Late July and the End is Nigh

Slowly, ever so slowly, my suitcases and backpacks are filling with things to bring home. On my list of things to do this week, I've got close the bank account, send things home, and clean my house. In a week I will almost be out of Japan. I leave next Tuesday, July 31st, and it's about time. I've said a lot of my goodbyes now, to people and places in my life here. There aren't too many more to go.

But, I'll tell you a little about the past few weeks. Supposedly, there was a typhoon headed towards Japan around July 13th or 14th, and everyone was scared. That week it rained a lot and I even began to think there might be a large tropical storm coming for us. I was in Osaka and it was supposed to hit there on Sunday, but when the day dawned on Sunday, the 15th, the skies were clear and the sun was out. So, no typhoon. Audrey and I went to Osaka Liberty Museum, a museum about discrimination and human rights in Japan, which I thought would be really interesting, but it wasn't really. I mean, there wasn't much in English, so I didn't really understand a lot of it. It wasn't a bad museum, necessarily, it just wasn't as good as I expected it to be. Here's an Ainu dwelling from Hokkaido. It reminds me of the Pacific Northwest Indians.The next day, Monday, the 16th, Audrey and I went over to Koya-san, outside Osaka. That place was pretty cool, and we walked around some old tombs in a shadowy forest with towering trees and rainy mists between the rocks and leaves. It was really beautiful, but I had to leave in a hurry to get back to meet some people at Pizza King. I didn't make it back in time to eat at Pizza King, and for a while I was worried I wouldn't make it back to Wake at all, because all the trains were really really late. But, I finally got on a train bound for Wake and it worked out okay. I found out later that the lateness of the trains was due to earthquakes in the north or a suicide on the tracks near Nara, or both. Here's some photos of Koya-san.I taught for the last time at Saeki Junior High on Tuesday and said goodbye to all the students and teachers. They all filed out of the staff room to watch me change into my outdoor shoes and waved goodbye as I left. On Thursday there was a closing ceremony at Wake Junior High and it was a kind of goodbye for me too. The principal made a speech and then I made a speech and some students gave me a card and told me how much they enjoyed learning English from me. They also gave me a huge bouquet of flowers, and as I sat there on the stage and the students sang their school song, I surveyed the faces of the bright and eager students who always made a point to talk to me and really really tried hard to learn English (Eri, Kana, Nozomi, Kaede, Miho, Yugo, Mochi...), and I was a little bit sad. I'll miss some of those kids, and I can only hope that the next ALT who comes to Wake will find them as fun to teach as I did.Then, I had a goodbye party amongst all the teachers of Wake. I met them in OKC for a large dinner and lots of drinks and it was a lot more fun than I expected. They gave me some Bizen pottery (some really expensive pottery that comes from this region) and lots of handshakes and made me make lots of speeches. We went to a tiny tiny karaoke bar after that and I sang some songs and talked to the youngest teacher, Yuki, a lot.

On Saturday, I'd tried to arrange a big party for Okayama JETs so we could all say goodbye. I met Marisa and Tiff and Dennis in OKC and we walked around a bit, shopping at Loft for the last time, running into people we'd see later that night.

We all met at the station at our appointed time and lots and lots of people came. By the time we got to the restaurant Moby Dick's, there were about 20 people or so, and more kept arriving. It was really great to see so many there. I tend to think goodbyes are important. Other people don't so much, maybe, but I like saying goodbye to people who have meant something to me. I have no idea when I'll see most of the people in Okayama again, so I wanted one last time out, to talk about big and small things, and get really drunk and sing karaoke. I did.

And here are some of the best pictures from the night.

Saying Goodbye is Hard

It's getting to be that time, when we all brace ourselves for leaving someplace we've come to know, and leaving people we've come to know. I've done it plenty before, but it never really gets any easier. I have a lot of people and places to say goodbye to. There are all the JETs I've met from various places. Some of them are staying in Japan, many of them are going home. There are my students at school who will probably quickly forget me and move on to torment the next ALT who will come to take my place here. There are teachers and co-workers who keep saying that one year is such a short time to stay in Japan. And there are my English conversation class students in Saeki and Wake. I complained about those classes a lot, but those people have been kinder to me than I ever would've expected. In the course of a week, I've had to say quite a few goodbyes.

