3 Weeks of no internet is too long!

Hi Everyone,

I know you've all been holding your breath since our last post, so sorry if anyone has died of asphyxiation in these long 3 weeks. We still have no internet in our apartment, but hope to get that taken care of ASAP. We can check email at some of our schools, but it's not a place where we can blog from.

SO....We are living in a small, but fairly comfortable apartment in Asou, Namegata City. Asou used to be a tiny town, but 4 years ago it joined with a bunch of other nearby towns and became Namegata City. Think of it as a kind of neighborhood. All of Namegata City is extremely rural. We are practically surrounded by rice paddies and vegetable fields. We are constantly driving past old Japanese farmers, standing in the middle of their rice paddies working, or driving tractors down the highway very very very slowly....It's like this all over our prefecture, apparently. So no internet cafes, only one library (30 min away from our apt), and a few different shopping "plazas" we can get to within 20 or 30 min.

We loaded up at a few different 100 yen stores, where we found housewares, clothes drying racks (no dryers here!), and other miscellaneous goods. It took me at least a week to find some kind of lotion that was meant for my face (the first time I bought something that advertised a "beautiful skin experience" it turned out to be soap). Yes, aisles full of products labelled in Japanese characters is always an adventure.

School is pretty good. My first week was exhausting, what with meeting all the teachers, principals, etc, and going through a lot of the cultural niceties that I don't quite understand yet. Lots of green tea, lots. Now that I know how to drive to each school, and know the teachers I'm working with, it's much easier. I am provided with one lesson plan each week that I teach to all of my classes, with minor differences depending on the teacher. So on Mondays I am just getting a feel for that week's lesson, but by Friday I could do it in my sleep. Sometimes a class is doing a test or something, so the school throws a younger grade at me, assuming I have a lesson I can do with them. At first I was a bit overwhelmed - but grateful for all my preschool/daycamp experience. At least I know kids' songs and games I can pull out of my back pocket to do with younger kids.

I don't think anyone wants to read a 5 page blog post, although I could write 50 at this point. So I'll save some for next time. If you have Q's, please post them and I'll try to answer them in my next post.

Hope life is busy and happy for all of you - without internet we're fairly isolated. We don't even know what's going on in global news, so if something huge happens, don't expect that we'll know immediately.j

Take care, and practice your hashi (chopsticks) skills so you can keep up with us when we come back!

-Tessa Sensei / Miss Tessa (all my students call me one or both of these titles)