Back in Business

Since October I've been working for this Canadian guy who had to go back to Canada for whatever reasons. I lived in his house and took over his English classes. He would call once and a while to check in on me but overall it was a pretty good gig. The agreement was that he would be back at the beginning of April and then I would be screwed. Out of work and out of a house. And so April came.....

Sometime in mid-February he asked me if I could work an extra month. I agreed and didn't hear back for another 3 weeks, at which time he mentioned that he bought his ticket for March 29th. That's the date we were going on and 2d ays before his supposed return he calls me and asks if I could work an extra month. This guy was a real piece of work. By that point in time we already had our keys to the new place. The story with this guy ends with us just making it out of the house with all our stuff moments before he pulled up with his family in a taxi. I'm ecstatic that this part of my visit to Japan is over. Sometime I'll come back and tell you all about this guy.

Now I enter phase 2 of my Japanese experience. We now have our own place and I currently have no employer. Honestly, it's not that bad. I'm currently, in the process of recruiting new students to teach. From what I figure I only need about 8 to cover all my expenses and the rest will be extra. You have no idea how easy it is to teach English and everyone here wants to learn. I highly recommend the experience. I haven't tried that hard to get students and I already have 3.

But April was just for me. I saved up enough moola to take the month off and prepare my university applications. Now if you asked me to write an essay on what I think about "whatever", I could pull something out and make it sound good. But these applications ask deep and meaningful stuff like what I want to do with my life before, during and after the program....I don't know. So I needed to do some soul searching. At least deeply enough so it sounded good. I've currently applied for two universities in Japan and I'm thinking if I want to apply to a third. I'll come back to this topic once I hear something back from them.

April had another big project, Japanese. From my experience in France, I now know that in order to get over the first hump of learning a language you can't learn it part time. In France, I tried for at least a year to learn French part-time and it got me nowhere. Same thing happened here. Thus, I knew that April needed to be devoted to learning Japanese EVERYDAY. (well maybe not everyday but almost everyday, I am a procrastinator which is a very bad habit I know.).


Somehow we've accumulated a great collection of how to learn Japanese books.

For about a month I was looking for a teacher who would want to teach me everyday. Sure enough no one wanted that. But as it turns out a group of elderly housewives that I was teaching for the last 6 months offered to teach me Japanese in exchange for English lessons. That sounded good to me and so, everyday I go to Starbucks near my house, buy a coffee, learn and practice Japanese and then pull an English lesson out of my...... you get the idea. A different teacher everyday. It's been working well. This Thursday will be the last class of the month. It's been really fun. If I ever learn another language...one month intensive is how to do it.

April has been filled with stealing Internet, learning Japanese, shopping for stuff to fill the new place and working on these applications. None of it turned out to be as easy going as I thought it would be.

As for the internet. I'm finally back online. In order to get internet hooked up. I needed to call the company and tell them I was interested. Then I waited for them to send me my account stuff by post. I had to confirm a date when a guy would need to come by and "do construction" BY POST. I called the company and they told me I had to do it by mail, there was no way to speed this up. COME ON! We're in the 21st century. People NEED the Internet. In the end, what in Canada would have been done in 2 days took 30 in Japan. I waited 30 days for a guy to come over here and "construct" my Internet. What that really meant was he opened the box with the modem and plugged it into the socket. Ta-da...Internet.......At least it was full service.