Incurably Inscrutable

Distant Memories

2010-11-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

That's a more profound-seeming title than will actually describe this post, I'm pretty sure.

Sometime around the beginning of the month, I planned to meet up with one of my friends from the TEFL course, Mattia, in Ueno for the day. Unfortunately, due to my misremembering our agreed-upon meeting spot, we missed each other quite completely. Nonetheless, I wandered around the area for a while. I wandered through a little bit of Ueno Park, though not much of it.

I didn't see any particularly famous landmarks or any of the three museums that Wikipedia informs me reside there. (I did see the National Museum of Western Art, but only the outside of it.)

This is evidently more or less what I looked like:

My glasses change their tint based on sunlight, perhaps a bit excessively at times. I think it makes me look somewhat angry or foreboding in that photo. Go figure. Maybe I was also slightly ruffled that I'd been walking around looking for Mattia without success for a while. (Not that this was by any means his fault, you understand.)

This is a view alongside the park, though it is obscured by the "wall" or slope to our right, heading into the more city-like parts of Ueno.

Ueno, it turns out, hosts a thriving little market area not too far from the station; I've completely forgotten the name of it? I'm sure Wikipedia could tell me, but I'm feeling lazy. It features a lot of fresh fruit & produce shops, meats and grains, bags & leather products, sports-y clothes, and other miscellaneous micro-stores. The fruit was all prohibitively expensive, by the way, but it's good to know I can find it if necessary.

Hard to tell from this photo, but this is a bunch of English/Western tea, alongside some Skippy's peanut butter and whatever else. I was disappointed that none of the shops seemed to stock any chai tea.

The peanut butter, incidentally, was very expensive: I don't remember exactly how much, nor can I make it out from the photo here, but I'm sure it was at least $5 for one of those tiny containers. On that topic, this is a photo from a grocery store I found later:

That's right, ¥478 = $5.74 for one of those dinky things. I'm starting to wonder whether there's any money to made with a black-market peanut butter importing business. Probably not, because the Japanese aren't nearly so fond of the stuff as Americans, so far as I can tell.

That was in a grocery store that was quite large by this market's standards. Most of the shops looked like this:

That recessed "room" on the left? That's the entire store. Plus the goods that extend outward on tables between shops. You can see where the next shop begins to the side, sharing its left wall with this store's right wall.

Hmm, evidently I didn't take a lot of other photos from that area, which is kind of a pity, since I want one that captures the size and distribution of these shops more appropriately. Ah well.

This is the Ueno station:

And then this was just a picture of Takeshita Dori, the main stretch of Harajuku, on my way back:

More to follow, supposedly!

Bloodsucking Varmints

2010-10-31T07:06:00.000-07:00

Please allow me to begin this post with an irate, whiny rhetorical question: how are there so many damn mosquitoes still alive this time of year? And how do they keep getting into my room so easily? Actually, I can guess the answer to the first question: it hasn't been consistently cold enough. And I'm on an island. An island that gets huge bouts of rain.

As for the second, I'm pretty sure that's attributable to poor window design--and to the fact that only half of one of my windows has a bug-screen. (Yes, half of one of them. With two windows, that means 3/4ths the window-space in my room are unprotected.) I get a lot of mosquito bites--enough that at first I was concerned they might be caused by, e.g., fleas or ticks. But, when I pay attention, I see mosquitoes sneaking onto my flesh (or hear them buzzing near my face in the dark) so often that I'm still willing to give them credit.

Though, I often seem to get several bites somewhat near each other, which is supposedly symptomatic of ticks or other parasites.

Maybe I'm thinking too narrowly. The mosquitoes could be teaming up with ticks.

What's the kanji for "bug repellant"?

With that out of the way, let me tell you a little about last weekend. Friday, several of my friends expressed the thought that going to see a fishmarket in the morning would be fun. I was hard-pressed to disagree, because, heck, what is there not to like about seeing a bunch of giant, dead fish at an obscenely early hour of the morning?

Thus the following plan was hatched: meet downtown, go drinking, take a train to the Tsukiji district, stay there until 3:30 AM, then visit the biggest fishmarket in the world. Yes, you need to be there that early to get in: they only allow 140 visitors in at a time. Surprisingly popular, considering that it's just... fish being sold. REALLY REALLY EARLY. Did I mention that it happens early in the morning? It happens pretty early in the morning, if you didn't catch that.

Anyhow, I actually missed out on the "go drinking" part of the plan, but I followed along gamely enough with the remainder of it. I should probably start using names so I can stop referring to people as "the French girl" or "the Swiss guy", etc. Said French girl's name is Claudia, and the party consisted of her, her boyfriend Ackeem (recently arrived in Japan. Also, I bet $10 that his name is spelled differently than my guess right there), one of her Japanese friends named Mami, and me. We'd attempted to conscript some of the other post-TEFL trainees, but they thought they had more important things to do, like sleeping, so they hung out only for the drinking part of it.

(Shibuya, in case you've forgotten what it looks like.)

