31 - Several months later... (Side Two)

Side Two.

I should explain before going on. I’ve been thinking about this of late, and whatever I may say about being busy, and not having time for things like writing anymore, that isn’t true. I’m getting better at my job each day, I know that for a fact. And more skill always comes with more responsibility. And responsibility with stress. I am tired when I come home from work. It’s a time thing, a release thing. Doesn’t matter if I’ve had no classes in the day, or if it’s been packed. I will be tired by 4.15. And when I get home the last thing I want to do is more work! I wish I could say writing these things is an unmitigated joy, which leaves me inspired and fulfilled. It’s hard work. And it also takes place on a computer. You know, the place where my games live. Distracting stuff. But here I am, coffee in hand, giving this another crack. I have two hours, so there’s no excuse for not finishing.

There was also no excuse for not finishing NaNoWriMo either, I was told time and time again, and that…

I think I’d remember talking about the elementary music festivals. I don't, so I will. Each year it’s a bit of a competition between the bigger and the smaller, and the smaller comes out on top more often than not. But this year Steph and I knew more of what to expect. Tsukushi excelled themselves once again, with an ace set of performances across all six years. Particularly excellent was the recorder piece by the third years, which is always good. This year’s song was the main theme from Spirited Away, which was a real nostalgia trip as it had been Mononoke in my first year. Can we British kids pull of this sort of stuff? I don’t remember learning about harmonising, for sure. Also standing out was what I think must be the neighbourhood’s theme for this year, an old choral song called Furusato. Awesome stuff, real powerful emotion. The whole school sung that, and then the principal insisted that we, the audience, join in. I did my best, I’ll have you
  know, having heard the song a few times in rehearsal. Steph had the excuse that this was the first time she was hearing it. But the parents? Bunch of uncooperative losers. Barely a peep from them.

A few teary eyes in the sixth years’ final song, the music teacher’s among them. They held together well in the performance, but once the curtain was drawn it all came out. And me? Well, I blubbered like a baby. Steph thought it was very entertaining. Am I ashamed? No! I heard some kids sing a song about leaving home, and I cried and I am proud! Hear me?! PROUD!

Except… if I was this bad this year, how bad will I be next year, when it’s my last…?

Moving on, then. Koryo’s festival was a funny one. We turned up about ten minutes before the start, and were whisked into a beaurocratic rigmarole where we sign our names, and sign on behalf of the schools we represent (Represent? I represent myself!), and are then told we should have been here even earlier because the place is full. At which point the vice principal shows up and takes us on a thrilling tour of the plumbing works round the back of the school, and slips us into seats on the other side of a fire escape. Guest seating. Got to sit next to a teacher who’d left last year, which was nice.

But, and if this makes me sound ungrateful that’s too bad, I’m not sure I wanted guest seating. It beat standing, which the punters had to do, but me? A guest? I WORK here! This is where I work! I’m not a guest! Now, Steph WAS a guest, so that’s fine I suppose. But I didn’t really like being put on a pedestal like that. Not when I work with those kids as much as any of the poor teachers marching around the outside keeping everything in check. Put me to work! Don’t bundle me up in cotton wool and stick me in a corner to rise in value!

Alright, alright. I’m calm. Seems silly reading it back now. Maybe it’s indicative of something deeper in the old subconscious. Some deep-seated fear of the monarchy, or something.

The music, then. I was impressed more by this year than last year. Last year seemed a little all over the place, and each year group seemed to only get a tiny bit of time to perform their songs. And when the attention has to be split between over a hundred kids in each year group, it’s already a bit thin. But I think this year they came into their own. Third years did a Lion King medley, which was pretty sweet. I recognised the songs, but not the words. Fascinating. First prize in the Pete Cute Awards goes to the second years with their Bouken Tai skit. Saluting and modifying their voices and… Argh, it was so cute I could have died! Top marks for the kids who seem intent of skinning me alive the rest of the week.

Didn’t cry this time, but I did end up feeling quite melancholic. I don’t think it helped that all the other teachers filed off to have some sort of meeting, and all the parents shuffled away to their cars, and the kids were sent marching back to their classrooms. It was quite lonely, really. I wanted to talk about what I’d seen, too. I wanted to tell the kids they’d done themselves proud, too. But no, we hopped on the bus and went home. That was it.

I think this sort of thing typifies the ALT role for many of us. The real love of the job doesn’t come from school policies, meetings and formalistic staff relations. It comes from the kids. That’s why we do this job, isn’t it? Nothing makes me more proud than an enthusiastic use of English from a student. And in the music festival, it’s the kids’ performances that really shine. I’m not there to be treated like a guest of honour, because that’s not what I came to Japan for. Nor am I here to mingle with PTA members and overbearing parents. I’m here to teach kids. If it weren’t for money and stability, I wouldn’t need anyone else to do my job.

I lost track of where I was going with that. Haven’t had coffee in a while, so I think my brain’s overshooting itself. Let’s move on.

What next? The term is almost over now, and it’s been a bit of a long one. I think we’re all looking forward to a long break. A break that starts, if you can believe this, at 16.15 on Christmas Day. Yes, this year closing ceremony lands on Christmas. It’s a defiance of human rights, I tell you. Not that Steph and I are hanging around for that long. We’re off on Sunday. But it has felt like a long term, broken up by the odd massive, exhausting event.

Like English Festival! Gosh, I almost forgot! So, if you didn’t read this last year English Festival is a speech presentation (NOT a competition!) where kids from junior high schools meet up and give presentations about a given topic for the ALTs and teachers of other schools. This year’s topic was ‘mottainai’, which sort of means ‘waste’, I guess. Things like energy conservation, finishing your plate, reusing old clothes and things. My own school was taking part, and though it was definitely not a competition I was also on the board of judges to choose a particularly good speech. But it wasn’t a competition.

And here’s why. Alongside the public schools, we also have two international schools taking part, and a private school with a lot of kids who’ve lived overseas. And yet we are supposed to pick the most talented users of English from this bunch. A bunch that includes native speakers.

I’m not bitter. I think the Board of Ed made it very clear what the purpose of the Festival was. Not comparing talents, but celebrating what each kid is capable of. And also giving kids a chance to get together with other schools and have a laugh. And in those cases I think it worked out well. But it is hard, y’know? You want to pick the underdogs. You want to give them all an award.

In a way, I think my role as ALT rep gave me a bit of an easier job. I mean, I have to represent the ALT community with my choice. So it’s not gonna be the international schools, because I know a lot of us don’t exactly appreciate their participation in the contest. That isn’t a contest. So I was looking for the fun ones. The creative ones. And there were a lot of them, I’m pleased to report.

Unfortunately, those all got snapped up by other judges. I should have acted quicker. A lesson for next time. Jump in there, tread on some toes, say your peace. Piece. I don’t know. So the school I wanted to pick got taken by the Chief Superviser of the Board of Education, who I am pretty I am contractually bound to not argue with. Second choice was taken by a teacher from an international school. That left my third choice…

…which was my OWN school.

I haven’t had that faint-inducing panic in a long time. It was like walking into the staffroom to find that the new teacher sitting next to you is that one tough kid from high school who took offense at your smarts and Adonis-like good looks. Hello, there. Fancy seeing you. Remember when I said I never wanted to see you again? And the more times this thing creeps up on me, the worse it gets. Cos I feel the fear for my current situation tied up with latent, residual fear from the olden days. Let’s see if I can list them off. English Festival; standing in line at SeaTac without an ESTA form printed off and having the border inspection guy lean forward and go, “Excuse me?”; being told I was responsible for driving my coworkers to the venue when I hadn’t brought a car because this was the first I was hearing of it… I should stop. So this time I’m sitting there, losing the feeling in my fingers, wondering who will give the eulogy at
  my funeral after I’m lynched by ALTs. And possibly my principal.

Well, I’m still alive, so you can tell that didn’t happen. My kids were a bit bemused. The ALTs seemed to think it was funny. Well, most of them. The others will forget in time.

Unless I judge NEXT year too…

But enough about me, English Festival has never been so much fun. The MCs were on top form, the kids were excellent, I laughed like an idiot at the skits in between speeches. A great day, all in all. Minus the panic.

Not a massive amount left to talk about. We had Thanksgiving at our house again, and that was a lot of fun. And Halloween, too. I’d forgotten to mention that… I don’t remember a lot about that night. I remember the hangover, though. But Thanksgiving was wholesome fun. We even had a second one down on Port Island, and got to meet our friends’ new baby. Never held a baby before. He didn’t instantly hate me, and I didn’t drop him, so crisis averted. A guy could get used to it…

Less about that. Christmas is upon us, and the term is almost over. A couple more things to mention and then I’ll give you back your afternoons.

