leaving: i’m finally writing about it

Leaving is incredibly difficult.  Not like I’ve never left things before – high school, college, my childhood home – but leaving here is unlike anything I’ve really experienced before.  Every day here has been an adventure, and this foreign land somehow became my home.  But it’s a home that takes upwards of 20 hours to [...]

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お金もないし！

Still can’t write about leaving. Sorry. Recently traumatized by a quick google search of job opportunities around where I’ll be living.  Googling only lasted about 20 minutes, but I will now have to put on Billy Joel and hide, shivering, under the covers until the real world disappears again.  A BA in Liberal Arts and [...]

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IT’S MUKADE SEASON

Oh god.  The worst most terrifying part of the year.  I have terrible crawly-bug anxieties and cockroaches and mukade (Japanese centipedes) are the two most intolerable things on this earth as far as I’m concerned.  Japan has a long-ass rainy season, which is very romantic and sweet in movies like 「いま、会いにゆきます」but is, in reality, pretty [...]

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garlic + teacher = no.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson.  If you are a teacher, do not eat garlic bread for breakfast.  Don’t do it. There are many reasons for this. The first is, who even eats garlic bread for breakfast?? That is insane.  Have you no sense of appropriate breakfast food items? The second is, you will [...]

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the benefits of doing things you don’t want to do

When I leave Japan I’ll probably put together a list of  advices to give to incoming JETs, but one I wanted to mention now, that I think someone told me once and I ignored, was SAY YES TO EVERYTHING.  People will ask you to do things you don’t want to do – do them.  They [...]

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nonstopweekendwrapup

This weekend has been easily the busiest of the year, so I have lots to write about that I just haven’t had time for. The Set-up: This last week was full of preparations – I’ve been staying after school coaching my two students for the city-wide English speech competition.  We’ve been practicing for a little [...]

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pre-departure anxiety

Three days until I go up to New York. Four days until I fly to Japan. Before I left for Japan last spring, I started thinking oh, maybe this is a mistake, I did this without thinking, why am I going. A few days ago I started to think the same way about this trip, [...]

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orientation photos & etc.

The other day someone sent me a link to photos from the pre-departure seminar the other week. i’m not entirely sure whose photos they are, but..take a look: http://photos.yahoo.co.jp/ryokok813. There’s one in the beginning with me balancing on my crutch while trying to check in…I sprained my ankle a couple days before and pathetically limped [...]

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