Sometime around 12 AM, the night found us wandering around looking for a restaurant; more specifically, Ackeem wanted to find a place that served udon noodles, which proved to be surprisingly difficult, when you think about the fact that we were, you know, in Japan. (I should add that we wanted to find an affordable place. That's probably what made it most difficult. Also, it being late at night narrowed options a little, though not as much as it would in some cities (*cough Portland cough*).) This is one of the places we considered but rejected because we didn't want to wait for a table to free up:

From 10-30-10

So back to wandering. Our method for finding restaurants mainly consisted of querying nearby helpful people for their opinions, something made possible only because we were traveling with Claudia's friend, Mami. A quick word about traveling with a Japanese native: it's really, really convenient for us Westerners. It simplifies everything, even if that individual is not necessarily very experienced with Tokyo in particular, as was the case here. It almost feels like "cheating", actually, because you can have that person take care of (mostly) everything, and it becomes easy to stop paying careful attention to the other people and the language around you. But it's really nice. It's different from traveling with a Westerner who speaks Japanese, since there's greater fluidity of communication and a more facile rapport. This strikes me as unfortunate, for the sake of inter-cultural relations, but it's hard to compete with the shared set of experiences and understanding that two natives have in common.

Mami herself is great, since she is very sweet and patient, and she puts up with a lot of my silly questions about Japanese culture and language. She isn't shy about asking for help from passers-by, either; and thus it was we ended up hanging out near a street-side takoyaki (fried octopus dumpling) vendor, watching him work.

I'm pretty sure she was originally asking him for a good noodle place that would be open at this hour, but we seemed to end up hanging out longer than I'd expected. He was very friendly, and chatted with Mami while preparing a set of takoyaki and two okonimyaki. ("Fish pancakes".) He encouraged us to "help" with flipping the dumplings and the okonomiyaki. I couldn't really follow any of the conversation, and Mami didn't give us translations too often, but I did learn that he'd been doing this job for 40 years (!), and that he visited the fish market-our intended destination-every weekend to buy octopus. (I think.) He also asked questions to/about us through Mami, and told us to have a nice time in Japan. Here's a somewhat blurry shot of the okonomiyaki, soon after the batter has been poured out:

Here it is after having cooked for a while, plus the new batch of dumplings. You can see Claudia's hand as she helps flip them over.

Sadly, I didn't take any photos of the end results, but they looked pretty similar, only garnished. They were also quite good! I believe he only charged us for the okonomiyaki, and gave us several takoyaki gratis, which I thought very kind of him.

Thas settled the food issue. Our final destination for the night was a manga kissa, a sort of internet cafe with manga to read and DVDs to watch. Another passer-by directed us to one several blocks away, and he even went so far as to walk with us on the way there, as a guide. More surprising (to me) kindness! Maybe the people here are just very helpful, given the opportunity; or maybe Mami is just especially good at chatting with strangers.

"The space for relaxation you've been looking for!"

In a manga kissa, you rent a private "room" (more like a cubicle) with a TV, computer, and/or couch. My cubicle (the same kind that the others took) was basically a big cushion with a computer. This photo doesn't quite do it justice, but:

It pretty much was just about that small.

I think it was around 2:00 AM when we arrived, so we didn't have that long to wait. I just messed around on the internet (and struggled with a Japanese keyboard) for the duration.

3:30 AM came along and, noting that the weather had gone from a mildly unpleasant "ehhh" to a chilly downpour, we hailed a taxi-cab. Around 4:00 AMish, we got there, and we began waiting in line. In the rain. Fortunately, it wasn't too long before they let us inside and issued us these neon green jersey things: they were required for visitors to identify them as such.

And then we waited more. It didn't "open" until 5, I believe.

This was me wondering what I was doing there at 4:25 AM:

Actually, I don't really have any reason to complain about this being "early" when it was really "late" in the sense of having stayed up the entire night. And given my sleep schedule tendencies, that isn't too unusual anyway.

But eventually, release! Dodging past fork-lifts piloted by impatient workers (they weren't actually fork-lifts, but they were of the same nature, I'm pretty sure) and huddling 'neath umbrellas, we visitors made our way to the tuna auction house:

The visitors stood in this crowded little railed-off passage through the middle of the warehouse, looking both ways. Both directions looked about the same: frozen, giant tuna corpses being inspected and prodded with picks. Yep.

Here we are. (Visitors).

A few of these tuna hadn't been "scalped" or whatever, and their heads had been cut off instead. I have no idea why that was or what it meant. But I photographed it for whatever morbid reason.

Moooore fish.

Wait, something exciting is happening! A bell is ringing! People are gathering around someone who's starting to call out in the immediately recognizable tones of an auctioneer. And people are apparently bidding!

This happened several more times in different parts of the house. I captured a little bit of the sound:

fish auc.mp3

And then we were hustled out, and that was that.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I'd been expecting to see more kinds of fish and sea fauna sold, and I'd been envisioning something more like a gritty marketplace than a warehouse. I'm sure something like that exists elsewhere in the place, but it wasn't what we sightseers were exposed to.

We stopped for sushi afterward (how can you not, when you're that close to a giant fish market?), but this post is already long enough, and that could be a tale in of itself.

Graduated Like a Cylinder

2010-10-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

Woooo. Class is done, finally. I'm a bona fide certified TEFL instructor now. Or I will be tomorrow, technically, but it's already been settled by tonight. We went out to celebrate at a nearby restaurant afterward. It almost made up for the fact that it's been friggin' freezing and raining like a mrhrhrmgmgph all day long.

What's been happening in the meantime? I dunno, I've been pretty busy finishing up lesson plans and stuff. Let's see, this actually happened a while ago, but I went to a nice little "British Indian" cafe close to where I live. I'm not 100% what makes it British Indian as opposed to just Indian, except that they served a green salad and fruit with the lunch special curry, and they had some kind of special European tea set you could order. I had a green curry that was really pretty decent, with nan (also pretty decent).

The price wasn't so terrible either, though I'm not sure I'd want to deal with how much it would be if it wasn't lunch.