So, my first ever campaign of D&D is almost at an end. It was a short one, cos we didn’t have the Guide that tells me how to do my job properly. Still, I think it went well as a practice run if nothing else. Everyone seems to have enjoyed it. Nobody died. Everyone was severely injured enough to not get cocky about it. All hangs in the balance for tomorrow's dramatic conclusion… This Christmas I’m going to give that Guide a good read and come up with something a bit more open ended for the next campaign. It’ll be set some time after the events of the first one, so what happens tomorrow will determine the specifics. Everyone wants to be spellcasters. Maybe something about some kind of school of magic, with four houses… It’s a good chance to bring new players in. I’ll have a talk with everyone and see what the new group looks like.

Mekton is on hiatus because of baby, but that’s going quite well too. I’ve learned a lesson about control from that game. Giving everyone full access to whatever technology they wanted for their robots was a good chance to see what they want to make, but bad because there’s a million and one rules I now need to memorise. And also scale battles for. It’s honestly exhausting. I’ll give it some thought, there’s still a few weeks’ of stuff before the end of the second series, but I may have to end it come summer or something. Or maybe someone else will step in and run something else. Like D&D. Who knows?

Finished Mass Effect 2 again the other day. Garrus died, and broke my heart. He’s always been such a big part of all three games, it was like watching Han Solo get shot in the back or something. But I did love it too, in a sick sort of way. The tension of not knowing whose life hangs in the balance was quite exhilarating. Especially when I’d played through all their stories before, and liked them all. With the Christmas sales coming up, and an abominable amount of Steam credit in the bank, I’ll try 3 at some other time. Haven’t seen the reworked ending yet, so that’s exciting.

Had my birthday on Monday. Didn’t have class so took the day off. Played Pokemon all day with a Let’s Play of The Wolf Among Us in the background. I can’t believe he decided to take off Gren’s arm! He should know there’ll be consequences! I’m really loving Alpha Sapphire, especially the new DexNav thing. Makes hunting for rare Pokemon a bit more rewarding.

Yep, I’m out. Nothing else to say. A big thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday. As you can no doubt tell, I did indeed have one. Looking forward to visiting the colonies next week. Hope you all stay in touch.

That’s it from me for this year. Thanks for reading.

31 - Several months later... (Side One)

Oh hey, Pete, you do a blog?

Yes, it's been a long while. And that's something I start all these things with, but I don't think I've skipped a whole season before. So sorry, if this is the only way you've been keeping up with my life out here. Though if that is the case, go ahead and drop me an email because, as you see, this isn't a very reliable form of connection.

Let's start with summer. In a word, 'busy'. As ALT Advisor for Kobe City, a position I'm sure all the Yamans are sick of hearing about, the summer influx was one of the big responsibilities of the year. I mean, I wasn't the only member of the welcoming committee, not even the most involved member. There was a lot of great work being done by a lot of good people, and I was proud to be a member of such an ace team.

So here's the overview. Weeks of meetings to get things like schedules sorted to start, and then the Group As arrived. First day, paperwork and welcoming dinner at ours. Me 'n Steph enjoyed hosting, something I know she's always been keen to try but too chick-chick-chicken to put into effect until now. I'm going to be saying variations of this quite a bit, but the newcomers are all amazing. Well, they're not new anymore. I think to a man they've settled down now, and that's excellent too. Next day was an early start to the ward office for residence cards and proofs of residence. A bit of confusion here, as clearly the office had dropped a few memos down the drain or something. Still, a couple of phone calls and we were back on track. Afternoon was spent loafing around the phone shop getting phones. This was definitely not my area of focus, so there was a fair amount of just kicking our heels and keeping everyone entertained. Coffee was supplied, mercifully. Then back home for an early night. Then Friday, which started with a trip to the disaster museum. Don't get me wrong; the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake is even today a huge part of Kobe's identity, and learning about it is very, very important. But still, I was not exactly put out to not have to go with everyone else. That afternoon we went to the city centre to take everyone on tours of important landmarks like stations, nice restaurants and the immigration office. Lots of walking, but not exactly taxing.

I think this is where the realisation started to hit me, that I was no longer novice but veteran. It was a nostalgia-filled summer, where every corner seemed to unearth unconsidered memories like toys recovered in a long put-off room cleaning. It's funny what sticks out. Walking across the overpass and being asked about the British love of tea, or losing a digital camera to water damage on the top floor of city hall. Things I haven't thought of for many years. Hm.

Moving on, that night was pub, followed by sleep. The weekend was just as busy, this time filled with unofficial trips out. We Yamans took everyone to the second-hand stores up in the north of the city on one day, and off in the other direction for the big electronics stores on the other. By this time I think we were all a bit washed out, but certain things (like air conditioners) are pretty essential during the summer. The nights were spent playing boardgames and drinking, usually at ours but increasingly at others'. Again, I consider myself truly privileged to be surrounded by such excellent people.

Monday now, and a trip to a, though not exactly convenient, certainly typical junior high school for seminars. Matt and I gave a bit of a hint session on self-intro lessons, and that was entertaining. Again, it really hit me that now we are the teachers. We're the ones with the advice to pass on. It's a hard to take it, honestly. Something I always have to fight with; that feeling of not having anything to offer. But I am fighting. And darn it, this summer I came out on top. Tuesday was the first day at school for the Group As, so we kicked back.

And then Wednesday came around again, and the Group Bs arrived. Rinse and repeat.

I don't have to say this, really, but everyone who came to Kobe this year is a remarkable human being, As and Bs, and even Cs. I enjoyed talking to you all about your new lives in Kobe, and I'm also happy to not really have to do that anymore. But I think a lot of us old-bies agree: last year we lost a lot of good men and women. The folk we were taught by. The folk who let us into their homes. That hit hard. And I'm glad that, though we don't have replacements for those gone home, we have something new, and something just as good.

Alright, back to summer. After the Bs came and did the welcoming thing, we had job training, two days of seminars about the more intricate sides of teaching in Kobe. I had another seminar to give, this time about remotivating yourself after years of monotonous drudgery. It was a daunting topic, but I think I got it. Or rather, I facilitaed the getting it of everyone who attended and essentially did my work for me. Cheers, guys. I do like a good KEC seminar day. Some days the place can be stuffy and oppressive, but it sure beats a day at school. I mean, it ends and you're already in town. You're near the pub. Heaven. And being with everyone else is a real good point, too. I can't say I've been thoroughly invested in every speech I've heard and every seminar I've taken, but I can say I learn a lot from 'em.

Last thing I want to talk about i-

END OF SIDE ONE

30 - Intervention

You’ve all been very patient, but it has been a good long while, and I think it’s time to talk about my wedding. I’ve already spoken to a lot of people about it here in Japan, answered a lot of the same questions, and many of you were there in person. But I feel like talking a little about what went on below the surface, because the run-up also had a massive impact on arguably the most important day of my life. But firstly, and unquestionably, a brief overture:

The day of my wedding was absolutely perfect. I know it, and I’m sure Steph feels the same. I cannot express just how perfectly everything slipped together on the day. I don’t have thanks enough to give to you all for your support, but what I have is yours. Thank you.

And now that you have that solidly in your minds, I can say the following without fear of you all misunderstanding. The year, and then especially the week, running up to March 22^nd, included some of the lowest points of my life. The Thursday before, I could not name for you a single moment where I was not ready to burst into childish, angsty tears. Truly, it was a hard lesson in self-control. And I don’t even think it was because things were going wrong, because they weren’t. Everything went very smoothly, I reckon. And by the end, everything was finished without needing a single compromise.

But the stress! The unbelievable crushing, suffocating stress that that week became. Now, I work in a junior high school. I know stress. I’ve seen it in the teachers who work here, and the kids studying for the exams that will shape the rest of their lives, and also in the other ALTs of the community who put up with torture sometimes. I count myself one of the luckier ones, to not take on as much of that stress as others. But that week before my wedding… By the afternoon of Friday, the stress was thick and tarry enough to be felt sticking to the air, forcing its way down your throat like second hand smoke. You could feel it sinking into your skin, into the hollow around your brain, into your veins. There were times, when I was between jobs, when the urgency gave way a little and I felt like I would melt like a human statue made of grease and seep away between the floorboards.

The stress changed the way I saw everything. If I had taken a step back, viewed the day’s events from more of a higher management point of view, I’d have seen that this person went here to do this job, which they did, and in the meantime this other job was done by this team of people over there. Clean and efficient, like orchestrating war in a strategic computer game. But with so much – I am hesitant to use this term but can’t think of any more appropriate – negative energy clogging up the church and the house and anywhere else two or more people gathered together in the name of matrimony, all I could see were a bunch of people, drawn together out of reluctant loyalty, doing a job well but to them far too slowly, with too inferior a set of tools, and to an insufficient, disappointing end. Maybe nobody else felt it. But I certainly felt that wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing incorrectly, and was only succeeding in getting in everybody else’s way. And why was this all going so poorly? Because of me. Because I had the dumb idea to try and get married. I have been to darker places in my life, but not for many years have I so much wanted to squeeze between the brickwork and hide from the world like some kind of vermin. And that thought in itself brought additional waves of misery. I was doing this for Stephanie, and I was doing this for God. If I was unhappy, then I was letting them down. If I was unhappy, what was the point…

So then why was it that when Friday night came around, everything was in its proper place and the whole thing was set to go? Why was it that when Saturday came around everyone was able to move themselves to the right places at the right times without ever needing to be told? Why, and this one really gets to me, why on earth did three or four days of darkness come together to create a day so brilliant and so holy? How does something like that happen? Was I suffering for nothing, or was it necessary to bring out the light from inside? The light that, I guess, must have been hiding just out of sight?

