Land of the Rising Sun
Konnichiwa!
At last we have a reunited in the land of the FAR EAST! It has been so great to live, work, and adventure in Japan together. We are loving every moment, and have already shared a lot of exciting experiences here in just these few days. This is not to go without noting, Tyler’s week long solo adventure. Tyler arrived here October 27 at 10pm exhausted from all of this travel inconveniences, luckily his childhood friend Roger was waiting to pick Tyler up and bring him back to his house. The next few days Tyler was trained for a total of two classes, and was deemed ready to begin teaching on his own. (A very short amount of time, compared to Sam’s full week of training) Saturday was a big day for Tyler and the company we are working for. It was the day of the Huge Halloween Carnival to help promote Gem School. Tyler was a big hit, spandexed-out in a skin tight Spiderman outfit. Which was very appropriate considering, from the mouth of the school’s owner, “if the costume does not WOW the kids, the “costume” is not good enough.” Tyler and the other nine American/Canadian teachers helped facilitate several games, a haunted house, and craft activities. (*Note, the weather was anything but sunny and warm. Extremely cold and misty rain covered the whole island, not a good day to be Spiderman) A funny thing to also note, as carnival prizes, Gem School was giving away small bags of Ruffle BBQ chips for $8, as a treat to enjoy true American cuisine. For Tyler’s free time, he visited a serene, peaceful Shinto shrine and in total opposition, an overly stimulated and much noisier Japanese mall. With four levels for fashion clothes, a dollar store the size of a small Walmart, and even a Baskin Robbins. Meanwhile Tyler’s voice had deteriorated to the point that his only form of communication was scribing with pen and paper. Probably due to a couple of factors, lots of children+cold, rainy weather change) The next day, Tyler went to the big city Takamatsu, big meaning a population of nearly 1million. The mall is pretty ritzy, considering it has a Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Daiso all right in a row!! Daiso is Japanese for Dollar store. Dollar stores are like LDS stake houses here. EVERYWHERE! A few days later after visiting one of the 88 temples (more details to follow shortly about these temples) he was able to pick up his love at the bus station. Samantha had finally arrived!
Since Samantha has come, we have been pretty busy with work everyday. Samantha has been training with the other teachers, while Tyler is filling in substituting until Samantha starts. However, we have been able to teach with each other occasionally which has been a lot of fun. One such class, called a Home Stay, is to give a kid the experience of living with an American. Basically we spend three hours babysitting these kids and taking them around to stores, parks, and ice-cream parlors to incorporate everyday English into their vocabulary. This particular Home Stay only had one student in the class named Shin. He is an ADORABLE six year-old who was very intelligent and knew very conversant English. (Thanks to the Disney channel and American cartoons) He really wanted us to take him to play video games at the Fuji Grand, the equivalent to a big Target Supermarket. Now allow us to describe Japanese video games. They make absolutely no sense. The game that Shin was insistent that we play with him was called Altus. The only way to describe Altus is… well… you put in your 100yen. It then shoots out a card similar to comic trading cards, however it’s made of cardboard and has a pog type thing that you have to punch out. This is your character. Then you take your pog and press it to this disc on the game that then registers the bar code and enters your player. Then you commence by hitting a green button, a red button, and a blue button, as many times as you can. Hungry Hippos Style. But sometimes you only hit one of the buttons, or sometimes two, or sometimes all. How you are to know which to hit at what point is not made very clear. At least to us Americans. Meanwhile, on the screen no characters are moving, just numbers like a slot machine. Even though it is supposed to be a soccer match simulator? Who knows. Samantha accidentally beat Shin, so then Tyler had to let Shin win by a huge margin. He loved that game so much, and it was totally hard to make him leave. At this point we realized we are going to be push over parents. We stayed a played the game for probably 30 minutes more. And spent quite a bit more money. Then we went over to the toy section and had him reinact all of the sounds of Pokemon characters. Interestingly enough, they make universal sounds. Then we went to the park and played on the swing sets, monkey bars, and slides. We played some card games too. One of which was Babanooki which is a game all of the kids love here. After the park we walked over to the mall and got some ice cream (it’s quite popular over here). It was a very fun and adventurous 3 hour class, well more so just hanging out with a Japanese kid.
More to come !!