Safety

Vignettes:
A week or so ago Teeth showed me a twenty-four hour supermarket fairly close to the Murder Lodge, and I thought, "Great! It's less than a ten minute walk, so if I need potato chips at three in the morning, I can just pop over!"

I was walking home from the metro one afternoon and about seven guys were slouched against the railing of the river, waiting for something, a restaurant or a bus, who knows. I did the quick automatic scan, and they looked like they had too much time on their hands. I kept looking straight forward and walked past them. None of them said anything or even particularly looked at me.

Halloween day, my kids classes were the special Halloween unit, so I wore a costume to work, and figured the easiest way to do so was just to wear the bat wings and horns in. Two little girls on bikes giggled at me as they passed me, so I waved and said "Happy Halloween!" A few people looked at me for two seconds before carefully dropping their Someone Else's Business shields over the optical space I was occupying. I took the wings off on the metro when a seat opened up, so that I could take it without poking the people on either side of me.

I cheerfully mentioned to one of my co-trainees, "Nobody pays any attention to me on the street! It's glorious!!!!!" He gave me a funny look and asked, "Really?" He paused for a moment. "Oh right, you're a white girl." Our reference points are totally different. He went from being a black man in Baltimore to being a black man an hour and a half north of Tokyo (and now, of course, in Tokyo); I went from being a white woman in Baltimore to being a white woman in Tokyo. These are totally opposite attention vectors, even if we both wind up somewhere close to what I'd call zero. I'm not trying to fool myself on this one: I'll never be Japanese, and I know that as a gaijin I stand out and I always will. But that's fine with me for as long as the price for that remains this low.

Another co-trainee dropped his passport at some point on our epic karaoke night. He reported it missing to the police, and the next day they called to say that someone had turned it in to the police station.

I've stopped even noticing how many guys walk around with the top few inches of their long wallets sticking out of the top of their back pockets.

Jaywalking just isn't a thing here.

It's not all sunshine and roses, of course. I do have one creeper-on-the-train story: taking the packed Yamanote line out of Shibuya, I saw this old guy lean forward and lip the back of the coat of the guy in front of him before deliberately drooling on it. I was staring at him with my WTF-est expression on, and I wanted to say something, but what would I have said? I really can't get much past "sumimasisen" at this point.

One Month

I've already been in Japan for over a month- how time flies! It's been incredibly busy, in a good way, and I'm already starting to feel like living here is my real life. I'm getting a handle on the most important aspect of my new life, which is Tokyo's train system- or at least, I'm getting a handle on the three lines I ride with any regularity, and getting better at not feeling overwhelmed by the size of the stations and how many people are in them at any given time. It still amazes me that it's possible to know, to the minute, when the trains will leave their station: the sheer organizational power!

Given that the train system comprises the city's arteries, it shouldn't surprise me as much as it did that the English students who have mentioned driving have such a different relationship to it than I do. Back home I had a thirty-five minute drive to work and drove about three hundred miles a week, and often found any additional driving to be tiresome. But I've had two students mention that they love to go driving on their days off, and one said that the hours-round-trip drive there was one of the reasons why he loves going to his favorite hot springs. Maybe after a year of not driving I'll miss it, but for now I'm excited by the thought of not getting behind a steering wheel any time soon.

I think a large part of why living in Tokyo is feeling like reality is that I've finally started work rather than training, found a grocery store, and started cooking meals since I moved into the Murder Lodge. (Oh, right, I moved! Given everything else, that actually seems like small potatoes.) Every so often I still think about how strange it is to be living in one of the most exciting cities in the world, halfway around the world from home, but more and more that's just how I roll- I'm cool like that now, even though I am not now, nor will I ever be, in the same fashion league as the tragically hip youth* I see all over. (In related news, Japanese people have amazing skin, and I cry myself to sleep at night** because I have no hope of aging so well.)

Anyway, speaking of Tokyo being so exciting, I have a party to show up fashionably late to. I promise I will post more soon!

*Aged ~15 to ~50. I cannot tell, because, again, amazing skin. Given the ages my students have claimed they are, I can only conclude that everyone looks 25 until they're 80, and then they acquire a few fine wrinkles.
**As you may have guessed, this is not a literal statement.

One of the many ways my life has changed

The last three weeks have been pretty amazing, that's for sure. They've also been incredibly busy, and I'm only just starting to settle into some sort of new pattern- routine still feels like the wrong word!

I had four days to get acclimated to the time change and start to find my bearings before training started, and I used those days to get unpacked and meet up with most of my training group before the first day of training. We wandered around Shinjuku, went to the Seiseria's, which is an unusual chain in that it doesn't have a table charge, and did a dry run of the walk from the train station to our office so that we'd know how to get there.

