And we have access to the world now!

Hi Everyone! Yesterday heralded the end to our long wait for internet access. This is a joyful occasion - finally we can chat freely to everyone! This is also cause for concern as i will no longer have a reason to head to the all you can drink soft drink bearing 'Popeye's Internet cafe. A weekly ritual for me, I am sad to see it end. Im seriously considering reading manga and sitting in their little booths watching movies.....oh to be able to show you all Popeye's! So we have officially started to really settle in now and are more accustomed to the rhythm of Japan and our lifestyle here. We have regular schools that we attend five days a week (with Fridays and Mondays off) and we work at each school for about six hours. No marking, barely any planning (just for group classes, of which I have two per week and am given time to plan), its a very restful way to teach actually. The teachers i met here who have stayed a long time (some even ten years), i ask them what keeps them in Japan. They always refer to liking the 'lifestyle', and i can definitely understand why. Many of them are bankers or lawyers or office workers or waitresses or whatever from back home in Canada or the USA or Australia and coming to Japan they are paid pretty well to effectively just chat to Japanese people and act like a wiggle in kids classes. The days of work are short, the pay is reasonable, Japan is an incredible place to live...I can see why they stay. I think for me, the hardest thing to adjust to has been the style of teaching that is done here. I am a bit of a perfectionist and I like to be part of both the planning and the execution of classes I teach back home. I really love plannin lessons! Here in Japan, lessons are pre planned for you - there is freedom in the way you conduct them and what you choose to do but the essential lesson plan is the same for all teachers at all ECC schools. This is great for standards, since all teachers are teaching the same structures and vocab to their students and the lessons are really quite good, but its hard because i find it hard to teach lessons sometimes that I didnt plan myself - it can become more of a challenge to 'remember what Im meant to do next' than what my goal is for the lesson. But, as i said, a lot of the time we are just sitting in rooms, talking with students who are eager to meet us and eager to chat with us. Its a really relaxing way to spend a day of work! We started kids classes last week. They are very fun and hysterically funny. All the staff and parents think the kids are 'so cute' and they sit outside the classrooms watching as we sing and dance and practice the alphabet with their children. The kids classes have students aged from 1.5 - 13. Yep, 18 months old and they come into an English emersion classroom where I sing and dance and operate a puppet for them! Its actually really fun and the songs are cute. I love doing ones that are familiar like Heads, shoulders, knees and toes.....but I also like the new ones 'Hello, Hello How are you....clap your hands....stamp your feet...flap your arms...turn around...." (and yes, there are actions! Kids classes are great, you just sort of act like a member of High 5 for bout 40mins then the next group comes in. Most days i have 2 or 3 kids classes. Ross has more than me though. We also teach free time lessons and Junior High classes and I have two regular group classes too. Free time lessons are where people come to the school and book in for a lesson (max 4 people per lesson) that goes for 40 mins and could be about any topic in the current textbook that we all have. They could also get any teacher that is there on the day. We talk about shopping, sightseeing, family, friends and we practice situations like booking a hotel room or using the telephone in English. Its definitely small talk, but if you get good students who want to chat then the classes go really well. Regular classes are ones where people are booked in for a year of weekly classes with one teacher. The teacher gets a little bit of planning time and we use a textbook that is npt made by the company, its one they could buy at a bookshop and is more widely recognised. Those lessons are pretty fun, they have a range of activities like listening to tapes, chorusing new vocabulary, watching movies, reading news articles, etc. They're longer too - 80mins. I really enjoy planning these lessons (there are no pre written lesson plans so its up to me - yay!) and teaching them. Junior High classes are a bit nutty pbut have been ok so far. We only teach them for 25mins (after a Japanese teacher has taught them) and we are there just to check pronunciation and intonation that they can only get from a natice speaker ("do you" becomes "do ya" and stuff like that). A couple of weeks ago we met this lovely Japanese girl Rumi at a Hanami (a cherry blossom viewing picnic). Rumi lived in Canada for awhile so here English is really good and we chatted for ages. We have kept in touch and ended up going out for dinner with her last weekend, then the following day her and her husband took us out to Nara for the day. We went to Yoshinoyama which is a less common place on the tourist route. Its farther from Tokyo tht we'd usually go if we were heading to Nara, but the Cherry Blossoms bloom later in the year there because its a mountainous area and the blossoms are shielded. We went hiking up the mountain, ate good food and took in a spectavular view - it was an awesome day of sightseeing. We felt so worn out but so proud of ourselves. Rumi also took us to this great Italian restaurant (very hard to come by in Japan, I promise!) with wood fired pizzas. It was delicious. Today is our day off! Hooray, we're meeting with Yoshimi for dinner but i think we'll head into Umeda earlier for a little shopping too. Much love to everyone. We'll try to keep this blog updated from now on. Cheers! Allie xo