I don’t want to bore you with details (to be perfectly honest, I don't want to bore myself with writing details either), so I’ll just give you a bit of a broad overview of how our lives have been travelling along for the last two months since arriving in Japan.
I’ll also admit that I can’t be bothered uploading photos to the blog, simply because it takes too much effort to resize them, so I’m just going to put in some links to my facebook albums.
A brief timeline of our lives since arriving…
5 June – touchdown! Got on the first plane of the morning in Hobart at 6am. Got off the plane from Sydney to Osaka at 8pm, local time. Met up with a charming chap called Simon on the plane whom we’ve quickly be-friended. After an hour or so of immigration and customs and whatnot, we arrived at our house near midnight, to find that it didn’t match the pictures we had been shown. Tired, and feeling like we had no alternative, we signed the lease and went to sleep.
5 June – 10 June: Before training.
We did a lot of cleaning the house and trying to find out about our local area. It took us days to find a ¥100 store – which turned out to be on Abeno Suji, embarrassingly close to our house.
6 June, we were at the Sumiyoshi Ward office registering ourselves. We saw a bike store around the corner. I bought a phone from Docomo (which turned out to be a mistake because everyone else has Softbank phones except me). We cleaned the house a lot because it was full of dust and mould. Not nice.
7 June, we went back to the bike store around the corner and bought ourselves some bikes. Tom got a nice blood red bike, I got a midnight blue one. To practice our riding skills we rode in a straight line toward the bay and got terribly lost and confronted by the industrial estate just two kilometres down the road from our sweet little house.
8 June, we rode to Tennoji on our new bikes and got on the Osaka loop line and went to Osaka Castle. It was refreshingly green, but a bit confronting in it’s tourist oriented bustle.
Osaka Castle photos.
We then rode past a little store selling tomato plants on the way home, and Tom has since had a little garden on our balcony with beautiful herbs and as yet not very productive but huge tomato plants.
11 June – 27 June: Core Training.
Two weeks devoted to perfecting your art as a teacher… or a whole bunch of theoretical skills that don’t get to see the light of day until you’re totally petrified in a class full of people expecting a lesson and you’ve have forgotten what you were told about what to do in this situation when you were learning about these skills a week ago.
This is the time where you make a lot of the friends that stay close to you for the rest of your stay in Japan. To give you a quick run down of who was there - Simon, from the Gold Coast, a high school science teacher and our cute and enthusiastic friend from the plane; Joe, an Arizona native who had been working in IT, who has an adventurous palate and a huge thirst for partying; Krista, a talented hobby photographer who is not party averse either, who’d been living in Chicago and working in publishing; Andy, from Carlisle in England, who had been working for a global pharmaceuticals company, and a very enthusiastic participant in the drinking game; Peter, a Melbournian and recent percussion graduate from the VCA who steers clear of beer; Susan, a Hungarian born, Sydney-sider and tea-totaller; and Brendan… well, Brendan was just a bit odd.
Susan and Brendan haven’t been seen by the training group socially since they finished training, but the rest of us have stayed actively in touch, and done a lot of gadding about and a bit of sightseeing and whatnot. All in all, we’re a good bunch, and I wouldn’t have had a different training group for quids.
It wasn’t easy. In fact, a lot of it was downright stressful, what with having to demonstrate your teaching chops (when you clearly haven’t got an idea in your head about what you’re doing) and try and remember all of this stuff that you’re not getting to put into practice until quite some time after being instructed.
21 June – In the middle of all of the training madness, Simon, Krista, Joe, Tom and I all went to Nara to see the Daibutsu (Big Buddha).
Todai Ji photos.
26 June – Joe and I went about a kilometre down the road from my house to the Sumiyoshi Shrine rice blessing ceremony.
Sumiyoshi Taisha photos.
27 June, we finished training, and began teaching on 29 June.
29 June – 6 August: Teaching.
For me, the old NOVA instincts were still in there, and I felt fairly relaxed about teaching the “Free-Time Lessons” within days of being let lose. ECC also have a fantastic array of “Group” classes – 80 minute long adult classes with real textbooks where you actually get to do a bit of real teaching. I have absolutely LOVED teaching group classes. I wish I had one on my set schedule. However, our schedules are not set, and nor will they be in the foreseeable future. We were hired in June – the contracts for the year are set in April. This means that ECC hired us at a time in the year where they would have usually already sorted out all of their staffing needs for the year. But this year ECC has been hiring more teachers than they have set schedule slots open for. Those of us unwittingly hired when there is no set shifts for us to inhabit once our training is completed have been stuck in a haze of substitution shifts – waking up each morning not knowing where we are going to be working, or who we are going to be working with, but most importantly, who we are going to be teaching.
I used to be a Kids Program Co-Ordinator at Tajimi NOVA, and I am fine with teaching kids if I am given the opportunity to know what is going on. If I get to do it often enough to know the course even slightly, I am a fantastic Kids teacher. I like kids and kids like me. But the way that ECC have been giving me kids lessons has been that they seem to crop up in my schedule so intermittently - bordering on never - when I do teach the little blighters I have don’t know what is meant to be going on, where they are up to in the course, what they know, what they don’t know, what the games are, where the lesson materials are or how they work. ECC have a lot more Kids levels than NOVA did, and there is no way that someone like myself – who has three set shifts of absolutely zero kids teaching – can possibly keep up with what the Kids lessons are. The upshot of this is that my lessons are awful, the kids hate me, and I hate the kids.
