So about how I'm leaving the country on Saturday.
....
yeeeeeeeeeeeah >_>
Tomorrow morning, I fly to NYC for the Pre-Departure orientation and then Saturday pile into a taxi with faded_lace and yomimashou to JFK and fly out for JET.
I'd like to point out that packing, car insurance and laptop frustrations aside, I am still really excited to be heading out to live in Japan for a year or longer. Granted a portion of that might just be that I'm pretty desperate to actually get there and KNOW what its going to be like, but I am excited to meet my students, and the teachers I'll be working with, and my poor, long-suffering supervisor who has been the focus of my continuous barrage of questions for like the past...month. I'm still pretty nervous about the whole teaching thing, but I've got a month before I'll be running any classes, and I've been doing some research so that's mostly abated, so now I just want to get there.
Luckily, all the New York JETs are flying out together, so I'll be with faded_lace and yomimashou, and we should be able to finagle seats together which means a 14 hour flight of company and JE variety shows as opposed to mostly misery. Well, some misery is inevitable given the length of the flight and general cramped state but it will be misery with company and entertainment. Yay!
To celebrate my graduation, and future employment, our family took a cruise to Bermuda at the end of June, and somehow my Dad managed to convince my grandparents to come along with us. It was really awesome to get some one-on-one time with them, since usually when we visit its with a swarm of cousins and aunts and uncles and we don't actually spend much time with them. But we went to the beach, and had dinner together, and got to hear a bunch of stories and it was generally pretty great :D
I found out some more about my placement as well, at various points over the summer. I will be in the town/village of Ichinomiya, a part of Fuefuki City, a tiny little town in a vally close to the more major city of Kofu. I'll be based at the middle school, and also visiting 3 elementary schools, once a week each. Whoever was in charge of naming the schools was clearly someone of incredible creative talent, as they are Ichinomiya Junior High School, and Ichinomiya North, West, and South Elementary Schools.
Genius, I tell you, absolute genius.
I have bought my predecessor's car, accidentally setting off a flurry of activity at my BoE (oops. But they wanted me to put aside $5,000 for a car through a dealership-y place and I don't have $5,000 for a car) but that's settled down and my supervisor has been awesomely helpful, especially considering I think I've sent clarifying questions in response to just about every email he's sent. He also speaks like no English, and so all of the documents and whatnot had to be translated through a computer program, so we've been communicating by way of writing the same message in both Japanese and English to cross-check against each other's native language and it seems to be working. Its certainly been a test of my ability to make myself understood XD
I'll be living in an apartment walking distance from two of the schools, ground floor so I'm not sure I'll feel comfortable using the terrace-y thing to dry laundry >> maybe I'll get some pots and grow herbs or something. But it seems to be of decent size, and close to stuff, so I'm pleased :D Also, I seem to be inheriting my predecessor's internet service so I won't be too cut off even though I can't get a cell phone for about 10 days cause of the new immigration card things. /o/ go internets!
Speaking of internets, I have a new computer :D Which I am not, in fact, typing on right now because it is still installing updates and then I need to re-install the myriad of programs I have on this computer before it will be even remotely useful. But its shiny and new and green and much slimmer and lighter than my current computer, which makes me enormously pleased even if it means I no longer have a disk drive.
But to be honest, I only used the disk drive once or twice every few months anyway, and it seems like I can get an external one for like...20 bucks on amazon. So I'm not too concerned.
I named it Masaki :D
On another random note, much earlier this summer, a good friend of mine got married, and I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony and party, and I got to visit with friends from college because it was held in Philly :D So I hung out with Lizz and Anne for a few days, and helped them settle in their new kitten (who was adorable alsdjf only about 4 or 5 weeks old ;~;) and celebrated my birthday (by staying in pyjamas all day and having ginger chai cake with chocolate frosting *o*) and also visited faded_lace for Hey!Say!Jump shenanigans and shopping :D all of which was great fun and I am going to be inescapably sad to not be within a 10 minute walking distance of her this coming year :<
The rest of the summer was spent working, relaxing around the house, and reconnecting with old friends from high school (and corrupting them with arashi muwahahahahaha), interspersed with frantic bouts of dealing with shit to prepare for Japan and putting together a work wardrobe, with some help from my mom.
and now, to close with some good news, after like a month or more of drought, it rained all yesterday evening and is raining even harder now *does a rain dance* no more slowly dying plants, hooray!
yeeeeeeeeeeeah >_>
Tomorrow morning, I fly to NYC for the Pre-Departure orientation and then Saturday pile into a taxi with faded_lace and yomimashou to JFK and fly out for JET.