Wandering around in that same general area, I found this weird, um, thing. It looks like it could be a doorbell, but the doorbell is right beside it, so who knows. In any case, it reminds me of a cartoonified Cthulhu head, particularly like one that a Walla Walla friend of mine has painted on her car.

Last night, I finally realized that a shop I'd been so far dismissing as simply for knick-knacks and toys is really the 100-yen shop people kept mentioning in Harajuku. It's pretty big, and multileveled, and it's a little bit heavenly to be able to buy things for 105 yen ($1.21, includes tax) that I've seen elsewhere selling for three times as much. Seriously. Well, maybe two and a half times as much, but still ridiculous. They sell FOOOOOD there too (albeit not a lot of it), so this may be my new favorite "grocery" outlet, now.

This is the interior on the top floor; I happened to catch some guy rounding the corner by accident as I took this shot. I wonder what he thought.

Here's a view from the stairs into the bottom floor, where most of the food and kitchen supplies are:

Next, jump forward to the restaurant for the TEFL graduation celebration.

Some of the food we ordered. (Unfortunately, as usual, most of it was meat-ed. But I had some seafood-y things and a few other items. They weren't half bad, though hardly gourmet dining by any stretch.)

Annnnnddd I'm pretty tired, I don't have it in me to write a lot more right now. (What I've written so far in this post feels a little "stale" and overly wordy to me already. Best to quit while you're ahead. Or... not behind.)

Wildly Addicting Crêpes

2010-10-19T04:34:00.002-07:00

My neighborhood sports about 5 different crêpe shops (or "crêperies", if you prefer. Actually, you'd probably prefer I stop being pretentious by spelling it with an "ê", regardless of what we call the places that sell the things, but, tough) scattered about, and they make a fantastic variety of fantastic-tasting crêpes. I'd already tried out these delicious morsels not too long after my initial arrival, but over the last few days the urge to eat more of them seems to be continually building–which is not so good for either waists or bank accounts. (Each crêpe costs from 350-500 yen, or $4.31-$6.15 USD.) But they're SOOOOO GOOD. My favorite variety of the moment is made with ice cream—or gelato, as the case may be—rather than whipped cream alone. I just devoured the following a few hours ago:

It was made with vanilla gelato (which you can see atop) and warm cinnamon-and-sugar'd apples below. (Much like apple pie.) Ooshii deshita! ("It was delicious!") And the pancake-y part, that is, the actual "crêpe" bit, was light and pleasantly textured. Superb-ful!

Last night, or maybe it was the night before that, I had some kind of chocolate ice-cream crêpe with I-don't-remember-what-else on it. This picture was taken after I'd gnawed on it a little, so it looks kinda less appetizing, but you get the idea:

So that's been my decadence, of late.

Last Saturday, I had my first actual experience with teaching, along with my first one-on-one the Friday before. The one-on-one meeting went alright: as I've mentioned before, it was mostly intended to be for assessing the student's level and educational desires/needs. I cut the meeting a little shorter than we were supposed to, though, since I kind of ran out of things to bring up, and by that point I'd already acquired enough information to start planning for a new lesson. It looks as though I will be focusing mostly on pronunciation, encouraging conversational fluency, and teaching some idiomatic English expressions–especially of the type that might come up in formal and informal business situations. My next meeting is tomorrow, and I'm still pretty unprepared, I'm afraid: while I kinda know what I'm aiming for, I'm still not sure about what to do, lesson-wise. Just drilling vocab phrases doesn't sound terribly exciting or effective, and it seems like the sort of thing a student could just look into on his/her own. I dunno.

But, you probably want to hear about how my lesson on Saturday went. The answer is: better than I expected. Our instructing took place at a Filipino community center, which offers free (I think) English lessons to Filipinos and whomever else wants them.

The class was divided into two main groups: Filipino adults and Japanese children. (Probably some were part Japanese, part Filipino.) I and the French TEFL trainee taught the adults, while the other trainees worked with the children. The teaching space was a little awkward, because it was a large rectangular room that we had to share with other "class" in session. Here, see for yourself. I'm sitting roughly in the center. Here's the right half of the room...

... And here's the left half:

Not even a partition to block sound. Ah well. It kind of worked.

Anyhow, we taught two at a time (one teacher on each half of the room) for about 45 minutes each. My lesson came later in the evening, with the adult students. They all spoke pretty competent English, so at first I was worried that my planned lessons would be too easy for them: but my lesson focused a lot on reading, and it turned out that was an area that did seem to need a little more help. (Side gripe: we trainees were given essentially no information whatsoever about the classes we would be teaching, aside from the vague categories of "low level" for the children and "intermediate" for the adults. Nothing about class-size, or any more concrete details about how their language sills. That made it kind of hard to design a lesson plan.)

Curiously, I didn't get near as nervous as I did for my first teaching practice, the one where other trainees were my "class." I was able to relax and flow with it a little more, though I still made a number of mistakes. I'm also a little unsure about whether my lesson plans are exactly conforming to TEFL International's standards, because they seem to be quite rigid in their expectations: there's a definite formula to follow, with particular components of the lesson which ABSOLUTELY MUST BE THERE. We shall see when I get feedback from the TEFL instructors tomorrow.

Urm, well, aside from that, here, have some more pictures!

Nifty window design:

A rather long corridor/tunnel/hallway under Tokyo station:

A small lounge / resting area in a shopping/commerce center near the station.