I think a big part of it was all the attention. I don’t mean people fussing over me, because I didn’t get swamped by that. But to look around was to see things that were changing because of me. The decorations in the church, for example, or the endless papercraft things strewn about the lounge, or the scowling anxiety of my parents. In some small way, it was all directed at me. And though I do quite like pushing myself out into the limelight from time to time, and I do have something of an addiction the sugary, pre-game nerves that I first felt as a theatre student at high school. But I couldn’t hide from it that week. I couldn’t get away. And unlike when I stand in front of the kids in class, or in front of the Board of Education at a meeting, I was not, could not put on a front to protect myself. I couldn’t be Teacher Pete, or Actor Pete, because neither of those suave suckers was getting married that weekend. I had to be me, under the scrutiny of hundreds, for a long, long time. And that was terrifying. So I guess, then, that most of the stress I felt was of my own creation. That flip-side of the drama coin, the feeling of always being slightly behind where you should be, that was my own feeling, not anybody else’s. That explains why everyone was smiling. Well, nearly everyone.

Alright, alright. Backslash gloom. The ends justify the means, and nobody died at my awesome wedding, which is of course the most important thing. I’ve said my peace (Piece? I don’t even know. I feel my peace because of it, at least.) and am more sane for it. I’m sure you want to know about the honeymoon and all that.

First stop on the tour was Eye Kettleby Lakes, which rents out fantastic little log cabins. We were there for two nights, which was enough time to do a solid, grueling chunk of nothing except eat the food we’d ordered and drink organic cider and watch Rio. Funny film when you’re tipsy. I read a lot (Brandon Sanderson’s new Stormlight Archives book), Steph slept a lot. There was a jacuzzi. That sort of thing. Awesomely relaxing, endlessly fun. But not really interesting to read about, I’ll bet.

So next on the list was Edinburgh, which (sorry Kobe) is my favourite city on the planet. Leicester doesn’t even come close, for all the excellent breed of people it is home to. Edinburgh is small enough to walk around in, friendly enough to be a comfortable stranger in, and familiar enough to fill me with a soft, sweet, orange nostalgia glow. I was impressed to see that very little had changed, which is really something ‘cos haven’t they been working on those trams now for like a decade? Potterow’s shop being outside now was probably the most drastic change I noticed, though as a non-resident I guess there’s a lot I missed. I mean, these days I’m afraid I’ll visit Edinburgh and for the first time ever find myself walking the streets of foreign territory, so most changes were small things by comparison. Boy, do you Scots like bringing up the referendum. ‘On the left you’ll see Loch Ness, and Nessy, of course, votes ‘yes’.’

We did a fair amount of sight-seeing during our brief trip to Edinburgh. Up Arthur’s Seat, down past the Parliament buildings, around the university campus. Continued my age-old tradition of walking up towards the castle and then thinking ‘ah, I don’t really feel like it’ and then walking away. The Mosque Kitchen, oh how I missed you. And, of course, a fantastic meal with a true friend on the night before we left. Edinburgh was safe and thus really not exotic. But I love it. I really do.

Next was the train up to Inverness, and a push against the Pete’s Furthest North Travelled line. Train was fairly uneventful, though I was surprisingly staggered by how inconvenient it is. Or rather, how inconvenient it is compared to Japan’s swipe-your-wallet-and-get-off-when-you-want system. In actuality it’s probably quite good. We stayed in a Premier Inn on the riverside, which turned out to be a great location. Inverness, like Edinburgh, is fairly small, and we could walk to anything we needed. We started off our visit with a quick walk around, down south along the river, before finishing up with a meal at a pretty excellent Indian restaurant in the city centre.

But that day was a taste of something to come, which I’m still struggling to get my head around. I reckon it’s Japan, but since leaving the UK I’ve grown very nervous of strangers. No, strangeness. I’ve grown very uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. So, when it turned out that the Frankie and Bennie’s in Inverness hadn’t been around for a very long time, suddenly I was struck by this fear that we weren’t going to find anywhere. Wherever we went would be new, unknown… No adventures for me, and good morning to you. But I do think Japan is to blame. Japan’s urban culture is designed to de-personalise the act of interacting with services. The trains are a good example; just swipe your Icoca or whatever and off you go, no need to even make eye-contact with station staff. But even when you do, it’s so scripted and polite you may as well be talking to machines. Follow the script, and you get exactly what you need. I’m used to that. God help me, I actually quite like it. And that has made me weak. Oh, and also the Scottish can be very loud.

So the next day I should have been more prepared. We tried going north, to a place called Fortose that has good views of the sea and a sweet cathedral. We say ‘tried’, because we got about half way there and then got off too soon, with a solid stretch of unwalkable A-road between us and our destination. Oh, the shame I felt that day. Can’t even get the buses right anymore. Now, Japanese buses are much better. And it wouldn’t be my last bus failure of the trip.

So, morning essentially wasted, we then took a pre-booked tour down to the Loch and the surrounding sights. And, praise the Lord, it made up for the early failures. Our guide was very sweet, and Loch Ness, though so commercial when viewed on the internet, is simply stunning. Did you know you could fit most of the world’s population into it if it was dry? Staggering. After that was a brief visit to Urquhart Castle on the shoreline, which was also pretty excellent. Got me all medieval warfare-y, which doesn’t happen often between seasons of Game of Thrones. I made a promise to myself to reinstall Shogun: Total War when I got home, and then we were off to the city centre again. Turkish restaurant for dinner, which was a lot of food but really, really good. Very sweet beer; very nice. We did try for the ‘greatest pub in the Highlands’, but due to a bit of over-sleep we missed the food cut-off.

Which brings us on to the last leg of the trip. We took a train in the morning up to a town called Wick, on the coast. I wasn’t feeling all that well, and the train ride was spent in some considerable discomfort, but we did get to see a lot of the vast Scottish countryside as we passed, which was really something.

Just gonna take a quick break here. Feel free to take the same for yourselves.

And we’re back. Wick, it must be said, was the most dreary, dismal town I’ve ever visited. It wasn’t bad; it did have a nice cathedral, and the pub was a good place to spend the three hours we had before the bus arrived to take us to the ferry. But it was overcast with clouds that looked more like industrial smoke columns, and as soon as we left the station all we could hear was the angry cawing of what must have been a hundred crows, all packed tight into the trees along the road down to the centre of town. We passed a graveyard before we got anywhere, and it had crows like you wouldn’t believe. Scrapping and stealing bits of wood from each other. It was like one of those bandit-plagued wild west towns from the movies, before Clint Eastwood shows up to set things right. But the pub, as I say, was quite nice. Still wasn’t feeling my best, so I’m glad we had that time to rest.

After that it was off on the ferry to Orkney Mainland. It was dark by the time we boarded, so the views weren’t exactly stellar. But riding a ferry was entertaining, even if it was only for about twenty minutes. We shared the trip with a group of middle school boys back from, I think, some kind of school football match. They seemed to have won, as their teacher was having a hard time keeping them under control. Reminded me of my students. Once on the Mainland, a terrible truth. We would have to take the bus for about 45 minutes to get to Kirkwall, and we didn’t have change for the bus. The only money we had was Steph’s 50-pound notes, and having seen a young woman try to get change for a tenner on a UK bus before I wasn’t gonna chance it. Buses, man. Don’t like ‘em. So we traipsed off into a coastal village called St. Margaret’s Hope, where a woman working a hotel bar agreed to change our fifty if we bought something. Now, the whole Scotland/England rivalry thing makes me a touch nervous every time it comes up and I’m on “enemy” soil, so you can understand why I made Steph do most of the talking. I was feeling pretty terrible, though, more through shame than whatever stomach bug I’d contracted. It was a bit of a stressful holiday, for reasons I mentioned earlier, and I think that took its toll on my body.

Anyway, we eventually found our way to Kirkwall, end of the line. Seemed pretty tiny in the dark, and there was barely a soul on the road that night. Fortunately the big Tesco was still open, a shining fortress of light in the darkness, and we took shelter in there to regain our sanity, buy food and call a taxi. He knew where our lodge was, and it turned out to be a slightly stretching walk away. Still, glad to have had the transportation. Pretty soon out of Kirkwall the roads turn to muddy country paths with nowhere to walk, and that would have been pretty rubbish in the dark. We reached the little cottage, Inganess House, and tried to get inside. A bit of a challenge there – we’d been told the keys were in a combination locker in the ‘new shed’, but had a bit of trouble finding it. We took it in turns rummaging around in both sheds the building had, while the other jumped up and down to keep the motion-detection lights on. The first time we got the light back I accidentally made a Slender reference, and that is why, when we got inside, we slept with our heavy bags in front of the bedroom door.

