:Japan )

I just dumped a load of my Korea photos into the Gallery, which is handily linked now on the side of the page. I think these photos prove that my photography skills are generally lacking but I’ll just blame it on the fact I was sick and just didn’t want to bother taking photos correctly. Eh well. It’s also obvious that I didn’t spend much time screening the photos before posting either.

Well I got a lovely surprise when I started my first day of work since Korea: a lovely bill for all the lunches I’ve been getting at school for the past 7 or so months. Now, I’m sure other JETs in the area, or Japan wide, might not have any sympathy as they’ve probably been paying all this time themselves. But the last thing I wanted to see on my desk, after spending a good bit for all my travel and lodging, was a 15,600 yen (~$156) bill for 7 months worth of meals. It’s quite possible that I was told a long time ago and conveniently forgot, but why in blue blazes am I not being billed for this on a more regular time-table!? Yay communication!

An aside note: the speed skating track is closed for the winter. So my best record stands at 1′ 10″ , down from the 1′ 45″ that I started with at the beginning of the trials. I’m looking forward to next year’s season but in the mean-time I have to find something active to keep the kilos from coming back.

Well things have been moving pretty fast around here. Most of our days so far have been jam packed with activities that don’t get us home at a decent hour. Usually I’m so beat that I don’t have time to update this thing… Now I’m in Busan, Korea. We arrived here on Thursday via the KTX bullet train. First time I’ve been on a bullet train in 10 years. At some point we were going 291 km/h…exciting but you lose all the thrill of going fast in things like that. At this point I’m just going to write down some topics that for me to remember to flesh out later.

Long bus rides. Karaoke on the bus. Crazy driving by everyone. Amethyst cave exhibits that have nothing to do with amethysts. Buddhist temples all around. food, food, delicious food! Friends sharing their ‘good journey’ wishes. Nore bang and Soju! Black markets. Eating at Genie’s parent’s house.

Today is the big day for Brian and Genie. I know they are really nervous and going crazy with all the planning etc. but I’m sure everything will go smoothly. Well hopefully more will come later tonight but no promises. Now the wedding party must attempt breakfast with no Korean languages skills what-so-ever. Good times.

Many jet-lagged people were up at like 04:00 but they got to try to keep themselves busy and from starving until 8 am when Brian and Genie showed up to take us back to the flat for breakfast.

Walked. Did board game cafes. Ate great food. Went to the mall. Crowded Subways.

will write more later.

Just finished my second full day in Korea. This has been my first time visiting a foreign country with absolutely no prior knowledge of the language. Well I can go around saying “thank you” all day long but that won’t really be of help. So to summarize these past three days:

On Sunday I was lucky enough to arrive at my train station in Shimoda because the train had either been rescheduled 10 minutes earlier or my travel agency just messed up. If I hadn’t things would have been really nasty. From there the schedule went as planned and I arrived at Icheon Airport in Seoul around 15:50. Sadly for me, just after deboarding the plane I needed to use the restroom and upon finishing the Immigration line had multiplied in size by …too many. An hour or so later I finaGenerallly met Brian and Genie. An hour or so after that more of the wedding party arrived and we set out for a long bus trip to Seoul proper to begin our adventure.
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Had my first full day at an elementary school today (I usually only get to visit and elementary school about 5 times a month). It turned out being a pretty kickass day. The teachers were all really nice and I was able to find quite a lot things to talk about with them, surprised me even. They even invited me out for dinner sometime! I haven’t gotten that offer from any of the schools I visit once in the 5 months I’ve been here. Sometimes I began to wonder if these kids were really having fun with the alphabet and simple introductions (most of them seemed to know it before I taught) but they all seemed to get a kick out of it. Teaching the letter V is always fun because they don’t have that sound in their syllabary so it always comes out like a B or Bu-i. So I get to teaching them about holding their upper lip so they can’t make the B sounds. Always gets a lot of laughs. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I received a firm flight schedule for the week long trip to Korea I’m taking at the end of February. With that achievement, a new category of ‘travel’ has been spawned here on the blog. I plan to post pictures and stories of my travels of course. Since I will be there for a limited time, I hope to keep the blog updated pretty regularly during my stay. Could daily photos and writing be possible? Well I’m sure there will probably be a least one night where I’ll be too drunk “to be arsed with it,” as my British friends here in Aomori would say, but I plan on being as diligent about it as I can.