A very similar building as the last, looking downward into two different areas:

Yet more Tokyo at night:

This is Shin-Koiwa, the part of Tokyo that the community center's in:

Walking back from the community center, after teaching (kinda cruddy photos, beware):

Whoops, okay, time to resume narration for a bit. The "mastermind" behind this teaching-English-to-the-community plan is a lady who owns a bar in Shin-Koiwa; after the lesson was complete, we all trundled back to said bar, where we were treated to some genuine Philippine food. (There was essentially nothing vegetarian, *le sigh*, so I just kind of took dishes and picked around the meat. Ooh, though there was this delicious, meatless, sweet sticky-rice dessert. And earlier in the day, fried bananas. 'Course, they were probably marinated in kitten's blood and then fried in hippopotamus fat, or whatever it is you carnivores do to such things.) It was a cozy, noisy, very familial environment; kind of oddly comforting, even though half the time the conversation was in incomprehensible Tagalog.

My photos from inside are pretty lousy, I'm afraid:

... And then they started the karaoke machine, which was slightly less horrifying than you might expect. Those who sang actually had really pretty decent voices.

As a questionable bonus to you, here's some mostly indistinguishable "ambient" noise that I recorded on my phone during a short part of this. (I believe that's the guy sitting in a black shirt in the first photo, that you hear singing.)

shinkoiwa.mp3

Updating Like an Updater Does

2010-10-15T03:42:00.002-07:00

(Like a lazy updater does, to be precise).

Well, it's Friday again, but this time my Friday's noticeably less busy, and I actually have a bit of spare time for a breather, so I might as well get a post up in this bizniz.

Speaking of that last Friday, here's a quick summary of the evening. As I mentioned before, I went out with the other TEFL trainees for a night of pub-crawling, more or less. We met in Shibuya around 7:30 pm right outside the train station, and lemme tell ya, it was plenty crowded on a Friday night—and there was no shortage of foreigners out and about, for that matter. Shibuya's one of the nightlife centers of Tokyo, and it sports tons of restaurants, pubs, clubs, and stores. While waiting others to arrive at our meeting spot, I tried to snag a photo or two of the crowd surrounding the station:

I think it's pretty safe to call that "jam-packed" with people. It's also quite a sight to see when the lights change and pedestrians flood across the wide crosswalks; alas, I don't have any photos of that.

I don't remember if I've said much about the other members of the class yet; but if I have, just bear with me as I repeat myself a bit. There are four students in the class, aside from me, two Americans, one guy from Switzerland, and one girl from France. Two of them brought housemates along, one of whom was from England and the other from Spain. Everyone spoke English, which was kind of reassuring/relaxing but regrettably, only one of us could really speak Japanese. (The British housemate, in case you were wondering which.)

The Brit was also the most experienced with the area, having lived in Tokyo a good sight longer than the rest of us (not that that was too difficult of an accomplishment; not one of us had been there much longer than a week, by that point). So, he set out determinedly through the crowd, presumably guiding us toward a fabulous locale of unspeakable wonder, untold delight, and unrelenting thrills, while the others followed along somewhat bemusedly. (Well, okay, I was somewhat bemused. Maybe I'm projecting that onto the others, however.)

So far, so good. We paused briefly in our journey whilst our courageous leader conferred with his first mate (something to do with a shop or pub having closed very recently; I was unsure if this was our original destination or simply an incidental diversion), then we forged onward.

Of course, once we reached our fabled haven, it turned out that it wasn't going to open for about an hour or so. So, just like any other respectful, considerate, and well-mannered foreigners would have done, we bought canned beer from a convenience store across the street and stood outside it, smoking cigarettes, drinking, and conversing loudly. I think we gave the local populace a pretty sterling image of Westerners.

(For the sake of accuracy, I note here I did not drink any beer (because I still hate it), and only three members of the group did any smoking. But it's the principle of the thing.)

So here's us, doin' our collective thang. (Representin' for Europe and the U.S.!)

It was super classy.

Eventually the pub opened up, and we wandered back across the street and up the stairs in search of more brew. The stairs, I might add, had some very cool graffiti on them:

The bar was loud (as bars often are) and small (as locales in Tokyo often are), but it had a kind of nice atmosphere... somehow. A lot of U.S. music celebrities had passed through the bar, and they had signed memorabilia here and there. I was slightly concerned that I was damaging my ears, and I probably was, but mreh, what'cha gonna do?

At some point the group tired of that scene (a bit mercifully, I might add, for the sake of aural health), and we went roving again.

This was a fun advertisement that looks almost like it's painted onto the street, but it's actually a light projection: in the second photo you can see someone's shadow partially blocking it out.

The next bar played heavy metal and techno remixes of pop-rock songs, but at least it was at a tolerable volume. I ordered a pineapple juice—which was freakin' expensive, I might add: 500¥ for a thin, ice-filled glass. ... Which translates to... holy crap, $6.16 USD? Really? Yeah really. And yet, it was still cheaper than the "real" drinks. Yeesh.

Thirst apparently still unslaked, we eventually went questing for another pub; though this time our fearless British navigator apparently had no specific destination in mind, so we flailed about pretty randomly for a while, trying a few different venues but rejecting them due to cover-charges.

At one point, one of the other TEFL trainees wanted a photo taken of her, and while she was posing, doing the stereotypical Japanese "peace-sign-for-photos" thing, several nearby Japanese jumped abruptly into the shot and posed with her. It was kind of awesome and kind of hilarious.

Then, wandering again...

This was one of the places we considered; but it had a hefty cover charge, so we decided against.

It was getting pretty late into the night by this point, and murmurs of hunger began to be heard in the ranks. We came across a 270 yen restaurant, where every dish and drink costs 270 yen ($3.33); and seeing that they served alcoholic beverages as well, it didn't take much persuading for the group to amble on in. (Plus tax, they end up charging 284 yen for each item, but whatever.)