Inganess House was really lovely. It was only about five years old, and had the sort of shiny freshness you expect from homes in US sitcoms. Every room had a TV, it seemed, and a sort of media control box on the wall under it so it looked like something out of Half Life 2. We had sandwiches in the morning while we got our itinerary in order, and then walked into town for a look around. The place does come alive in the daylight, but it wasn’t exactly bustling. Kirkwall has everything you’d need, including another impressive cathedral made of red stone. We did a little bit of sightseeing on our own, but public transport was ever against us, and in the end it was the hired tour on our penultimate day that got us the most around the island.

Our little tour was led by a fellow named Kinley, who it turns out was pretty fantastic. We found a website that listed the official Orkney tour guides, and a quick email around picked him out as being reasonably cheap as well as available. Have a personal guide also meant we could pick some of the places we were more keen on seeing, and there’s a lot of stuff to see on the mainland. Steph was eager to take in the Neolithic sights, so that was where we spent the brunt of our time. There was an old village on the west coast which was pretty fantastic; it pre-dated the pyramids as evidence of human civilization. Also huge standing stones, and a massive cairn that nobody really knows anything about. That one was famous for having Norse graffiti scrawled onto the inside walls, and it was very humbling to see that human civilisation really hasn’t changed at all since it was created all those years ago. ‘Ingird is the most beautiful of women’ is pretty much no different to ‘For a good time call’. Though most of where we went was somehow connected to several thousand years ago, it sounded like Kinley really wanted to tell us about the war. Somehow it always seemed to come up. We’d be driving along a road, and he’d point out that it was a road built in the war. It was a bit of an eye-opener; I don’t think either of us had really understood that Orkey was as much under threat from attacks as London, despite being so far north. It was an exhausting, but truly excellent day, and we even received a photo print Kinley had made as a wedding present.

From the front door of Inganess House you can see the airport. However, we still had to call a taxi and get it to drive us around the impassable land in between, which the driver had a good laugh about. We took the smallest plane I’ve ever flown south to Glasgow, and from there back down to East Midlands.

And now here I am. School’s back up, and by some miracle all three of my OTEs are still here. The third years are currently off in Okinawa, taking in the sun and the cheap American imports. The newcomers seem to be settling in okay, but I fear they’re still a bit nervous around me. Got my first class with them tomorrow, which I’m reasonably confident about. Still, don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. This is a good year, I can say that with real confidence, and I don’t want to lose them to dekihenitis. The second years are doing well, though. Already taught them a few times and it looks like they haven’t changed much.

Outside of school, life has been busy. As ALT Advisor for Kobe City this year, I need to be on hand to give my opinions about things and generally be visible for the BoE and ALT communities. But so far there hasn’t been much for me to do there, just the silent roiling of stormclouds overhead which might rain buckets down on me or might pass on by. A bigger, more immediate responsibility comes in the form of a role-playing game I’m running this year. Never done a long campaign before; never done anything outside of the ludicrous antics of Maid RPG. I’m super-excited, often can’t stop thinking about it, so I hope it all goes along well.

Fingers and brain are hurting. Time for me to call it. If you weren’t satisfied with my honeymoon account, go ahead and ask me your probing, fiddly little questions. Go on.

Thanks for reading.

29 - Big Stuff

This weather, I swear. It has no idea what it’s doing. New Zealand was hot. Then, Kobe was cold. After a few weeks, Kobe was warm again. Yesterday it snowed. Then it was spring. Now it’s snowing again. In the UK, at least, you can expect that when weather doesn’t know if it wants to be snowy or sunny it sorta overcasts out into a dreary, smudgy blend of all possible weathers that ends up being none at all. Here in Kobe, the weather’s more like a terribly enthusiastic intern who is caught between two opposed choices - putting all his energy into one choice, before changing his mind and firing all that energy in the other direction. Madness. And the nights are ridiculous. Last night I could barely sleep for all the cold. The heater above the window did nothing; all that hot air couldn’t penetrate the lower levels of icy atmosphere above my futon, and I got none of it. If it’s not one thing taking my sleep from me, it’s another. And that one thing is wedding plans.

Now, prepare yourselves. I’m needing to go through the biggest Christian holiday of the year, followed by the biggest event in my little brother’s life, and also catch you up on what’s been happening Kobe-side. So get that coffee on, and let’s do this.

Christmas this year took place in Washington, with the Bradleys. As part of the second loop of our ‘one year in England and then one year in the US’ system, I was looking forward to going back. The flight was… not worth the words. Not great, is what I’m saying. But eventually we got our way into SeaTac and we were home free. Urgh, or so I thought. First I had to pass out from terror for the second time in my life. I’m a natural worrier, and also a bit of a coward. But America, come on. Do you pick ex-Marines for your border inspectors, or FBI interrogation staff? Either way, they’re terrifying. And I say that having every right to be in your country, having paid the fourteen dollars to wave the visa aside and stroll on in. But here’s the thing that went round and round my brain as I stood in the queue to be judged and branded by US Immigration: if I didn’t see anything on the ESTA website about needing to print off my visa waiver form, then why is everybody holding just that? Everybody! Is this something they’re all doing because they’re over-cautious? Or is it my fault? Oh, that’s more likely, huh. Geez, way more likely! And now I’m going to be shouted at and deported, aren’t I? Steph’ll be upset and her parents will be disappointed and probably won’t let me marry her anymore and there’ll probably be some kind of suspected terrorism charge and an probe of some kind before I get back on th-… oh, nuts, that flight was looooong and now I have to do it all again and how am I going to get to my seat because I can’t feel my legs.

Turns out I was right the first time, and I didn’t need that form at all. But it almost didn’t save me because by the time I wobbled up to the desk and handed in my passport I was seeing stars, and my lips had gone all numb for some reason and I was having difficulty enunciating. When I explained that no, I wasn’t flying alone, but my fiancé was a US national and used the other queue, I mumbled so bad the guy leaned over, fixed me with a killer stare and said, ‘Excuse me?’, in that way you hear American actors say it when you’ve just told them you slept with their mother and they’re contemplating how to maim you.

Whatever. It’s over, and somehow, by the grace of God, I got in. First thing to do in the US: go out and order more food than you’re gonna eat. Especially considering the absence of decent food on the plane, but I said I wouldn’t mention that. Lunch was pizza, and fine pizza it was too. Also root beer off the tap, which is something I’ve only recently realized I very much like. We didn’t do a whole lot that night. Actually, a great deal of my time in Seattle was spent catching my breath after a turbulent term of work. Of course there was the usual sort of going home stuff. Trips to the supermarket for things we can’t get in Japan. Watching movies that won’t come out in Kobe for many months. Like the second Hobbit movie. I swear they could have put the whole book’s worth of stuff into a single film if they’d tried, rather than having to fluff out three from the same story. I mean, I didn’t remember much of the book when the films first came out, being some fourteen or fifteen years in the past. But I did remember the characters having a lot more charm than they ended up having in the movie. Bilbo, for example. I thought The Hobbit was supposed to be about him. Apparently it’s about Legolas. Hm, at end of the day I didn’t much care. It was an entertaining day out, especially when bookended by Mexican food.

Tell you what, this far along I’m struggling to remember exactly what we did in what order in the US. And I refuse to take all the blame, as Marsha insisted I finish two packs of Strongbow during my time there (I did) and as a result a lot of my time was spent a little more merry than usual. Steph had a lot of work to do while she had the chance. Things like filling out forms, sending and receiving money, posting packages. So a lot of my time was spent keeping her sane by way of enlightening conversation. Something I can supply whilst playing video games. Having Marsha and Jess around, both avid Skyrim players at the moment, made for some excellent conversations as I made my own way across the icy north, and Steph was eager to share opinions about things like Starbound, which we play together. Ace game, that. Lots of potential.

But I can tell you about Christmas. As it should be. Rather than taking the long trip to one of the local county churches in the morning, we decided to go to an evening service on Christmas Eve, and ended up at, uh, Bethany… Something Something Church. Bethany like the charity, I believe. Big place, and with some serious technology behind them. The whole building was done up in a sort of Grecian elegance that didn’t come close to being gaudy or overly audacious, and there were some cool lights in there too. They had a massive screen for song words, and they seemed eager to show it off as often as they could. There must have been ten or so video clips used in the sermon, and some of them weren’t especially necessary. One of them, the folk around me whispered excitedly, used the voice of Morgan Freeman, but I don’t think it was him. Still, a good service. The kids all sat at the front while one of the leaders told the Christmas story in all its childish simplicity, and praised them heavily when they got any little bit of detail right. And the songs were good, despite a limited music group, and despite America’s inability to get certain tunes right. Oh, and while I’m on the subject, it’s pretty jarring to hear some preachers in the US pronounce it ‘sayv-yOR’, like it’s the name of some evil space emperor. Bah, hum-bug.