I'd like to point out that packing, car insurance and laptop frustrations aside, I am still really excited to be heading out to live in Japan for a year or longer. Granted a portion of that might just be that I'm pretty desperate to actually get there and KNOW what its going to be like, but I am excited to meet my students, and the teachers I'll be working with, and my poor, long-suffering supervisor who has been the focus of my continuous barrage of questions for like the past...month. I'm still pretty nervous about the whole teaching thing, but I've got a month before I'll be running any classes, and I've been doing some research so that's mostly abated, so now I just want to get there.
Luckily, all the New York JETs are flying out together, so I'll be with faded_lace and yomimashou, and we should be able to finagle seats together which means a 14 hour flight of company and JE variety shows as opposed to mostly misery. Well, some misery is inevitable given the length of the flight and general cramped state but it will be misery with company and entertainment. Yay!
To celebrate my graduation, and future employment, our family took a cruise to Bermuda at the end of June, and somehow my Dad managed to convince my grandparents to come along with us. It was really awesome to get some one-on-one time with them, since usually when we visit its with a swarm of cousins and aunts and uncles and we don't actually spend much time with them. But we went to the beach, and had dinner together, and got to hear a bunch of stories and it was generally pretty great :D
I found out some more about my placement as well, at various points over the summer. I will be in the town/village of Ichinomiya, a part of Fuefuki City, a tiny little town in a vally close to the more major city of Kofu. I'll be based at the middle school, and also visiting 3 elementary schools, once a week each. Whoever was in charge of naming the schools was clearly someone of incredible creative talent, as they are Ichinomiya Junior High School, and Ichinomiya North, West, and South Elementary Schools.
Genius, I tell you, absolute genius.
I have bought my predecessor's car, accidentally setting off a flurry of activity at my BoE (oops. But they wanted me to put aside $5,000 for a car through a dealership-y place and I don't have $5,000 for a car) but that's settled down and my supervisor has been awesomely helpful, especially considering I think I've sent clarifying questions in response to just about every email he's sent. He also speaks like no English, and so all of the documents and whatnot had to be translated through a computer program, so we've been communicating by way of writing the same message in both Japanese and English to cross-check against each other's native language and it seems to be working. Its certainly been a test of my ability to make myself understood XD
I'll be living in an apartment walking distance from two of the schools, ground floor so I'm not sure I'll feel comfortable using the terrace-y thing to dry laundry >> maybe I'll get some pots and grow herbs or something. But it seems to be of decent size, and close to stuff, so I'm pleased :D Also, I seem to be inheriting my predecessor's internet service so I won't be too cut off even though I can't get a cell phone for about 10 days cause of the new immigration card things. /o/ go internets!
Speaking of internets, I have a new computer :D Which I am not, in fact, typing on right now because it is still installing updates and then I need to re-install the myriad of programs I have on this computer before it will be even remotely useful. But its shiny and new and green and much slimmer and lighter than my current computer, which makes me enormously pleased even if it means I no longer have a disk drive.
But to be honest, I only used the disk drive once or twice every few months anyway, and it seems like I can get an external one for like...20 bucks on amazon. So I'm not too concerned.
I named it Masaki :D
On another random note, much earlier this summer, a good friend of mine got married, and I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony and party, and I got to visit with friends from college because it was held in Philly :D So I hung out with Lizz and Anne for a few days, and helped them settle in their new kitten (who was adorable alsdjf only about 4 or 5 weeks old ;~;) and celebrated my birthday (by staying in pyjamas all day and having ginger chai cake with chocolate frosting *o*) and also visited faded_lace for Hey!Say!Jump shenanigans and shopping :D all of which was great fun and I am going to be inescapably sad to not be within a 10 minute walking distance of her this coming year :<
The rest of the summer was spent working, relaxing around the house, and reconnecting with old friends from high school (and corrupting them with arashi muwahahahahaha), interspersed with frantic bouts of dealing with shit to prepare for Japan and putting together a work wardrobe, with some help from my mom.
and now, to close with some good news, after like a month or more of drought, it rained all yesterday evening and is raining even harder now *does a rain dance* no more slowly dying plants, hooray!