Flat3D

A week in a valley with some fish…

Thats what the name of this town means.
Ajigasawa - The kind of valley thing of the horse mackerel (can you tell I don’t really know?)

Anyways I’ve been here a week now and had the chance to explore and settle and rest and onsen…
The Elliots have gone to Tokyo (yes it’s not Tokyo, it’s Chiba, but if you jut thought this then you are in the vast minority reading this who know what Chiba is and probably also know that Ichikawa is litterally a river’s breadth away from being in Tokyo) for project timothy (Laurie told me what it was for/about but I have forgotten. It sounds more exciting just as “Project Timothy” anyways) So it has been me and their daughter Sarah in the house. For a while an ex-JET, Tricia, came and stayed as well, then she left for Tokyo to fly home to Arizona. It has been very interesting.

So what have I been doing? Well not a lot is the answer! I have been out biking around the town to find out where everything is, I went and downloaded a bunch of pictures of Irish things so I can teach the kids in the Kindergarten about Ireland (at the request of the guy in charge who will be driving me around… whom I met at the russian class on friday, more on that later…) Then I took a memory card of 5 whole photos to the Fujifilm shop to get printed. It all worked quite well, now I just have to figure out what I’m gonna actually teach the kids… As in what English I am going to teach them, that is the point afterall!
I have also been to Church here in Aji and then again at the international service at the Ghent’s church. Believe it or not I actually felt more comfortable at the Japanese service in aji than at the English service. I am not sure if this is due to having acclimatised to Japanese culture but not to North American culture or simply because when you can’t speak the language you don’t feel so much pressure to actually go and talk to people… Although after the service I did go and talk to people and felt much less uneasy. So hopefully that will continue at the next one.

So the russian class. It went well. We made and ate pirotski (which, being the result of being changed to Japanese and back again, is probably not correct, it could be pilotski or protski or plotski or anything really…) but yeah it was tasty and fun and I got to meet some people and practice my Japanese…

Then this week I have moved into my new room! It is in the church building and is above the sunday school room. The stairs are veery steep though, and I have been informed that 2 short termers have already met with the floor at some velocity thanks to them. But since then they have added a hand rail and glow in the dark patches along the edges and things so hopefully I won’t meet such a fate. It is nice to be where I will be for the majority of the next year, now I can finally get settled, arrange things like I want and so on and so forth.

And today the new bath outfit was installed. They will come again tomorrow to hook up the water. but we can’t use it til friday as the caulking won’t have set until then. So we will just have to continue the regular trips to the onsen (Japanese hot spring bath)…. shame…
The next few days will be a little hectic, I have tomorrow to finalise prep for the kindergarten and kids classes. To be honest the kindergarten classes scare me more than the kids class despite the Japanese teacher’s presence. In fact it is because of him that I am more worried! With the kids I can just do stuff and try to get something across, kids don’t really fill me with fear as they might some people. But a supervised class, now thats different, it almost feels like I’m going to be tested!

So yeah, I have taken photos, but I will upload them another time. Too much messing around for this evening.