Next day was Christmas, and in all honesty we did very little. Steph and I were still wracked by jet lag, and I was awoken at 10.30 feeling like I was melting into the carpet. Huge thanks to those who contributed to the Pete is Spoilt Fund. Those who gave money may be happy to know it’s going right in the wedding fund, so if you come along to the big event (and you better RSVP soon, you lazy louts) you’ll essentially be getting your money back again as alcohol. And the games! Games like you wouldn’t believe! I was playing Skyrim, a notoriously long game, before the Christmas rush came in, but now I have more games than I’ll be able to play before this year ends, I reckon. Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead 2 are done for now, with the next in the series of chapters due to be downloaded straight to my computer some time in the next couple of months, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of a lot of them. Steph got me Lego Marvel, which we’re playing together and is shaping up to be awesome. Can’t at this point say it’s an improvement over Lego Lord of the Rings, but we’re not even half way yet. And Both of us received these portable charging devices, which I don’t use as often as I could but still continues to be exceedingly useful. Oh, and clothes. I must be growing up if I requested clothes for Christmas, eh? Socks in their multitudes, and sweaters and all sorts.

The last few days in Seattle were equally relaxing. Watched Fifth Element for the first time in must be five years, and cooked food, and I bought some electronics with my excess hundred dollar bill that I’d brought as travel money. The poor cashier’s face when I showed it to him. Easy to forget that Japan’s an exception for being so free with its cash. But yeah, eventually the day came to head down to New Zealand, and we strolled into the airport again.

I shan’t yet again write down the trials of international flight we experienced, as I’m positively sick of thinking about it. Short version: no food and no sleep makes Pete an angry boy. Still, when we arrived in Auckland we were pleased to see that all of our faculties were still lodged in place, and so continued our little sunny winter holiday.

I want to get this off my chest from the very beginning. I’m sure most New Zealanders are sick of all the Lord of the Rings stuff by now, and I can sympathise. We’ve got Harry Potter and Doctor Who, and all the PR baggage that comes with it, after all. But cheesy air safety videos, big statues of dwarves and one Shire-themed park aside, New Zealand, you sure don’t make it easy for yourselves. Flying out of Auckland, I was stunned to see other flights going to a place called Dunedin. The fact that I later learned that it’s pronounced ‘dun-ee-din’, and not like the fictitious, long-lived race of Men which is the slightly different ‘doon-uh-deyn’ changes little. It got my mind into Middle Earth. And that was only one thing. All your homes are bungalows. Y’know, squat little things with one storey and wide roofs and big kitchens and magic rings on the mantelpieces and oh no wait that’s hobbit holes but they’re just so similar! I really tried to appreciate NZ for what it was and not what was filmed in it, but sometimes it was just impossible.

We flew from Auckland to Christchurch, which was fine. Same sort of time as the East Midlands to Edinburgh flight I’ve taken many a time, so no problem. Met up with the parents at the airport, and drove the miniscule distance to the bungalow where we’d be staying. Christchurch is a fantastic city, and I think we both really loved it there, and one of the reasons why is that it’s so compact. Everything was very close, and there was plenty to do in the area. It was also quite warm out, though not the complete 180 we expected from hopping from cold north to hot south in such little time. We thought we were in the clear. We were wrong.

So, a lot of what we did in NZ for the first week surrounded, you guessed it, my brother’s wedding. I want this to be a testament to how stunning the whole event was, from early preparation to final goodbyes, but it does have to be from my own perspective, and I can’t talk about the run up to Andy’s wedding without being true to how I felt.

Alright, here it goes. Being involved in Andy’s wedding reminded me that my own was right around the corner. And the days I didn’t spend angrily stressed at how little time we had left, and how much had to be accomplished in that limited time, were often spent feeling intolerably alone. It’s insanity, I know, to feel lonely when I’m with my family when usually that isn’t possible, but that’s the truth of it. I think the reasoning was two-fold: First and foremost being that my wedding will take place in a country that sometimes I struggle to remember is my home. Everyone who’s coming, you are amazing, fantastic people, and as a part of my growing up I am honoured to share this event with you. But Kobe is my home, too. And sometimes it’s hard to remember that the second family that I built up here, made of friends and work colleagues and even the students, won’t be there to see it. Seeing Andy surrounded by old friends and new just brought that home, and it was difficult.

And then there’s Andy himself. And the second reason for why I felt so low, I think, is that that big group of friends that were with him through the genesis of his new life in NZ, and in the building up of who he is today, didn’t include me. I guess it’s like, um, hm. Trying to think of a comparison that doesn’t make me out to sound too self-important. But I guess it’s like putting some toast on the grill (that’s how we roll Japan-side), and then sitting down to boot up a game of Skyrim and… Ah, no, see this won’t work. Andy is not ‘burnt’, because that implies he is in some way broken. Quite the opposite. How about this: It’s like having a Pokemon in the Daycare Centre, and coming back after looping around the region and picking up a bunch of new badges, and now you have this Pokemon back in your life who’s the same Pokemon he always was, only now he knows some epic new maneuvers and his stat numbers are way up and could he always annihilate an Oddish with a single punch? and… You see what I’m saying? He’s still my brother and he always will be, but it feels like I blinked and missed him growing up, and that makes me sad. Now he’s a married man, can you believe that? He has a beautiful wife. He has a car, and a job. A job that’s not a glorified babysitting job for uni students who can’t move on, as JET sometimes feels. He is an independent and strong man. Am I that strong? I don’t feel it. And I have nobody to blame for not being there to see him grow but myself.

So let’s talk about this wedding, shall we? I’ve been beating around the bush long enough. And, while I’m mid-combo streak for embarrassing confessions, yes I did cry at my brother’s wedding. I’m not even sure why. I think it was a combination of the atmosphere, and having everyone else crying around me. Even my dad. That was weird. Not to sound negative or anything, but ‘dad’ and ‘emotional’ don’t often go together. But yes, I shall more than likely be crying at my own wedding also. Very much more than likely.

You’ve probably seen the pictures by now so I won’t go into detail about the ceremony and how it was set up. By a stroke of fortune that could almost be called miraculous, the perpetual overcastness opened up a just larger than wedding-sized hole that hung over the camp site for the duration of the event. In other words, it was stunning. And the nearby airport barely contributed any noise at all. I didn’t choke up on my Bible reading, despite, I think, it being as relevant for myself as for Andy and Nicky. Not too long, not too short. Perfect. Curse it all, but that’s gonna be a tough wedding to top.

The party that night was equally ace, despite confusing instructions to share my soup with the people around me. There were too many swee-… Ah, I mean ‘lollies’, don’t I? Well, whatever they were there were too many of them left over and now I’m fatter. Cheers, bro. As if Kobe City Hall breathing down my neck for what is apparently a drastically increased BMI wasn’t enough. It went down, for heaven’s sake! How is that a drastic increase?! Fat fears aside, the party really was excellent. Congratulations on all the speeches. I was impressed that the four speakers had four very different ways of telling their stories, and thus presented us with a wide spectrum of experiences. Phil’s practiced, comfortable style and Josh’s more intellectual approach, and Andy and Jazz’s more ‘go with the flow’ atmosphere. I’ve started work on my own speech, but I fear it may not be quite as good.

Ah, who am I kidding? As I will be mentioning on the day, life in a Japanese company has given me a lot of practice with giving speeches. I’m actually pretty confident. Dad’ll be another speaker, I think, which I’m also sure will be good. As for the undecided rest… we’ll have to see.

Saw a kiwi, too. Not at the wedding, you understand. Though I’ll admit to being fooled by a popular misconception that kiwis just come rolling out of the hedgerows like verminous balls of brown fur in NZ, which is of course not true. May as well say the same for badgers in the UK, if badgers were also a protected species. But we did see one, and it was close enough to touch. They’re big; I’d never realized! Bigger than footballs, almost like medicine balls! They were still cute, though, and the zoo we saw them at did a good job of making me want to protect them. Also, did you know certain eels live longer than humans? Madness.

After Andy and Nicky left for their honeymoon the whole city became considerably more lonely. And with mum and dad leaving not long after, Steph and I struggled with suddenly being alone in a country we weren’t that familiar with. We made do; we acclimatized ourselves with the Christchurch public transport service (which is on par with the UK’s and thus was a worrisome step down from Japan’s) and even took a day trip up to Lake Brunner near the west coast of the south island. It was very pretty, and the trip there on the train was awesome. But even though we were getting off ahead of the masses heading for a thirty minute stop-over in Greymouth (which, I’m told, is devoid of anything interesting), we still ended up having not a lot of time before the train returned and we hopped back on. Brunner was nice, though; we saw some very large plants. And that evening we found a superb vegetarian restaurant on the southern outskirts of the city. Absolutely brilliant food.