Why Korea? Well 1) it’s where my friend since high school, Big B Willi, will be getting married to a lovely Korean lady, GK. (Keeping all names relatively secret for now just in case…:P) And b) because it’s there! (and I love their food too!)

Finally got around to editing the default WordPress install to make it look not so ugly. I love the abilities that CSS provide as far as layout and keeping visual style seperate from content, but it is still feels a little painful editing it in Dreamweaver. Big props go to EditCSS and Mozilla Firefox for once again making life easier. But as for Dreamweaver, I am pissed that they still don’t have an SSH/SFTP way to syncronize your local editing with your live website. Jesus, only people who are looking to have their site hacked still use FTP.

Anyhow, I hope that now that I’ve begun the process that I will have more time to devote to playing around with the sites design until it ‘feels like home’ Feel free to tell me what you think.

Just for a little added bonus to people interested in web development, a couple of my fav CSS related links:
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Finally got to taste some snowboarding action in Japan. Second time ever snowboarding and first time ever on powder. Took me a while to get used to not being on ice but glad to not end up so black and blue from falling by the end of the night. It was a 3 day weekend in a cabin …I’ll have to add more to the story later as I’m out of time now.

Another quick note, after a week of getting worse on my speed skating times, I finally made a new 500m personal record of 1′ 16′’. Yay me.

Everyone rejoice!! The Year of the Cock has arrived! 2005! Let’s hope it’s a good one!

*Anyone not thinking of a Rooster should be ashamed

So Christmas Day while Beau, Lorraine and I were hanging out watching movies the subject of organizing a cooking party of some sort came up. This time Lorraine mentioned that she had found an easy looking torilla recipe she was dying to try but she didn’t have the iron skillets with which to do it. Well I hit this road block about a month or two into my term here on JET when I was dying to make cornbread. “As luck would have it” I told her, ” I received 2 lovely iron skillets in the post from dear mommy for Christmas!” After a bit of “You did not!” / ” Yep sure did” banter, we made an open ended resolution that “we must have a Mexican food cooking night” and then the subject was changed.

A couple days or three later my night was looking to be a boring one so I thought I would start the calling and see how the other two would be interested in the Mexican cooking night. Beau was only interested if Lorraine was. Lorraine didn’t answer so I left a message that went something like this: “Beau and I were wondering how you felt about having a Mexican Cooking night tonight…call me when…blah blah” And thus the story began to unfold….
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Merry Christmas All!

I almost got to spend Christmas with no heat myself. My kerosene tank outside the house decided to go empty the night before Christmas Eve. It took a while for me to figure out why my heater suddenly stopped working. Even more odd because a friend had just called hours earlier saying he was getting the same error number on the heater. Fortunately for him his was easily fixed. Realizing I was not going to have hot water for a shower on Christmas Eve morn, I stayed at his place for the night. Christmas Eve I had to go to work so I was able to ask them to help me get my tank refilled and they delivered. Thinking I was safe and sound I went out for some more shopping hell…er ..pleasure that is this time of year. Coming home around 9 pm or so I find my heater now has a new error code!
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New time is 1′ 25′’ almost had 1′ 20′’ on another trial but fell down just before finishing.

So far it’s pretty easy to shave off many seconds as I get better at the form and my muscles get used to the work load but I’m expecting a plateau soon. My goal is to make the 50″ mark without having to buy one of those skin tight suits these people wear. To me it kinda stops being a hobby when you start buying all the professional gear.

My new record time for 500m speed skate track is 1′ 32′’ 6 seconds better than last week but still a far cry from the 50′’ goal.

–Edit
The world record for the 500m is in the range of 34-35″ There is a 12 year old on the team I’m practicing with that is skating it in about 42″ In fact the first time I attempted to go 500m the coach challenged be me to do it faster than the previously mentioned kid’s 1000m time of 1′ 35″… couldn’t do it. The 50″ goal above is for a “Level C badge” I don’t know what the 1000m time requirement for that is.

Last Friday I was asked to give an Introduction and English lesson to 128 5th graders at one of the elementary schools I only teach a club at for yesterday. I was a little nervous that my lesson plan wouldn’t last a whole hour and it is a little hard to find activities through existing JET printed material that works for massive amounts of kids. Things went really well though. The master plan was to teach the kids the Hokey Pokey so I first started out teaching right and left and had the kids jump at my commands like “right, right, left.” Then the same thing with forward and backward just to kill a little time and watch them laugh some more as some of them bumped into each other when they mixed the commands up. Most of them knew when they were wrong so I didn’t have to worry about correcting.