Even with the adults, it’s hard to build any rapport or target your lesson planning to specific student needs if you never know if you’re ever going to teach at that school again. Sub teaching is difficult, and I’m not enjoying it very much.
I understand that there’s nothing that can be done until some teachers who have permanent shifts decide to leave or a new contract year comes around. ECC has also been continuing to train a lot of new teachers – six batches of new recruits this summer alone, at a time when they usually do not recruit at all – from what I’ve been told. With so many people hungry for set shifts, for a bit of stability in their lives, it is difficult to see how everyone will get all the work that they want. Other teachers who have been here for a long time who don’t do any substitution shifts seem blissfully unaware of just how unpleasant it is, subbing all the time with no end in sight. At least if I knew “it’s just until November” then I might be able to coax myself through this unstable part of the year a little more successfully. At the moment it feels like we will be stuck substitute teaching until April next year – which may leave me burnt out and bitter before I even get my first set contact. We weren’t told before we came that we would be substitute teaching for an indefinite period of time. We were given the impression that what we were signing up for was a stable job, where we taught at a variety of set locations. Not that we were signing up for an unstable job, where we teach at a variety of unset locations – sometimes we are shipped from one location to another in the middle of a shift to cover for someone. It makes you feel pretty lonely because you don't know any of the people who you work with, and I don’t know who to ask for help.
Staffing practices aside, on a more positive note, the course materials at ECC are very good, I love teaching at the Web School (even thought it does feel a bit like working in a call centre), and I have met a lot of really fantastic teachers and students. It is very different to the ol’ Pink Satan, NOVA-bot jazz in many regards, and I am quite prepared to stay with the company. I think I would be very happy if it were not for the blasted subbing. The last few years have taught me that I can adapt to anything, given enough practice. I am just finding uncertainty a little more difficult to adapt to.
In the first few months of being here, our finances are being stretched to the limit. Monthly pay in arrears is great when you leave, but it’s difficult when you arrive, waiting for the tide to change and money to start coming back in. Luckily for us the tax man gave us some money back this year (unlike last year where he took all our money away), so we were able to make it through the dry times without having to resort to eating our shoes.
When Tom's tax came in, he bought himself the computer that he has been wanting for the last 4 years - a fantastic windfall for him. It also means that we are no longer competing for the usage of my computer - which seems old and decrepit next to the shiny snazzy new black Macbook.
We spent a fair bit of time putting away some beers with Joe and Simon, and having the occasional games, karaoke or noodle party with the nice neighbours, Tom and Alexis from Canada, Mark and Lindsey from Michigan, and Angela and Richard from Melbourne who live up the road. Good people and good times.
Here are some of our photos taken from around that time:
Urban Osaka photos.
Strange details from Osaka photos.
7 August – 19 August: Obon Holidays.
Paid holidays. What a total and utter novelty for two people like Tom and I! I take back everything I said above. I love you, ECC.
We received our first full sized pay packet on 12 August, and so we were very, very broke at the start of the holidays. It is unfortunate, because we were unable to book any accommodation or tickets because we had no money, so we sort of got stranded at home, hiding inside under the air conditioner trying to hide from the brutal imposing Osaka summer heat. It doesn’t even get cold at night here in July – August, and the choking humidity is very difficult for our Tasmanian constitution to adapt to.
9 August – we travelled to Kyoto to meet up with my old student and now friend, Takako, from Tajimi NOVA. We then went to the Yodogawa Hanabi (fireworks display) – the show was almost stolen by an enormous lightning storm that ended up soaking all of the people gathered on the riverside to watch the fireworks.
Yodogawa Hanabi photos.
12 August – we jumped on the JR line to Himeji and went and saw the enormous, beautiful original castle there.
Himeji Jo photos.
18 August – we rode our bikes to Osaka Port and went and saw the beautiful sea creatures at Osaka Aquarium.
Osaka Aquarium photos.
22 August – we went to Akame Shiju Hattaki in Mie Prefecture to see the amphibian centre, and the 48 waterfalls on the 8km nature walk (of which we did 4km and turned around and came back).
Akame Shiju Hattaki photos.
So… now we’re back at work, starting to hatch some plans for a get away around my birthday. I’m probably just feeling that 3 month hump at the moment. It is only natural, as I have mentioned before in this log, that humans resist change. Change on this scale is bound to upset our sensibilities after a while. A new country, a new company, a new language, new friends, new opportunities, new difficulties… and this is just a broad brush stroke over what has been only the beginning of our time in a country that we plan to be in for about 20 months… we know all too well that plans sometimes don’t run smoothly, and I’m hoping that life remains interesting but allows us a little time to enjoy our pieces of stability. We do have a stable income. We do have a stable house. I’m about to take up learning Japanese at the local YMCA. Routines slowly emerge. I’m finding a lot more peace here than I had even hoped for. The quiet mind in the din. I love Osaka, I’ve decided… it’s a great place – the good things about it are really good. I look forward to having more to report in the next few months…