Check it out, you ordered via little menu-machines that were at each table.

Of course, what they don't tell you (or maybe they do, but none of us could read Kanji well enough to figure it out. Though, two of the group had been here before so they probably knew and neglected to warn us) is that you're also charged an extra 284 yen for each diner, simply for entering the restaurant. So even if you only order one thing, you're paying 568¥ = $7.00 for a crappy little item worth probably a quarter of that. Live and learn, I guess.

So, it was pretty near 12:00am by then, and the last train of the night left at 12:15am, or something; it became pretty obvious that we weren't going to make it back. There had been earlier discussion on this point, taking about whether we would have enough time to get to the station or not, but everyone was apparently feeling pretty crazy, since no one had pressed the issue earlier. The Swiss trainee cheerfully reminded us that we only had to wait until 5am for the trains to start running again, so we just needed to kill time until then. (Actually, he tried to persuade all of us to go on an impromptu expedition to Mt. Fuji once they started running again. "We can sleep on the train, come on, it'll be great!"). Strangely, everyone else was a little less enamored with the suggestion than he.

Here's a picture that actually includes me for one. I think this was around 1am?

Okay, this post is running way too long, let's cut it short. I and two of the other members who lived nearby-ish eventually decided to abandon the other poor souls: we walked back to our own places. Speaking of, remember when I got lost on my way back from buying an adapter, way back whenever? That turned out to have been an advantage, because it made me that much more familiar with the Shibuya area; once I figured out where I was, I made my way back to Harajuku with no trouble at all. Later, I heard that the remaining trainees had gone back to a bar visited previously, and they fell asleep there. So... things worked out, I guess.

Let me add, finally, that the crowd-size was strikingly reduced by this hour, 2am-ish. Witness the comparative emptiness of the following street shots.

This one especially. Remember the first photo in this blog? How crowded it was? A little hard to tell in the following blurry photo, but this is the exact same area, later in the night (and taken from across the street looking back). It felt like a ghost-town by comparison.

One final (final final) thing, I walked past a bike-parking area that looked at once cool and creepy at night. I think this photo captured some of the atmosphere pretty well, actually:

The First Week

2010-10-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Alright, back now. Let's talk about how the first week of TEFL International's class went.

To begin with, I do find the course interesting. I like learning about teaching methodologies and such; and we've been going over English grammar, which I find surprisingly fun. I have a strange relationship with grammar: I enjoy learning about it, and I sometimes take a small amount of pride in knowing how to phrase and write certain things "properly", but other times I get really irritated by some of the ridiculous and arbitrary rules. (Ending a sentence with a preposition is perfectly okay, people! Sometimes it can even enhance the clarity of a sentence.) I guess you could say I like learning about language descriptively as opposed to prescriptively.

Anyhow, the course is jointly taught by two instructors; they teach together on Mondays but alternate for the other days. So far that hasn't been a lot of homework immediately due, but we have some big projects coming up in the near future. It can also be a bit exhausting being in class that effectively covers the same subject for ~7 hours at a time. (On the plus side, we do get breaks and at least change topics within the subject. We might, e.g., study grammar for the first half of the day and then teaching techniques for the remainder).

In the upcoming week, each of us TEFL trainees will be meeting with someone from outside our class to give a one-on-one practice lesson. To be more precise, we'll have two such meetings with our "students", the first largely to get a feel for what areas the student needs to focus on, and the second to do the actual teaching. Most of us will be giving lessons to the secretarial staff of the building that TEFL's renting, which may turn out a bit difficult since they already speak English competently. The one that I will meet with is particularly proficient--she taught English herself, at one point, though she is not a native speaker--which is frankly a bit intimidating, making me uncertain about how much she'll be able to learn from me. But at the least, I can probably help with some of her pronunciation, as that does have noticeable "anomalies". (Incidentally, she said she spent about 7 months living in Seattle for some school-related thing; I don't remember whether she was taking classes or if that was when she was teaching English herself. I wonder if it was at UW?)

So who knows how that will go.

Now for pictures! After the first day, one of the teachers led us trainees to a nearby bookstore, which had a surprisingly large English section. (Still overwhelmingly Japanese, though.) Relevant to our pursuits, they had a pretty decent selection of English-teaching workbooks and supplementary material for sale; but they also had little sub-categories for other subjects, as well as a general division between fiction and non-fiction. Here's a view pointing downward as I ascend an escalator. (Or... escalate via escalator. Whatever.)

A few assorted pictures:

Some European art books: (everything from here on out was in the English section, for future reference)

I think this was in the "contemporary fiction" category, although that wouldn't explain what the Illiad is doing there. Did someone write a wholly different book with the same title? Sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't remember.

English versions of Japanese manga (AKA comic books in the Japanese style):

Philosophy books! They had some interesting selections, but everything was pretty pricey; maybe I'll take a look again some time.

Japanese literature:

Speaking of, there was also these books, which were either in the Japanese Literature section or the neighboring Japanese Culture section:

Here's a slightly blurry picture from about the fourth floor or so; this bookstore is part of a larger shopping center that itself has underground stairs and tunnels that meet up with the Tokyo station. (The bookstore itself is multi-leveled, I might add: you might have guessed from the escalator shot earlier.)

Ah yes, this. This was a real oddity: a bizarre doll placed in a display window. The display window was off to the side of an in-store café; I have no idea what it was put there for. I do like this doll/display, though it is creepy.