After that I taught them the vocab for head, shoulders, elbows, hands, knees, and feet. Then we made a massive circle around the gym and played the Hokey Pokey. I was standing in the middle of all of it so some of the teachers that were helping out would grab some students from the edges and bring them to the middle to do the Hokey Pokey with me. The kids ate it up, probably a little too much. Just as things were about to get out of hand we had them all line up again and did a couple of rounds of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. I know they hate this by now but I needed to kill a little bit of time again. Finally some Questions and Answers. The question that never is never failed to be asked is “What is your favorite word in Japanese?” Jesus, I don’t even know my favorite word in English. This time I was prepared with のんびり pronounced nonbiri or carefree in English. Surprisingly they didn’t ask the other favorite: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

All in all a good end to a day I was a little nervous about.

Well I guess it’s about time to update this thing eh? I am still alive (how many times have I said that on this blog now?) and sadly I won’t be going back to the States this Christmas. It was a hard decision but it’s just to difficult to make it back this time. I will probably be going back closer to summer time though.

As for what’s been going on… well it’s mostly been pretty standard fare teaching life and/or office life. Nothing very exciting on that front. I guess the latest news is that the outdoor speed skating track in the nearby city of Hachinohe has opened and I’ve bought a rather expensive pair of speed skates to continue practicing with the elementary school kids. It’s quite a different feeling compared to the in-line skating we did for summer practice. The schedule for this speed skating club has ramped up quite significantly: every day in the week from 4:40 pm until about 8:00 pm. I can only attend on about 3 of those nights. Then add Saturday morning from around 7 am to 10 am. They are dedicated, no doubt about that.

I also bought a Nintendo DS recently for some electronic entertainment when possibly stuck in car on a long trip or something. Only have the Mario game so far (45 stars at the moment) if anything
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This week I haven’t had a single class to teach. I believe both my junior high schools are on their annual field trips. I know at least one of them went to Tokyo among many other cool things. So that has left me with a lot of deskwork days and with the weekend being the 19th Annual Largest in Japan Salmon Festival there has been a bit of helping with the prepatory work for said event, not to mention getting the house ready to potential host many JETs. (Sadly the housework hasn’t gotten enough attention) Today I got to go to the Salmon Catching area which has already been populated with the salmon. The poor little suckers. There were quite a lot of salmon just dropping dead from the exhaustion of trying to escape. I don’t know why they didn’t wait until Friday evening or real early Saturday morning to populate the pond. If the salmon is gonna die I rather it die in a way that can be eaten (and they all are going to die come weekend’s end)

Though I was so looking forward to being able to catch a salmon with my hands, I’ve been tapped for staff duty. So I’ll be working on a stage translating all the games and raffles so the American’s from Misawa Airbase can understand where to put their damn bingo chips. But I’m not bitter. No, I’m sure I’m gonna have a great time either way, especially since it looks like Saturday has a nice display of fireworks scheduled. Looking forward to the weekend…

Firefox has finally hit 1.0! Since their site is being hammered right now it is highly recommended you use your favorite bittorrent client to grab it. Here is the windows English version and the Japanese version.

If you aren’t using Firefox as your main web browser yet… well you either love pop-ups, spyware, and virii or hopefully you just haven’t been informed. Surely it’s not because you’re too lazy to download it >:| It is after all available for windows, mac, and linux.

I’ve been reading some headlines that says an earthquake hitting north Japan….rest assured, I’m much further North than what the news is reporting. However, this is the same area that was hit with a 6 point something earthquake toward the end of October.

Well this weekend started out semi planned but had a nice random element inserted which got things fired up even better. At our last little rollerblading outing Lorraine had mentioned she was planning to go to Lake Towada for some sightseeing and general weather enjoyment. If the weather was bad the plan was to go to Hachinohe for some christmas tree shopping. Sounded like a plan so Ewen and I decided to go along. However these plans started to unravel when all three of us decided to sleep in until 11, 11:30ish. The weather had been a little dismal before the weekend started so the traveling started out with Hachinohe in mind, by the time the carpool had arrived at my house it was decided the weather was good enough for a Towadako run…all the way back in the direction of Lorraine’s house. Doh! Evironmentalist awards all around please.
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