The 6-Month Mark

It's a little scary - I've already been in Japan for six months. Yet, somehow I've only been in Japan for 6 months. When February 1st came around, I began to ask myself a lot of questions:

Has it really been six months?

When did using chopsticks become as natural as using a fork? (In some instances, more so!)

Why does everything seem so normal? Wasn't I freaking out about basically everything a few short months ago?

and finally,

What will I do next year? If I stay another year, what will I do after JET?

Well, folks, it's now official. I'm staying for one more year. I submitted my request and received approval last week. I sort of new for a while that I wanted to stay another year, but it was still a strange feeling signing the form. I mean, Japan may be awesome now, but in another 6 months, what if it sucks? I'll be stuck here a whole year longer!

Actually, that's not a particularly big fear of mine. I do wonder sometimes if and when I will run out of ideas for teaching, or if I'll overstep my boundaries. Will this get easier the second time around? Will I actually learn from my mistakes? Am I going to get too comfortable and fail to take advantage of the opportunity to explore this country and learn more about this culture? I think that's my biggest fear - taking it for granted that I'm here, in Japan! Life has taken on such a routine - walk the dog, go to school, make dinner, go to kendo, go out occasionally to eat dinner and sing karaoke. This makes for rather a pleasant living experience, but it has diverged somewhat from my original hopes of exploring this entire country and region.

In sharp contrast to my last entry, this week has been a little off. I've felt tired almost all week, particularly today (I stayed up late doing origami, but the rest of the week I've been getting sleep). When I got to the BoE office in the afternoon after teaching, I found out that Zuma somehow managed to escape. I'm 98% positive that I locked him inside the house this morning. So unless he was very stealthy and slipped past my feet or there's a hole in the house, I don't understand how he could have gotten out. The board members were extremely nice in that they chased him down and used the spare key to my house to lock him inside again. But I was scolded because I haven't registered him yet, or taken him to the vet. And here I became a bit upset, enough that I had to stop talking in order to hold myself together. I was too tired and too upset to explain that calling a vet, finding a vet, talking to a vet, and understanding a vet (or the people who register pets) are all dauntingly impossible tasks for someone who knows so little Japanese. And everyone around me always seems too busy to help me. So this scary task just went undone, because it was easier not to think about it. But now Zuma's gone rogue so I had better figure this out.

And in other news, my Thursday evening English conversation class has moved to a new building where the room adjoins to a kitchen! This obviously means we should do cooking lessons, but to be honest, I barely have a clue where to start or how to run a successful cooking series. Current plan: bring in a recipe for reading practice, go over some key words (bake, fry, cook, cut, peel, pour, heat, ingredients, liquid, etc) and suggest each person find their own recipe to teach. Then we'll have cooking lessons, wherein the person teaching is not allowed to touch the ingredients or speak Japanese, but must instruct everyone else in English. That will be a challenge. We're going to need a good bit of speaking practice before we can carry that out successfully. Hm.

My Japanese study is falling a bit behind as well, although I have made a Japanese friend who has decided that we should text each other only in the other's language. This is considerably more fun than reading the course books, and actually gives me a chance to practice the coursebook material and my kanji recognition. The phone predicts what I'm trying to say and auto-selects which kanji I might want to use. It does NOT predict English words, though, so texting in English is a slow process. Karaoke is also proving to be great reading and kanji practice. I can pick out the simpler words on the screen fairly easily now, and I'm even working on learning a couple of Japanese songs! Now if only my voice would come back...I've been abusing it by singing so much and making weird voices at school. But I'm an English teacher - speaking is my job. I might as well make it interesting.