Saturday the 13th was our first day of training, and since we had Sunday off, six of the eight of us rolled out to Karaoke, which is justifiably famous as a Thing To Do In Japan. What you need to know to make this story make sense is that the trains stop running some time around midnight, depending on the line, and don't start again until fiveish in the morning. So if you're going out, you are committed to going out. After two hours at a nomihodai, an all-you-can-drink flat charge bar, everybody suggested going out clubbing in Roppongi. I said I would go home while the trains still ran if everyone else went to a club, but the alternate suggestion to karaoke was floated, and I accepted, based on the best advice I received before I came here: accept every invitation for the first two weeks, even though you'll only feel like sleeping, because people will stop inviting you if you've never said yes. I just wasn't willing to do that for a club.

We rented a karaoke room and rocked our hearts out for hours. We came back to the Murder Lodge to crash, but my roommate and I just decided to wait up another half hour or hour or so until we could head home and sleep in pajamas with toothbrushes. We got home a little after twenty four hours since I had woken up, which if you know how much I love my sleep is quite a feat.

I am now a person who has karaoked all night. That is a thing that I have done. And it was wonderful!

Leap of faith

Many times over the last few months, I've wondered to myself if I'm really doing this, and how did I actually make this happen? And I think about all the things I'm putting my trust in to fly half way around the world and live an entirely different life for a year:

That Company is actually as reputable as I have every reason to believe, and that it will be the awesome work environment that I think it will be. I have always had prompt responses to paperwork and communication, and have heard personal recommendations about the strength and reliability of Company. My in-person interview was great and informative, but it wasn't in Japan, with the people who will be my direct supervisors and coworkers, so there's a certain amount of sight-unseen on this. I actually really don't have doubts about this, and have seen no red flags, but I feel sort of like I should be less unworried, probably just because it's a huge change and I feel like I should be more skeptical.

That I'm going to be able to roll with everything that I have to roll with. The first question my students ask me when they learn I'm moving to Japan is if I speak any Japanese, to which I cheerfully respond, "Nope!" I am, however, hoping that being there will increase my motivation to make it through more than the first half of the first Rosetta Stone lesson. (The second question they ask is whether I'm going to start eating fish or if I'm going to stay vegetarian. I tell them I'll probably go on a don't ask don't tell basis with things like fish sauce or bonito flakes on food, but that I don't intend to full-on start eating meat.) I know that there's going to be a lot to roll with- jet lag, culture shock, language, food, having a dress code stronger than "not jeans," etc, etc, etc- but I'm pretty sure I can handle it.

That a year isn't that long and that my boyfriend and I can make it long distance.

That my cats will still remember and love me when I get home.

That sushi in Japan is going to be even tastier than sushi in the States. (And, I guess, that they even serve veggie sushi there.)

That 30 really is when all that hard work I did in my 20s of figuring out who I want to be and what I want to do is going to really come together. That it's a good year to go adventuring. That this is going to be awesome.

Mind maps

I've known about mind maps as an organizational tool for brainstorming since at least high school, but I've never personally found them particularly useful for writing papers, and I always did more linear paper outlines with heading and subheadings. Even when we talked about them as a brainstorming tool in grad classes, I didn't see the magic, because doing them as a sample is entirely different than doing them for real.

But now I have seen the light of mind maps, because I used them to write my packing lists for the next year. Mind maps are really perfect for something like packing which has so many categories and sub-categories, and it's really easy to add things in any order without the paper getting out of order. That's a big deal for me- I want my lists to make sense, so it bothers me if I don't split the page up right and run out of room in one vertical list, or if the order doesn't make any sense because I thought of something later, but it was related to earlier things.

Adding information to the mind map worked around that problem, though, because I could come back to any category and add to it later, and since ideas are expanding outward from the center, there's still room, and it's still in the right place. Even adding a whole new category a few days after the first brainstorming session didn't mess things up! It was also helpful just in terms of thinking, because it both made me a little more orderly in filling out my categories, and mitigated the effects of writing down ideas out of order.

I'm starting to feel like it's at least possible that I won't wind up in Japan and realize I should have brought ________.

So, mind maps: what's your experience been with them, and why? Love them, hate them, use them never/all the time?

Introduction

I intend to use this blog to chronicle my adventures in teaching English as a foreign language. Expect a writing mixture of thoughts on language, teaching, culture shock, and travel fun. There should be enough personal stuff in here to keep those of you who know me interested, but I also hope for this to be a resource that’s useful for other teachers or travelers.

I started this blog now because in mid-October, I’ll be teaching English in Japan, which is an adventure that I’m so excited to embark upon! I think this is going to be a truly amazing year for me, and I think that reflecting on my experiences in journal form will help me maintain this sense of wonder and excitement even when living in Japan is my new normal.

Teaching abroad is a pretty good reward for all that work over the last two years in my M.A. TESOL program, I think! I learned and grew so much in all my classes, and now I feel really eager to go forth and apply my skills and knowledge. I think I’m ready for the challenge of moving from theory to practice.