach any classes. I was so bored out of my mind. I sat in on some of the English classes, but it was a very uneventful week. Next week I’ll have a packed schedule with 4 classes each day. On Thursday I went to one of my two Elementary Schools. They were practicing for the Sports Festival in the morning so I got away with only teaching 3 of my 4 classes. 5^th and 6^th graders were pretty tamed compared to the 3^rd and 4^th graders.  But I had the 3^rd and 4^th graders after lunch, so maybe they just couldn’t concentrate.

My predecessor’s name was Patrick, so sometimes the teachers out of habit call me Mr Patrick. It’s understandable because our names are really close (Patorisu vs Patorikku), only one syllable is different.  At my Junior High School, some of the kids asked if I was Patrick’s little sister…..seriously…. asking the dumbest things ever…..

Tuesday night I went to a free community Japanese class. I decided I’m going to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, Level 3. N2 would be way to hard and I don’t feel I’ll have enough time to study. I feel fairly confident that I’ll have enough time to review and pass with more than flying colors with N3. Gonna crack open some books and study. Feels like I’m getting more and more comfortable using Japanese again.

Friday night I hung out with some of the other Matsusaka JETs. Saturday we had dinner again with more of them too. Then today I went to Ise to see the shrine. It is supposed to be the shrine of all shrines. They renovate it every 20 years.  It was really hot, we completely messed up our trains, so I don’t really know what I was focusing on. It should have only took us 15-20mins to get there, but we took so many wrong trains it took us 2 ½ hours to meet up with the other we were meeting. Lesson learned and the next time I go that hot mess won’t happen. There was a really nice river and bridge along the way. We had lunch and akafuku shaved ice (green tea, azuki beans and mochi n the shave ice).

First Tori into the Ise Naiku

Uji Bridge over the Isuzu River

Uji Bridge, Entrance to Naiku

Another of the many Tori

Up towards the shrine

One of the streets on the way to the shrine. Tons of shops.

kids in the river

Akafuku Kakigori

Oh yeah, the other week we had a big typhoon. It rained a lot and  was really windy, but other than that not too many problems. Other areas in my prefecture had landslides, power and water outages, and some people died. They had to evacuate too. But I was totally fine. I stayed in my house all weekend though.

Things are going okay. It feels up and down at times, but I think next week will be a lot better once I’m actually doing more classes. If every week for the next year is going to be like how it was this week I don’t think I’d want to stay more than a year, but I think things will start to pick up and get more interesting next week.