The Nishihara Board of Education (BOE) takes extraordinarily good care of its Assistant Language Teachers, or ALTs. Literally across the parking lot from the BOE office, there is a small, government-owned house. While I'm a teacher here, I get to live in this house rent-free. The house comes with a few basic appliances, including a TV which comes with 6 basic channels, a bed which just got a new mattress pad and for which I got to choose the new sheets and covers, and an old semi-circular couch. The house is rather decrepit looking from the outside, but the inside is nice since it was newly wall-papered after Jay's cat completely scratched up one of the rooms. The floors of the bedroom, living room and spare bedroom are covered with tatami mats, which cover the floors of most traditional Japanese houses. If you are new to living with tatami mats, their musk is the first thing you notice when you enter the house, especially when it is hot and humid, as it is all summer in Nishihara.
The house is entirely devoid of hallways. Rooms link to one another by way of sliding doors, which would be like removeable walls if you could take them off their tracks. The kitchen is equipped with two gas burners for cooking, a microwave, fridge, cabinet full of dishes and cooking and eating ware, and a small shelf that serves as a pantry. The bathroom is separated into a toilet room on one side of the kitchen and a sink/shower/washing machine room on the other side. There is a deep, though not very long, bathtub, which many Japanese people use for soaking after they shower - they fill it with hot water, cover it (my covers are missing) and use the same water for a couple days for an after-dinner soak. Or so I was told at an orientation about two months back.
In addition to getting a rent-free house, Jay has left me a number of useful things that he won't be taking with him back to Canada. There are bug sprays and mat sprays and soaps and air fresheners, all labeled in Japanese, so I'll need to be properly monitored before using most of them. The laundry detergent is pretty straight forward. Thankfully, Jay labeled the bleach. That could have been disastrous. There's a closet full of teaching supplies, anything from giant dice to Christmas decorations to an ancient stuffed Pikachu. There are also Japanese grammar books and flash cards, a random assortment of CDs and DVDs, old dish towels, and even 6 months worth of toilet paper tucked into various nooks and crannies of the house. Apparently, when I mentioned that I had worked Dorm Crew and cleaned dormitories in college, he worked extra hard to clean the house before I got there, and it showed.
Now my work is cut out for me. The walls of the house are bare, but that will change very soon. I don't have a decoration scheme in mind, but then I never really do. There are Glow-in-the-Dark stars on the bedroom ceiling, and those are going to be the first thing to go. I've never had anything against Glow-inthe-Dark stars before. Strange. Anyway, I'll give them away as prizes to the students or something. Meanwhile, I'll still have clothes to put away and Stuff to sort through, organize, and determine the use/meaning of. I should probably do laundry fairly soon, but I don't know when I'll have time between tomorrow's festival and buying a phone and connecting my internet (I'm currently on the office computer) and shopping for groceries and other necessities.
And somehow, in the midst of all of this, I'll learn some Japanese.
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