On the subject of food, I do have to express my sincerest joy at the state of NZ’s fish and chips. I mean, they’re not quite the same as what I’m used to, not quite as oily for one, but I would happily have eaten out every night if it wouldn’t have killed me, or earned me strange looks for the guy who worked at the local chippy. I was initially reluctant to choose my own type of fish, having only had the generic cod or haddock forced on my in the UK, but I actually did enjoy the chance to try different things. Hoki is nice, for example. Not too dry, like UK cod can be. We also reveled in the chance to get some falafel, which hasn’t made it to Japan yet. Excellent stuff.

Which brings us back around to Kobe, and the last couple of weeks in school. Nearly there, guys, nearly there. This time of year is a frantic one at school. No major days off, and the impending stresses of finals and graduation for third years, and the move on up for the elementary kids. Certainly after getting back I’ve found myself with next to no free time at school, and only now that mid-term tests are coming around do I actually have some time to plan ahead and get optional things like posters finished. It’s meant the time has shot by Monday to Friday, but I’ve been increasingly sleepy when I get home, and sometimes before. Almost fell asleep at my desk on a number of occasions. Haven’t done that since my first term. Today was a lot of marking papers, which is straightforward tedium. I’m often called on for marking, as I am apparently so good at it. I think being a native speaker who can spot mistakes very easily helps.

A few things leapt out during the term, though. We had our next SDC, which was relatively informative. The talks were good, and I learned a few things. Still, that place is too, too warm, and sick as I was it was very unpleasant. Yeah, I had a bit of a nasty cold since I got back, one that hung around for a couple of weeks. Not enough to skip school, just enough to make me miserable at every opportunity. It did the round of the ALT community, and some poor folk even came down with influenza, which is dropping kids like flies. Out of school temporarily, that is; nobody’s died. Having a cold was inconvenient for another reason, too, and that was because my OTE had arranged a big cross-school celebration in town for the wedding. Steph’s schools were invited, but I guess none of them could make it. Got a huge turn out, too, from all three of my schools. As far as I’m aware, this is one of the only times my junior high school has gone out drinking with its feeder schools, and as far as I could tell they all thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a posh Japanese restaurant, which doesn’t always bode well, and being still a bit sick I’d promised myself I’d take it easy on the beer. But in the end I didn’t have to worry. Not because the food was good (it was passable), but because I barely got a chance to try it. As soon as the festivities began we were hailed by one of the many teachers there that night, most of whom had never met Steph before, and began asking questions about wedding plans and life after JET and all the other stuff we’d been over a thousand times with a thousand different people. And I know that sounds bitter, but I wasn’t. In fact, everyone was genuinely intrigued that I couldn’t help but be flattered by all the attention. But yeah, we didn’t get much to eat or drink. There were speeches too. One elementary had a little presentation using flashcards about us. The other ended the night with some kind of honourary yelling competition, with the main shouter doing some sort of bullet time thing. Japanese culture, I am told. My junior high school principal, and one-time head of the Guidance Division of the Board of Education, gave a long and very sweet speech that ended up being less about me and Steph and more about ALTs in general. Even though it’s no longer her job, we are well represented by Shiba-sensei! All the teachers wrote a little card to say congratulations, and my OTE read his out for everyone. It included… some interesting advice about power struggles in marriages. ‘Contact me in ten years,’ he said. ‘You will tell me I was right.’ Steph and I gave our own speeches, which I think were well-received. At the end of the night, we all went home. A teacher’s daughter drove us.

Now, I’m reading that last bit back and I think it sounds a little blasé. I’m very tired, see. But my true feelings are anything but. I was absolutely bowled over by the incredible gestures of welcome that we received that night. I don’t even have the words for it. There have been many times in my three years on JET where I’ve felt all alone in the staff room, surrounded by folk who don’t even realize I exist. Doesn’t help when they forget my name. But that night was such a spectacular show of generosity, I can’t help but feel, as I said in my speech near the end of the evening, like Kobe is my second home, and the people I work with my second family. Through all the talks I have with my fellow teachers I’m starting to finally take to heart that they don’t mean to be distant. They’re busy, tired and nervous about talking to me, three traits which disappear when they have a bit to drink and reveal their true selves. That, I suppose, is the measure by which I should know them, not the sleepy, frantic, over-stressed people that rush past my desk and occasionally claim I’m from Australia. This is cultural exchange. This, I suppose, is JET.

And on that bombshell, time for me to take a nap. Not really, naps don’t do anything for me. But time to vegetate in front of the computer and romp across Tamriel for a few hours. The other night I had a bit too much to drink and now I’m a reluctant vampire. Can’t let my commander in the Dawnguard know, he’d have my head. Exciting stuff. Day off tomorrow! Woo-hoo!

Thanks for reading, everyone. This was a long one, and I appreciate your effort.

28 - Pre-Christmas

I’m looking down at my diary and I see it’s been a couple of months since I last wrote anything here. So, better get to it. There’s a fair amount to talk about. Having said that, I am sick. Chances are a lot of what I type down is going to be only half thought out, and the other half is going to be semi-delusional nonsense. Please forgive any fever dreams that creep into this writing.

So let’s start off with the earliest big events, the elementary music festival. A quick glance at my last blog post tells me that the larger school festival was the next day, so I doubt there’s anything before that. This was the first time that I’d gone along to this school’s festival, just on account of not being able to before, and Steph was kind enough to come along with. It was interesting having a second set of eyes, an unknowing pair of eyes, on both schools so she could compare them. So, let’s see. The school went in a completely mixed order of school years, starting with 4, then 1, 5, 2, 3 and finally 6. Impressive stuff, and doubly so when you take into account that this school is much more massive than its smaller cousin down the road. Four classes in each year, each class with about thirty-five kids. There was barely enough room on the stage, and there was no way the school was going to split up a year group. Time constraints, y’know? So instead they had to make the whole thing a bit more interesting by adding little dance numbers on the back rows and routines involving streamers. Cute stuff. Second years did an English song medley, which they pulled off very well. Pronunciation really blew me away. I mean, I bet they had no idea what they were singing half the time, and they’ve probably forgotten it all by now, but it was still an amazing bit of memorization. I was surprised, though, that the third years were doing international songs as well, including a song from England. Or rather, a song in an ‘English style’. I guess… it sounded kinda Celtic. But it wasn’t familiar. Well, I have faith that the teachers did their research first. Sixth years played Holst’s Jupiter, which was pretty epic. You gotta go epic at sixth year, or you ain’t nuthin’. They also did the little ‘this is our last music festival so see ya’ song at the end, and once more did not cry. Maybe we’re just breeding an apathetic generation of kids, or something. Last years’ cried like babies.

Okay, so here’s the criticism. The place was packed when we got there, and though there were places to sit we decided our gaijin girth might irritate some of the shorter, older members of the audience. So, we stood at the back. No problem, I’ve stood for longer before. It’s just… the second, the second, the first group of kids finished and made their exit, their parents made their exit as well. There was this sudden rush from the seats as mums and dads got to their feet and pushed out the emergency exit. You see that sorta thing in UK primary school events? I sure haven’t. The whole thing came off as very rude, like they were blowing off all the hundreds of other kids who tried really hard to get their performances down, but because they weren’t blood related they weren’t worth the time. Only then I noticed that more people were coming into the sports hall as the others left, and after a bit of maths I realized that there was no way, no way, that all the parents of all the kids were getting into that hall. My new theory is that the parents were asked to leave when their kids were finished, so as to make space for the next batch. It looks rude, but I guess it was necessary. Also, you’d have to go home and then come right back again at the end to pick up your kids, which seems a bit silly. But the big thing that really got me was that it took so-o-o-o much time to funnel everybody out and pump a new unit in like some kinda elementary school parent distillery. People, and people in Japan so much more so, are quite good at taking instructions on their own, but in a herd it’s like their brains all get mushed together into something that doesn’t look like a brain anymore, and you can call out at them ‘Please leave via the emergency exit doors!’ all you like and they won’t move because the pretty pictures in their head are just so distracting. What’s that Tommy Lee Jones quote from Men in Black? ‘A person is intelligent. People are (dumb).’ I don’t remember, he said it a lot better than that. And that’s why he’s the face of Boss coffee, the Boss of them all. So ask me to stand for an hour forty-five, I say no problem. You got it. But standing through an elementary school recital is just so much easier than standing through long, long minutes of watching cattle bump into each other and squeeze through small gaps with all the fussy entitlement of an Oscar winner on the red carpet. My feet hurt after the first two hours. My poor feet.

Okay, I’m done with that. Got a bit spiteful, there. Gotta watch the old spite.

Moving swiftly along to the Skills Development Conference, which was very good. Very good, actually. I can normally put these conferences down to being a passable use of time – more effective than sitting around at my desk but less fun than, say, Summer School or… Skyrim. But I was quite thoroughly interested by this year’s. One talk was from a friend of mine on bringing your culture into mid-level elementary lessons, and it was ace. Some truly inspired ideas outta that one. And the other one was by this, wow, such a stud. He was handsome, charming and witty, and he made the best quiz on Japanese pop culture that I’d e-

Oh, wait, that was me.

