A little Better

Ok, so thankfully I felt a little bit better today. I was able to eat some regular food finally. I finally got a rice cooker and some groceries. This way I can control my own diet a little better.

Training today was better than yesterday. I learned a bit and got some good ideas for lesson plans and games. We watched a video basically giving us examples of how work will be in the classroom and it looks pretty fun. The kids in elementary school are all super enthusiastic to learn English. The stuff they review is pretty basic as most of it is vocab and just word exposure. The Junior High looks a little boring as most of it is grammar related but luckily I will only be teaching it twice a month.

The weather here is still very bad in that its really humid and its been raining on and off the past 3 days. Tomorrow all the ALT's are going to an overnight kids camp. While there I guess we're supposed to interact with the kids and break into groups and make lesson plans. Joytalk never really tells us what's going on until its happening so I don't really know what to expect. I think we're also supposed to practice being around kid and getting everything we've learned in training down. Its a 1 hr 30 min train ride on top of a 2 hour car ride to the camp so I hope it'll be fun.

So far the other ALT's in Sano seem real nice. Two are from New Zealand (Regan and Oliver), One is from Canada (Astria) and the rest are from America (Graham, Becky, Me). There are a couple others that are in a city close by called Ashikaga that are pretty nice people as well, Sean (British) and Zamira (American). The problem is we all live so far away and don't have any real transportation (besides my bike). Sano Japan is kind of like the suburbs of America. You really need a car to get around/have fun/go fun places. Some of the other ALTs might be required to get a car but until then we're all kind of stranded in our own places. Also we don't have cell phones yet so communication is tough. Yesterday I registered to get my Gaikokujin (Foreigner) Card yesterday and I can pick it up on Sept. 3rd. (You need this to get stuff like a cell phone in Japan) Today once we got back from training I helped Becky and Graham get theirs as well.

Working in Japan will be alot different than going to school here. Last time I had tons of free time, this time I won't have that much free time because I'll be working probably over 40 hours a week and have tons of school event to go to on the weekends, seeing as how I'm expected to attend school events and I have 5 schools I'll be teaching at. I really just want to start already, all this training has got me ansy.

One more thing, I experienced my 3rd earthquake in Japan, but don't be alarmed it was nothing serious. It just felt like a subway was going by.