Re-contracting conference
From Monday-Wednesday of this past week, I attended the Re-contracting Conference in Kobe, which was a conference for all JET ALTs in West Japan going into their second year on the program. These JET conferences usually make everyone roll their eyes, because they tend to be filled with the same generic seminars and lectures, meant to inspire us to become better ALTs and fill our heads with amazing ideas, while actually doing nothing but bore us to tears. This one was better than expected though, and I think I actually learned a few things!
The cost of transportation to the conference was borne by the Hiroshima Board of Education, and by default they gave me the money for a shinkansen ticket. I was debating between doing that, or buying a bus ticket and pocketing the extra cash. But in the end they gave me an excessive amount of money, enough to buy a round trip ticket on the Nozomi shinkansen and still have 10,000 yen leftover, so my choice was clear.
You guys might be tired of hearing me gush and moan about how sweet the shinkansen system is, but get here's some more anyway. Hiroshima and Kobe are just over 300 kilometers apart, which turns out is exactly the distance between New York and Baltimore. The trip takes one hour on a 500-series Nozomi. For those of you who traveled with me from my apartment to Otakon in Baltimore a couple years ago, imagine if you will: if we pretend that we had to be there at 1:00 PM on the first day, imagine a system in place which would have allowed us to leave the front door of my apartment at 10:30 in the morning and make it there with time to spare. You seriously can't beat this system, anywhere in the world.
The train up to Kobe was delayed by 5 minutes, the first delayed shinkansen I've ever witnessed. The JR staff was falling all over themselves apologizing for the egregious delay, using some exalted forms of humble and honorary Japanese that you really don't hear very often. As I was witnessing this, I started thinking about how they would have reacted back home had this been an Amtrak or Metro-North train that was delayed for 5 minutes, and I just laughed.
Kobe itself is a very nice city. My initial impressions were that all the buildings looked very nice and new, as if they had all been built in the past decade or something - and then it dawned on me that they had all been built in the past decade or so, because all the prior ones were destroyed 12 years ago. The conference was at the very nice Portopia Hotel, which is on a huge man-made island built out in the bay called Port Island. The days were spent going to the aforementioned lectures and seminars, and evenings were spent in the city, eating and drinking to my heart's content.
It was good to see my friends on the other side of the prefecture who don't come visit anymore, and it was especially good to see my friend Ashley, a JET in Shimane prefecture who I met on the flight from New York. I hadn't seen her in 8 months or so, and was glad to see that she's still the coolest gaijin in the Chugoku region.
On a somber note, I was back at school today and was very sad to learn that one of my favorite third-year students, Kana, suffered the loss of her mother just the other day. She won't be back at school until sometime next week, but one of my JTEs is her homeroom teacher, and went to the funeral today. She said that Kana was having a very hard time of it, and thinking about the super-genki girl from my Internet class last year crying her eyes out is enough to make me tear up. I wonder what she will be like when she comes back to school next week. All I can do is offer my condolences and hope that all her friends can help her feel better.
The cost of transportation to the conference was borne by the Hiroshima Board of Education, and by default they gave me the money for a shinkansen ticket. I was debating between doing that, or buying a bus ticket and pocketing the extra cash. But in the end they gave me an excessive amount of money, enough to buy a round trip ticket on the Nozomi shinkansen and still have 10,000 yen leftover, so my choice was clear.
You guys might be tired of hearing me gush and moan about how sweet the shinkansen system is, but get here's some more anyway. Hiroshima and Kobe are just over 300 kilometers apart, which turns out is exactly the distance between New York and Baltimore. The trip takes one hour on a 500-series Nozomi. For those of you who traveled with me from my apartment to Otakon in Baltimore a couple years ago, imagine if you will: if we pretend that we had to be there at 1:00 PM on the first day, imagine a system in place which would have allowed us to leave the front door of my apartment at 10:30 in the morning and make it there with time to spare. You seriously can't beat this system, anywhere in the world.
The train up to Kobe was delayed by 5 minutes, the first delayed shinkansen I've ever witnessed. The JR staff was falling all over themselves apologizing for the egregious delay, using some exalted forms of humble and honorary Japanese that you really don't hear very often. As I was witnessing this, I started thinking about how they would have reacted back home had this been an Amtrak or Metro-North train that was delayed for 5 minutes, and I just laughed.
Kobe itself is a very nice city. My initial impressions were that all the buildings looked very nice and new, as if they had all been built in the past decade or something - and then it dawned on me that they had all been built in the past decade or so, because all the prior ones were destroyed 12 years ago. The conference was at the very nice Portopia Hotel, which is on a huge man-made island built out in the bay called Port Island. The days were spent going to the aforementioned lectures and seminars, and evenings were spent in the city, eating and drinking to my heart's content.
It was good to see my friends on the other side of the prefecture who don't come visit anymore, and it was especially good to see my friend Ashley, a JET in Shimane prefecture who I met on the flight from New York. I hadn't seen her in 8 months or so, and was glad to see that she's still the coolest gaijin in the Chugoku region.
On a somber note, I was back at school today and was very sad to learn that one of my favorite third-year students, Kana, suffered the loss of her mother just the other day. She won't be back at school until sometime next week, but one of my JTEs is her homeroom teacher, and went to the funeral today. She said that Kana was having a very hard time of it, and thinking about the super-genki girl from my Internet class last year crying her eyes out is enough to make me tear up. I wonder what she will be like when she comes back to school next week. All I can do is offer my condolences and hope that all her friends can help her feel better.