This was my second time presenting at an SDC, first time solo, and I did certainly enjoy it. I can’t claim that my talk broke new boundaries in the education system, nor sent people away with messianic levels of inspiration, nor was even particularly well-made. But I like to think it was enjoyed. At least there was that much. The afternoon of the SDC was to be spent at another junior high school for most of the ALTs, gathered in the hall in their hundreds around a model classroom full of terrified junior highschoolers wondering why were there so many foreigners in this room with them watching them judging them and if they suddenly turned feral could we take them in a fight cos I don’t think so…! I saw the pictures. Because I was back at my own school, doing an observation class of my own with any of the teachers in our block of school who wanted to come and watch. The class went, eh, alright. Usually kids respond to the addition of guests by trying to be on their best behaviour, for some reason. God bless ‘em. But class 1-1 didn’t really change that much and that was probably because nobody turned up to watch my class!! All that preparation and fear!! For nothing!! Ah, okay, that’s an exaggeration. I think three people stuck their heads in for the briefest of moments before wondering off down towards the sounds of a DVD player being plugged in. We never really grow up, do we? But it still hurt.

After the class, with a headache coming on, I was shuffled off to the computer room with all the guests to listen to a talk from a language professor from Osaka University talk about group dynamics in the classroom. Here’s a classic example of bizarre Japanese society: The computer room had been modified with these long desks to accommodate guests, two rows of them with three seats behind each. Now, it ends up being a lot like urinals, and this I’m sure is true all over the world. You wanna sit on an end seat if you’re first there, so that the next person to come isn’t forced to sit next to you, which they may not want to do if they don’t know you so well. So when I came in and sat myself at the back I got to watch as teachers filed in, some talking amicably, and chose their seats. Know what happened? They all chose different desks to sit at. Every single one, on a different desk. Crammed right at the end as though we were giving them no choice. Maybe not so strange so far, I know. But here’s the kicker. The second the last desk got filled… sorry, ‘filled’, by a single teacher, there was a flurry of panic from my host teachers who dashed to the closest classroom and set up new desks at the back of classroom!! Why?! Whyyy?! And to top it all off, they had the nerve to complain that they hadn’t expected there to be such a rush!! Are you actually kidding?! A rush, when two thirds of the seats are not taken?! In uni, one of the Japanese culture speeches we had from our forth-year sempai was on amaeru, which is kinda like being spoilt. Well, here ya go. Living example of adults being spoilt as children and then growing up equally spoilt.

So anyway, we had this talk, and I think I managed to keep up for the first ten minutes or so. She made some genuinely interesting points, about how showing a united teacher front where everyone gets on with each other is good motivation for the students to try and do the same, but eventually I just collapsed under the weight of it all. That, and knowing that all my friends would have finished their own work and be off to the Hub for a pint by now, while I was stuck in an overheated room listening to a talk that I was finding increasingly difficult to follow. Irritation soon turned to anger as the speech became something of an anecdote corner featuring her ‘funny’ students. Later that night I caught up with my school’s music teacher at the cafeteria-style restaurant near home, and he commented on how funny she’d been. I said that I hadn’t thought so on account of not understanding her ultra-fast, mile-thick Osaka dialect. A half-truth, one I will admit to publically. The other half was that I was well beyond the point of caring, well beyond. I was hungry, I had a headache, and I was miserable. I could try to justify why I felt like that some more, but I don’t think I have the right. It was Friday night, I had a busy day the next day and I just wanted to go home. Eventually I did.

So, moving on, the weekend. The next day was English Festival, a relatively new event split off from Summer School. This year was the second attempt at EngFes, which was built around a speech contest revelling in the glory of Kobe City. Figured a new topic would be nice this year, but whatevs. Eleven schools were taking part, with groups ranging from pairs up to the international school’s colossal twenty-strong group. International school, you say? I say, that doesn’t sound very fair! And no, you’d be right. This year, the two international schools were invited along, but only as special guest stars to try and bring them closer to the public schools. Didn’t… really work. I mean, they could have done with letting the schools know that they weren’t in the running for a prize before they arrived. Just one more reason why I’m not working at city hall. We’d been told that the idea behind EngFes wasn’t the naming and shaming of schools with poor English records, but rather the celebrating of as many kids’ participation as possible. This meant that there were six representatives giving out a prize each, from the Board of Education, to us ALTs, to the international schools. That’s over a 50% chance of winning a prize if all other factors were equal, which is great but I don’t care because my school won one!! Yeah!! Got a crunk certificate!! Got a dope picture to hang on the wall!! Boo-yah! So yes, we were pretty thrilled about it. To my knowledge, our school’s never really gone in for extra-curricular English in any form before now, so this was a big victory for us. The kids did really exceptionally well, and I’m exceedingly proud of what they achieved. Here’s hoping they keep this up into next year.

Which gets me up to date with work. December’s been quiet, what with the end of term and all. Weather’s rotten, so everyone’s feeling the holidays now. This week’s classes have pretty much all been Mr Bean. Dat guy, man. Cross-cultural comedy. A lot of free time, which leaves me free to fret about travelling.

I do hate travelling. Everybody be all like, it’s not the destination it’s the journey that’s the most important. But living in this world of visas and stuffy planes and 1984 border guards it feels to me like that saying doesn’t hold water in a literal sense any more. Take this Christmas. I’m going to Seattle, which I love, but to get there I have to take a long-haul plane, which I hate. Maybe if the extent of my travelling was hopping on a horse and riding the mountain paths from Whiterun to Falkreath I’d like it more. That’s the second Skyrim reference today, and I hope that lets you know what else I’ve been spending my time on. Been reading Look to Windward by Banks lately, and there was nice quote there. It went something like, People realise that the journey, rather than the destination, if not granting fulfilment, grants us a break from feeling like we should be fulfilled. Clever, clever stuff.

But I don’t even have it that bad. Steph’s organizing a marriage visa for our wedding in the UK. You imagine you tough that is? Very, is the answer. It’s very tough. And the Osaka consulate is spreading their arms wide and proudly revealing to us just how little they know about anything. It’s a tough road. Urgh, thinking about the wedding is a sure-fire way of getting me down, y’know. All that planning… all those stupid little details… I gotta get over it, I know, and realise that as co-host of the event I’m allowed to let it go any way I want. No guests? No problem. But for now, let me fret.

Let’s talk about something more positive. Andy’s also getting married, which is excellent news, and takes the pressure off me somewhat. Really looking forward to seeing him in New Zealand at New Years. Also looking forward to dem Steam sales. Despite all that talk of Skyrim, I haven’t been playing so much this month. Starbound came out earlier in the month, and Steph and I have been spending hours digging ores, plundering tombs and blasting penguins with machine guns. It’s living up to the hype so far, as being an early-access game we’re getting new additions every week. Bliss.

And, that’s it. Headache. Tired. Still sick. I’ll see you all later.

Merry Christmas. Thanks for reading.

27 - Singalong

It’s all go. All of it. First was the cultural festival at school, which was panic-ridden chaos until the day itself due to the unknown influence of a pair of typhoons. Now we have the upcoming Skills Development Conference to worry about, or rather I do, as I’m presenting. That afternoon I am exempt from the usual keynotes speech and demonstration of team teaching because I have another presentation, this time back at my school, with my OTE. I think he feels a bit out of the fire and into the frying pan, allowed out of the SDC but instead to be judged by other teachers from Kita ward. Poor guy. I haven’t told him about my plans for an ICP next year, but I don’t think he’ll be happy to hear of the extra work. The day after the SDC is English Festival at Gaidai, which brings with it a whole new pile of stress, as three of my students are giving a speech in the contest. They’re nervous, to say the least; this is the first time our school has ever done something like this. They’re going up against some real heavy-weights, even discounting the three international schools taking part. I’m proud of them even for trying, and I’m sure they’ll do really well, but I hope they’ll think the same when it’s all over. And in the midst of all this, just this morning I remembered that I was supposed to reply to an invitation to watch a friend’s wedding over the internet, which is tomorrow.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, whether its fatigue, stress, that cold that I thought I’d gotten over during the weekend. But whatever it is, it’s been making me real scatterbrained and emotionally fragile. I keep walking into things, too, and suddenly thinking I’d forgotten something important before realizing I’d just imagined it. Or had I? I can’t even tell. It’s not for want of time; just last night I caught my second shiny Pokémon, a Slowpoke. Looks just like regular Slowpoke, but with a matte finish. I have big plans to pump him up into a beefy Slowking, which unfortunately involves trading him to someone else with a certain item to kick-start the evolution. Do I trust anyone enough to temporarily lend them my beloved, once-in-eight-thousand shiny? We shall see. Maybe I’ll need to take something of theirs as a hostage until they trade Excalibur the Shiny Slowpoke back. You see the sort of stress I need to contend with? But no, I’m not feeling weak because I don’t have time to relax. Sleeping’s been tough of late, maybe that’s had something to do with it. Making dinner with Steph always seems to take an eon. I’ll think about ways to shorten that down. And maybe the clutter around the house isb’t helping, Steph wants to do something about that this weekend. But then that’s less time to rest and regain my energy and… Urgh! It never ends…