Back in the non-English books section, this was a magazine rack/stand that was visible from one of the descending escalators.

Journey completed, this is Tokyo at night, on my way back to the station. There was a really neat-looking mist, smoke, dust, or fog of some sort in the air, though I don't think you can tell from this photo. It might have been caused by pollution--even though Tokyo is an extremely eco-conscious city--but it looked really rad regardless:

The Tokyo station boarding platform for my train line:

A little ways out from where I live, Harajuku, atop a bridge that crosses over traffic:

Ah, now I'm disrupting the chronological unfolding of events. This is a view of the water that surrounds the emperor's palace, quite nearby my TEFL course's building--which is to say, in Chiyoda, near the Tokyo station. I love how the light reflects off the water here.

More Tokyo at night...

Last photo for now, and back to daytime. During our lunch break, we TEFL trainees tend to walk to a nearby convenience store for food. I was snapping a photo of the traffic alongside when one of the other trainees unexpectedly ran in front of me, jumping and waving, which made me laugh. He came out weirdly stretched or flat looking, something to do with how my camera auto-focuses, I guess, and how it reacted to a fast moving object appearing right as the photo was taken.

Whoof, long post. Next I'll try to post about Friday night's adventures when I can. For now, suffice it to say that I had a lot of fun.

(Huh, someone's playing (or listening to) jazz somewhere near by. I hear a saxophone improvising. Wonder what that's about?)

Yeah, Yeah

2010-10-08T01:48:00.000-07:00

So I've been a little lax on the updates, please forgive me. (Sorry Chris! (Since you mentioned it in the comments.)) A thousand apologies and all that. Since class started, I've found myself somewhat more drained at the end of the day, perhaps unsurprisingly.

Anyway, this isn't going to be much of an update either, since I'm going out pretty soon. It's Friday, and the other TEFL trainees are meeting up in Shibuya to hang out and go to pubs. If you know me much at all, you can probably guess that bars aren't really my favorite place in the world; but what the heck, it's better than staying at home wasting time on the internet all night. (Probably). Not better than staying home and doing assignments for this class, but the lesser of two evils and all that.

I will mention that we took our first stab at "teaching" today, though it was only a practice lesson with the other members of the class as our "students". I did... really poorly, honestly. I wasn't prepared enough, and I got very nervous, and things just generally went badly. Not a very pleasant experience, and it doesn't bode well for when I will actually need to be in front of real students. But more on that later.

Hmph. These rice crackers taste faintly of fish. I wonder if they were baked in (or... lightly fried in?) fish oil. I might be able to find out if I only I could READ ANY OF THE FREAKING PACKAGES around here. (My progress on reading Kanji is going slowly, I might add. I did look up some Kanji on the backs of things, however, and I have a loose idea of how "carbohydrates", "calories", and "protein" are written now.) Then again, maybe that's just the salt.

Class Has Begun (But You Don't Get to Hear About It)

2010-10-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

So, I didn't do any blogging yesterday, thanks largely to laziness (and tiredness, to a certain extent). Quick recap of yesterday: I wasted the earlier part of the day doing very little, then I went off to try to find my course building around 6 PM or so. The location had been (fairly abruptly) changed from somewhere in the Shibuya district, which is pretty close to where I am, to somewhere in the Chiyoda district, pretty much in the dead heart of Tokyo. Luckily, it's not far from the central Tokyo station, which is on one of the most important railways in Tokyo, the JR "Yamanote" line. The Yamanote line runs straight from Harajuku station (near where I am) to the Tokyo station, so I don't have to do any transfers on the trip, and it is such a frequently used railway that trains are leaving and arriving about every 2-4 minutes, both directions.

The downside of all of that, naturally, is that busy trains are, well, busy. Especially at peak hours, which I was kind of catching the tail end of at 6 PM. When I first got aboard, I had to stand right up against the door I'd just passed through, since the car was so jammed full. I wanted to take a photo, but it was kind of awkward and seemed a bit rude. I took a hurried photo a few stops later, after the crowd had thinned out a bit. So, imagine this picture, but more so:

Actually, I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's a photo from atop the Harajuku Yamanote platform.

And, taken earlier in the night, this was just an intersection in the surrounding Harajuku area. (Not quite "Harajuku proper", maybe just outside it.)

Back to the train ride. I took this a few stops after the earlier crowded car photo; the car had cleared out enough that there was actually sitting room by this point, and so this photo was taken from a seat near an exit.

The rest of the train ride was pretty uneventful. Eventually, I arrived at the Tokyo station. This really is at the heart of Tokyo; or that's the impression I get, anyway. The emperor's palace is pretty nearby, and this station is kind of a nexus for both commerce (of the clothes and restaurant variety) and other forms of transportation. (The streets are much larger than in Harajuku, Shinjuku, and Shibuya, too.)

Actually, I had a bit of a frustrating time getting out of the station. In Tokyo--or at least, on the lines that I've been taking--they make you use your ticket for exiting the station as well as entering it. (This lets them track your distance traveled to make sure you aren't cheating; I believe San Francisco does this too). But, my ticket was giving me an error when I tried to pass through the gate. Thinking I might have paid too little, I tried taking it to a so-called "fare-adjustment" station, but I got an error there too. Soooo, I attempted to get help from one of the guards/assistants on hand, but he spoke English sort of poorly, and I couldn't get across what I wanted to say in Japanese. He seemed confused about where I wanted to go--I was telling him that I just wanted to leave the station, and he'd nod, but then sort of stare at my ticket and go, "Hmmm" perplexedly, then ask where I wanted to go again. It probably didn't help that this particular exit also led toward a subway line (or something); I think he thought I wanted to use the ticket again to travel somewhere else, and for some reason I couldn't make it clear that I just wanted to exit.

