Names! So many names!

Today was spent at the Nishihara Junior High School (chugako) touring the campus and organizing the desk, which is FULL of flashcard and teaching handbooks and activity books and curriculum binders, etc. Many of these sets of cards aren't complete, but I don't know which ones so I spent a lot of time in the teachers' office going through numbers, days of the week, months, weather cards, sports cards, alphabet cards, envelopes with pictures of food in them, etc.

I also met the two English teachers I'll be working with. Thankfully, they can speak English, if not quite as well as Tomoko. Every time a student would walk into the office (they're studying for exams and practicing for various athletic teams), the teachers would encourage them to speak with me. They were all levels of nervous and shy. One poor girl looked like she wanted to die and get it over with. 5 tennis players game in a group and they brought up Asheki (?), a Japanese boy band, I believe. They asked me which one I liked. I examined it, then pointed to the middle one, and they screamed! One girl collapsed to the ground because she is apparently obsessed with this dude, Musaki, Mosaki, I forget. I asked a lot of people their names today.

Oh, and I went to this delicious restaurant called Herbu. I had fish of some sort, and it came with an onion soup and a salad - super yummy! Apparently Nishihara has a slew of good restaurants since a main road goes straight through it and people outside of Nishihara often stop by to eat.

By the way, here is my house. It's rectangular in shape. Pretty simple-looking from the outside.

 This is my bedroom. Those white panels slide back and forth, and I usually keep them open unless the air conditioner is on, since it is located in the bedroom only. I closed them for showcasing purposes. You can't see the dresser on the right or the 3 closets on the left.

This is the view from the kitchen. You can see the bedroom on the right and the living room on the left. The small kitchen table never looks any cleaner than that. And you can see the some of the semicircular couch. And the mess beyond it. If I sit on the chair at the right, I can see the TV in the living room, which is hidden from here.

Next is the kitchen. You can see the two small gas burners, the sink, the Scary-Killer-Death-Oven-Microwave, and the top of a small-ish fridge.  It's quaint, I guess.

And finally, here's the spare room. In the photo, it has become the craft room. I'm preparing for my self introductions in the classroom. There's a tall bookshelf out of sight on the right, and to the left there is definitely room for a couch. This is also a good view of the tatami mats. This room was redone due to the cats who lived here before. My allergies occasionally flare up while I'm in here.











So that's a basic, quick look at the house. I didn't show you the entryway where you're supposed to take off your shoes (and I do - anything to help prevent bugs). You can probably also see that most of the walls are bare. Still looking for stuff to put up. Didn't show you the bathroom either. Ah well, next time.

And did you notice I mastered the photo technique? In the previous entry, I somehow managed to delete some and change the order of the text while getting the photos in a hodge podge. It's apparent from that entry that I still have more photos to show. But all in due time.

Sayonara! (which, incidentally, nobody says...)