A silver lining: tomorrow morning’s the second elementary school music festival, this time for the bigger of my two schools. I’ve never been invited to this one before, and wouldn’t have been able to go since it had a tendency to land on a Wednesday, of all things. But I am excited. My smaller school’s festival was once again unbelievably excellent, with stellar performances all round and a complete lack of mistakes of any kind. It was even better to hear the first and second year kids sing Itsy Bitsy Spider, complete with gestures, in well-practiced English, and the fourth years rattle off a short refrain from a Stevie Wonder song in equally high-grade English. Blows anything my old schools could have done out of the water. My bigger school seems to want to up the bar a bit, though, as their second years are doing all of their songs in English. The ABC song, Bingo, London Bridge and Are you Sleeping, which I’d never before heard in not-French. This last month I’ve been working with them to fine tune the pronunciation and hear their grievances about saying LMNOP really fast. (I taught them that it’s easier to just try and say e-le-me-no-P, which they think is hilarious for some reason.) Other than that, I have no idea what’s in store. Must be big, though, ‘cos last Tuesday was like Staffroom of the Dead. Lots of vacant eyes and lurching, and the weekly English meeting was delivered with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed sea cucumber. Must be tired, and I know the feeling. I mean, I saw the same deaths in the eyes of my junior high school around the time of our cultural festival.

Let’s talk about that. For the most part the day didn’t change much from the tried and tested formula used, I think, by all the schools in Kobe. The morning was open house, with kids’ work up on the walls of their classrooms. For English we had a first year display, where the kids wrote the simplest of self introductions and then said what their treasure was, with a little picture to go with it. I was disappointed to find that they’d been re-drafted from when I’d originally set them the work earlier in the year, so the kids that wrote things like ‘Onion is my treasure’ had switched to more acceptable things. I thought it was quite funny, actually. There was some pretty good stuff up, and I had the pleasure of seeing it as I had the morning free to wander around and see everything. My favourite was a set of third year posters which they’d started in second year, where they’d written what they were like then (year 2) and what they thought they’d be like in the future (year 3). As third years, they’d stuck on photos of themselves from the three years of middle school, and it was great to see how much they’d changed. Some of them were practically unrecognisable. The science room also had some cool stuff, like little heart-shaped tubes with coloured liquid that moved around when you held it in your hand. Something about body warmth I think, but I dunno. Also had a great moment at the front gates when a family came in with a little two year old, who practically bellowed out a konnichiwa at me when his parents said hello. The same kid came wandering out of one of the classrooms as I passed, and on seeing me shouted out to nobody at all, ‘Oh, it’s that guy from before!’ As I passed, his father came out to see what all the fuss was about, and when he did I heard the kid say, ‘He must have come from real far away. Look at his skin!’ Ah, to be young again. But really there wasn’t a whole lot to see that morning, and I quickly got a bit bored. Ended up seeking out kids from my elementary schools to talk to, preferably in the presence of their middle school older siblings so I could earn a few cool points. See? Your little sister thinks I’m cool!

The afternoon was the big presentation in the main hall, which I obviously sat in on. I’d avoided watching the rehearsals this year, to keep it all a surprise. First they had the winners of the chorus competition from the week before sing their chosen songs, which was fairly impressive. Then there were a couple of speeches, and then the health club kids gave a Powerpoint presentation about sugar in drinks. They dropped the ball last year by making it about sleeping habits, and showing it in a dark room – I’d been ready to nod off then and there by the end. But this year was actually pretty interesting, and I learned a few things to boot. Like, non-alcoholic drinks actually have alcohol in them, it just has to be under a certain level. Saw a few parents’ faces pale at that, parents who’d probably let their kids break the law because they thought they were just giving them glorified soft drinks. And no calorie drinks are the same. Not that they have alcohol, that they just have to have under a certain level of calories. I knew that sugarless drinks are pumped full of additives to give them taste, but the rest was news to me. So yeah, good job health club.

The two big events for the afternoon were the third year play and the wind band concert. The morning before, the kids from the newly-established drama club had stood out in the rain with paper fliers to hand out to the other students. In the privacy of the staffroom, the teacher in charge had explained that this was because the story was very difficult to follow, and the audience might need a bit of help with it. This got a laugh; weird, confusing plots are a trademark of middle school productions. But in the end I was very pleasantly surprised by how the play turned out. It was much better than that bizarre Romeo and Juliet 2 Except Juliet Somehow Survived And Romeo’s Ghost Is Trying To Get His Younger Brother To Go Out With Her thing from my first year in Kobe. The premise was that a highschool girl was asleep, and was visited in her dreams by something called a Life Advisor, who informed her that she was taking too long in choosing what she wanted to be in the future. Like, what stereotype you fit into, rather than what job. The Advisors showed her a selection of archetypes she could pick, that she would magically become in the morning if she chose them. Things like sports enthusiasts, bullies, pop culture fanatics, prefects and two different types of nerd. Y’know, one who studies a lot and one who locks himself in his room listening to europop and assembling plastic models of underage girls. They have a word for that in Japan but not in English, I think. Anyway, all these archetypes were massive exaggerations of what it meant to be fit into such and such a category, and the girl rightly argues that they’re all weirdoes and she doesn’t want to be any of them. The Advisors then make the deal even less desirable by saying that if she doesn’t pick one then and there they will pick for her, and then inform her that the procedure for making her choice involves putting her hand on one of the characters’ shoulder and jamming a knife into her own heart. Naturally, she kicks up quite a fuss about this. So the Advisors make the choice for her, and the cross-dresser characters chase the girl around the gym before eventually cornering her and making her stab herself with the knife. Cut to black. Then the lights come up and everyone congratulates each other on making a great rehearsal for the cultural festival, and start having a meeting about what they could improve. See, it’s like Inception or something. But it turns out the actors are slightly more realistic, but still very single-minded versions of their own characters, and one by one they dump their responsibilities to the play and run off to do other stuff, leaving the protagonist alone. She complains to the directors of the play that she doesn’t like the ending, that she thinks the girl should have the right to choose her own path. To which she receives a shrug and a ‘that’s life’, before the directors make their own way home. The girl, alone, soliloquises that life is more complicated than that, and that she wants to choose a new path, her own. Then the play ends on a pointless, cheesy ‘Saki went on to start a bakery and lived happily ever after’ narration. So yeah, for a bunch of middle schoolers surprisingly deep. I was impressed. They also worked together really well, and it sounded like they really enjoyed themselves. Good job them.

The wind band was last, and once again they were incredible. I’m always blown away by those kids and their music, and it boggles my mind that they’re not even that good on a national or even city-wide level. They totally nailed the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, and deserved every round of applause they got. The one thing I will say, and I say this with all the tact I can muster, is that the solo bits got a bit much. It’s customary for the third years who’ll be leaving at the end of the year to stand up and do part of the melody solo, so everyone can see them and think about their personal contributions to the club. Great. When they’re done, they bow, and everyone claps. But the thing is, they tend to string a few solos together, one after another. And the accepted clapping time to be polite is about four seconds. Which means one third year gets their solo, and everyone claps, only to drown out the next kid’s solo which barely gets heard at all. I see why they did it, and it must be hard to find good places for support instruments like tubas to get centre-stage moment, but it doesn’t quite work. Y’know? So, overall it was a cracking day, and the kids really excelled themselves. And everyone breathed a big sigh of relief when it was over. That night was the customary staff party, which... could have gone better. The company was fantastic; each time I go out drinking with these teachers I end up feeling even closer to them, and they really go to great lengths to keep me feeling like one of them. Only... the restaurant was traditional Japanese food, which means I got served more of my favourite Severed Fish Head in Oil. I mean, different cultural tastes and all that, but uuuuuurgghhrhghhgh. And the boiled eggs had runny yolks that looked suspiciously red. Urgh, I feel bad just thinking about it. And the whole thing was rounded off with a barbeque on a stone platter in the middle of the table, which smelled just foul. Say what you will about meat being great, you set that stuff on fire and it reeks. Forcing down so much food I didn’t want made me royally sick the next day, just in time for not church. No sir, not that Sunday. I’d barely have left the house before depositing oily fish head from my stomach on to the ‘Yama pavement. Posh food. Do not understand. Apparently some secret council of ALT supporters is organising a joint JH-ES party in honour of me and Steph getting married, and that’s just the kindest thing I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. But... if it could not be at some high-class eastern-style restaurant, that’d be grand. Pizza Hut, if you please.

I’d better sign off there. I can write again after the SDC, ‘cos I’ll have plenty to say about that. Thanks for reading.