He finally let me through, though. I think this took about 15 minutes altogether. I think I may have screwed up my ticket by scratching/tearing it or something, I'm not sure, but so far it hasn't happened again. (Earlier today I lost my ticket on the train ride, but that's another story.)

As you might expect, there are quite a few buses that serve the station too:

This photo isn't of anything in particular, it's about a block or two away from the last.

So far, so good; but at some point, I concluded that the map I was following wasn't quite... adding up. I was using a screenshot from Google maps that I'd placed on my phone; but none of the street names matched anything I saw around me, and I didn't seem any closer to my destination. Yes, that's right, folks, I was lost again. This seems to happen depressingly frequently. Although, lost seems like too strong a word, since I knew I was still pretty close by the station, and I knew how to get back to it easily. Rather, I'd had a bit of a mix-up, which I realized after extensively consulting my map and comparing it to some of the posted maps in the nearby area: I had exited the station to the east instead of to the west, so I was going the exact wrong direction.

This realization made, I about-faced and passed back through/under the station, and had a much easier time finding the appropriate building.

I should note that, as with my last expedition to acquire an adapter, I was walking around an unfamiliar part of Tokyo at night (I think it was around 9 by the time I headed back to the station, all told. I also grabbed some food at a few places, in addition to the getting-lost delay and the struggling-with-ticket-guard delay), but it really seemed very safe. I still kept an eye out and on my guard, of course, but I never felt even remotely threatened/endangered/unsafe. On a related note, in general I've been pleased to see a lot of women walking alone at night without fear in this city; this is due largely to the low rate of violent crime, I think. Something you don't always see in other cities. (Women in Tokyo do have a perhaps higher risk of being groped in, e.g., busy trains and subways, of course; but let's count our blessings where we find them). I'm sure there are seedier areas somewhere--every city has them--but jeeze, compared to the Portland train station at night? There you're SURROUNDED by wackos and freaks; not so with Tokyo's central station, everything seems respectable, safe, and well-ordered. (Hmm, but by "wackos and freaks" do I mostly mean "homeless people?" because that seems awfully class-ist and judgmental. Food for thought...)

(Another thing to remember is that I wasn't there at, say, 11 at night. Maybe it gets worse then. 9 PM is still pretty early.)

Anyway, here's a statue kind of thing that sits in the median of one of the streets near the station.

Some random highrises:

Lastly, almost forgot! In the below-ground shopping center that surrounds the Tokyo station, I found this cute little waffle store that sells waffle "sandwiches" with delicious creamy fillings. I'd picked one up earlier, and I stopped on a bench to munch on it as a celebration for finding my classroom building. This isn't the most flattering picture in the world (horrible lighting), but here's the marion berry mascarpone waffle I had:

And that's all for now. (I seem to be updating this blog mostly one day behind actual events. Ah well. Tomorrow I'll cover how my first day of class went.)

Of Adapters and Adaptation

2010-10-02T03:11:00.000-07:00

Let's see where I'll be living for the next month or so.

This is the outside of my house; very homey and pleasant looking, I think.

And here's the view out of my room's window on the second floor, looking down at roughly the same place from which I took that last photo. The two don't quite meet up, however. (I.e., if I were simultaneously standing where I took that last photo as I took this more recent one, the "me" down there wouldn't be visible in the picture.)

Next is the view from the opposing window in my room. It looks nice, although it's a bit stiflingly close to that building right outside.

This is the kitchen. Pretty much ALL of the kitchen.

Here's the rest of the kitchen. (Panned to the left a little bit with respect to the last photo.

Now the best part: the toilet.

I have never yet encountered a toilet-space that small in my life. I mean, look at how little room there is for your legs when you sit down:

Sheesh.

After settling in reasonably well, my primary objective became to find an adapter for my laptop's power cord. My phone worked just fine, but my laptop's cord is three-pronged, whereas practically all Japanese outlets are two pronged. As far as I can tell, both my phone and laptop should work fine with the voltage differences between North America and Japan, albeit they may take longer to recharge and such. (Japan typically uses 100-110V appliances and outlets, America seems to use 120-130V. Or more. Or something.)

I did a bit of preliminary Googling about where I might obtain such a device, but I didn't have a whole lot of luck. I went out and wandered around my neighborhood without any better results, although I did finally buy a bit of food (some sort of slightly sweet, spongy, cake-like bread. I think eggs were responsible for said spongyness).

I also got slightly lost wandering around: here are some of the photos I took.

Upon returning home, I ran into one of my house-mates (one from France, I believe), and I prevailed upon him for adapter-related help; he directed me to a store called "Bic Camera" in Shibuya, a neighboring district.

I got a little lost on the way there (even though the instructions were pretty simple), but I made it alright. Subsequently, I spent some 30 minutes wandering around in the store, looking for an appropriate adapter, and wondering if I was brave enough to try asking one of the staff for help. (Sumimasen, adaptaa wa arimasuka? "Excuse me, are there adapters [here]?") But, I don't really know how I'd specify the kind I wanted. "Powaa adaptaa"? "San, ni" ("three, two") while showing three and then two fingers, respectively, to indicate three prongs going to two prongs? But what if I inadvertently made a horribly offensive gesture in the process? O_o.

