Acquisitions

As requested here is a photo of something blue, my super-cool elephant clock!

I am now the proud owner of furniture, a bike and a mobile phone so it's been an exciting week all told.

Of course the bike is built by Japanese standards so when my co-worker Jason tried to help me make it tall enough he ended up taking the seat right off! :p Easily enough fixed but we had to accept that tall enough wasn't going to happen and we should opt for as tall as possible! The other thing I have noticed about almost all the bikes here are that they are 'girly' (no crossbar) bikes. Having been used to having one with a cross bar (and possibly also influenced by horse riding) I continue to swing my leg out behind in order to mount, I'm sure this looks most peculiar to anyone watching as stepping through the middle is obvioulsy far less effort. And speaking of bikes one of the things I find very quaint here is the parking attendants in the centre of Kakogawa who are there purely for the bicycles! They make sure that they are all lined up neatly and will help people to get their bikes in and out. Still on bicycles, one of the strangest things I have noticed now that I am riding is that although the cars here drive on the correct side of the road (the left) the cyclists all seem to try to pass on the right.

My apartment is now feeling much less like a hotel and more like a home, I have bookshelves and they have books on them! That would probably be enough for me to be perfectly happy with my surroundings but to cap it off I now have a sofa, coffee table and various other furnishings. The built by Japanese standard comes into play here too, the sofa is really quite low to the ground, but then again many things here are, even the toilets seem to require extra lowering... But I won't complain too much about that since I am always grateful of finding a western style one!

My mobile is another exciting development, or at least it will be when I can figure out how to use it! It has a very cool camera, which I quickly came to grips with, and I am pretty sure I can handle making and receiving calls, however all the other funky features such as music require using an installation cd on my pc and naturally enough they are all in Japanese. Will no doubt have to appeal to a friendly native :)

Classes continue to go well and my nerves have eased off a lot. I still have moments where I can't for the life of me remember what is supposed to happen next but I get through them by bluffing and I think I am the only one who can tell. Had my first ever student counselling session on Saturday and managed to get the student to sign up for extra classes so the manager was pleased, apparently that doesn't usually happen on the first try... Hope I haven't set myself an impossible standard to live up to.

As to the students, I really like them, some are naturally more talkative than others and some classes run more smoothly than others but on the whole they seem to be a good bunch. One of my duties is to collect and mark homework books every second week so this was the week for them. Couldn't help but laugh out loud when I came across a dictation passage about homewares in American houses. The student had to write down the description and then guess what the item was and for oven they had written 'We use it to bake things like turkey, bread and KIDS' (cakes)!!! I think it's safe to say some people have a slightly warped perception of other countries' cultures! ;)