The store's signs were of no help, since practically everything was written in Japanese. I eventually found something that looked promising hiding away near extension cords and surge protectors--I couldn't read anything on its box to know if it said anything about American plugs, though, so I just decided to get it and cross my fingers, so to speak. Checking out went relatively smoothly, although I didn't really understand what the girl behind the counter was saying at all. I caught... something about yen amounts... maybe... and then she seemed to ask something, to which I replied, Sumimasen, wakarimasen ("I'm sorry, I don't understand"), and she sort of seemed to shrug and carry on it with. Maybe she was asking if I wanted a bag for the purchase. Maybe she was telling me I bore a distinct resemblance to warthogs and alpacas. Who knows?

It had become quite dark by the time I'd found Bic Camera and purchased the adapter; food began to sound more and more like an appealing idea as I walked back. I kept a look out for plausible seeming places, but most looked too meat-heavy or too English-unfriendly. (I can't really deal with Japanese-only menus at the moment.) I came across a little mall-like below-ground area called the Oval Plaza, and I wandered around there a bit. The stairway down into it is surrounded by a nifty water-feature, which I photographed for y'all as follows:

The largest store/restaurant in the plaza was a McDonalds--it kind of occupied the center, and stretched around back quite a ways. It looked pretty different from your typical American McDonalds (actually, different from the other Japanese McD's I've encountered so far, too). Note the ebullient English and European words wandering all along the left side of the entrance--those wound about pretty much the entire structure.

After hemming and hawing for a bit, I built up the courage to walk into a small restaurant on the side that had English descriptions of its food items. Conveniently, the waitress who served me spoke English pretty well--although that was almost a disappointment, because I'd been trying to psyche myself up to deal with struggling through language barriers again. Anyhow, she was very nice, although somewhat oddly convinced that I didn't want to use chopsticks ("You like a fork? It's hard to eat with chopsticks, yes?"). I ordered a steamed vegetables + noodles soup kinda thing (I don't think it was miso, although I dunno), and an iced oolong tea.

By this point, I was pretty much starving, so I don't think I had the most critical judgment in the world, but at any rate the food, and the tea, tasted abso-freakin'-lutely delicious. (Although I didn't like the onions. Too bitter, blegh. But mmmmm, the bamboo and mushrooms were amazing.)

Food acquired, I continued onward and... got myself even more lost than before. I discovered (later) that I'd started out going the wrong direction once I'd exited Bic Camera--the lack of familiar stores probably should have tipped me off. But, anyhow, I definitely wandered around for quite some time before finding myself back at the Bic Camera again. Some street signs are in English, others... not so much. >_>

I really need to get up to speed with written Japanese; this is giving me a new appreciation for the necessity of literacy in navigating throughout everyday life. I've also discovered that, while I have a small ability to read the two Japanese phonetic scripts, Hiragana and Katakana (as opposed to the pictographic/ideographic Kanji), I have nowhere near the facility with it that is necessary for reading signs and labels. Oy vey.

So, here are photos that I took whilst on my (rather lengthy) night-jaunt about the city:

I finally made it back, safe and sound, though also bloody-well exhausted, around 10-11pm Japan time. Further pictures and stories later to come.

Arrival!

2010-10-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

So, yes! Here is a blog about Japan-trip-related things.

I arrived in Tokyo (well, Narita airport, actually, which is a ways away from downtown Tokyo) yesterday afternoon around 2:00pm Japan time, which is to say around 10:00pm the previous day, PST. The flight was pretty uneventful and pretty painless: there wasn't much leg room at all, but I had two empty seats on each side of me in my row, which was nice since it meant I could stretch out a bit, leave items next to me, and not worry about bothering nearby strangers.

My row was something like this, where X is a filled seat, O an empty seat, and | an aisle:

XOO | X O O X | X X X

... with me being the second X from the left. Sch'yeah.

Once I'd landed, exiting the airport went pretty smoothly, though somewhat confusingly. I had some trouble understanding the guy who checked my passport and issued the temporary visa, which was kind of awkward, but ah well. Same deal when I bought a train ticket to downtown Tokyo. I was also unsure about whether I should make any effort to use the limited Japanese phrases I do know (e.g., arigatou gamizasu--"thank you very much", sumimasen--"Excuse me/sorry") when speaking to someone who knows English relatively well. If they say "Thank you" in English at the end of an interaction, I should too, right? I don't know. Minor concern, anyhow.

This is roughly what the train-station waiting platform looked like. (It's underground at this point, so it's more of a "subway" until later, I guess.)

(Click to enlarge, of course).

The train itself was interesting. It felt well-maintained, it traveled quite smoothly, and it was very clean (I was surprised actually, when it first arrived they barred off the train's entrances for about 15 minutes while staff went through the cars, picking up trash, swiveling seats around (so that they would face "forward" again as the train started back to Tokyo), etc.). I took a few photos out the window, although most didn't turn out well due to motion blur (and the fact that my phone takes about half a second to capture a photo after being triggered).

As you can see, and as you'd expect, it started out pretty rural and gradually became more urban. Overall, it reminded me a lot of a prettier version of Portland mixed with Hawaii, actually.

By the time I arrived downtown, it had started raining relatively heavily, which only exacerbated the Portland-resemblance (though with considerably different architecture). I wandered around trying to find the Sakura House (company owner of my guest house) office for a while, and I can't say that lugging around two heavy bags in the rain was a particularly fun experience. Ay, should have brought an umbrella...

After checking in, I eventually made it via train and walking to my house in/near the Harajuku area. (Getting there was another trying experience in of itself, but we don't really need to hear the rest of that).

My next post shall provide more pictures, some of my house, plus a description of my "adventure" earlier today tracking down a power adapter for my laptop.