First of all, there was a big beach party up in Tottori, north of Okayama, last weekend. Almost everyone who is a JET in Okayama was there, and for a lot of them, it was probably the last time I'd see them. I went up on Saturday morning and had to walk all the way to the beach from the tiny train station. Because of the goodbye party for me on Friday night, I couldn't go up there on Friday, so when I arrived on Saturday everyone was still rather hung over from the night before. I layed on the beach and did some swimming. I took a few pictures and tried to avoid getting sunburned (I failed at that).
At night, there was a big dance party and some famous DJ came to spin and everyone danced in the sand. There were lot of food stands and drinks and I had Thai red curry and lots of Chu-hi's. And I took a lot of pictures with some of my favourite people in Okayama.
The next morning I didn't feel so sick, but I was tired and hot. I fell asleep on the beach on Sunday and eventually woke up, got a ride to the station, and boarded the train in Tottori to get back down to Okayama. Bernie and I made plans for a final Pizza King outing soon and I limped off the train in Wake, exhausted after only one night of partying and a couple days of swimming in the ocean.

I had school on Monday and taught the last classes of my 9th graders. They were really never my favourite, but they all wrote me very nice notes that they gave me as presents at the end of each class. We had fun playing description pictionary too.

Then, on Tuesday, I had my last class with Saeki conversation class students. We met in the kitchen of the very modern and expensive looking Saeki community center and they taught me how to cook okonomiyaki and tacoyaki. They even gave me a tacoyaki grill! Now I can make dough balls filled with octopus parts any time I want! Plus, I now know how to make one of my favourite Japanese dishes, okonomiyaki, so at least I can claim I learned something in Japan. We took some pictures too.
Today, I had my last classes with the 8th graders at Wake. Apparently many of them have already reached the turning point and decided to become apathetic and unresponsive. It was a struggle to get through some of those classes, but I got to take some pictures with some of my favourite students and we played a clapping number game that some of them may've liked.
Just tonight I had my last class with the students of my Wake evening class. They all wrote farewell speeches for me and read them during class. They were all very nice (the speeches that is). They wished me luck and recounted their favourite memories of their year with me as their English teacher. I talked about my plans for the future and told them they could all come to Minneapolis next summer sometime.

I said goodbye at the end of class and thanked them all for being such dedicated students (after I'd taught them the word dedicated).

There are yet more goodbyes to be said, but I'll write about those when they come.

Some of my last classes

Today was my last day teaching the 7th graders at Wake Junior High. Although they've only been my students since April, and I really rarely taught them (thanks to their classes being on Fridays, which are the best days for me to take off), they were still a lot of fun. Their enthusiam and excitement carried over from elementary school, and they hadn't yet become synical and twisted junior high school students.

So, all the students first sang me "Saturday Night," which I didn't recognise from the title. It's by the Bay City Rollers and starts out spelling out the word Saturday. I'd forgotten that song existed. Then we played pictionary and I gave a short speech and we took pictures at the end of each class.

Here are some pictures. Although I really made an effort to get to know some of their names, it was pretty hard. I mean, I barely know any of my students names, which I still kinda feel bad about. Anyway, here is a group of 7th grade girls (the girls are, on a whole, much better students than the boys, a fact I suspect teachers everywhere have known for a long time).
Class 1A at Wake.Kids playing pictionary.Class 1A and ME!One of my favourite students, Toese. I remember her as a particularly bright student from my elementary lessons.Most of class 1B with me. The girl in the exact center speaks English without any accent (or with an American accent I guess).Some students' renditions of me.
And proof that the students have fun in my classes, usually.And then I finished up and all the students bowed to me and said 'sank you very muchey' and I said goodbye.

Tonight I had a goodbye party in OKC with people from the Wake Board of Education. I never see them, so I don't really know any of them, but they are the ones who pay my salary, so I figured I should go to the party they were having for me. It was a bit odd actually. It was in a large hotel near OKC train station, and it featured a lot of people in a large banquet room with a buffet dinner, free refills on any kind of drink, and a bingo game with prizes. It was a lot of fun, and I spoke in Japanese pretty much the whole night. It wasn't very good Japanese, but most of them didn't speak English, so I had to understand and make myself understand in this crazy foreign language. If I'd only been speaking Japanese my entire time here, I'd be fluent by now. I didn't take any pictures, but it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. That's probably because I wasn't expecting it to be any fun at all.

A Lake, more Kyoto, and a party with my family

My family left Japan today. They're probably on a flight right now, heading towards Hawaii and then back to Minneapolis somehow. During their last few days, they were in Kyoto.

They left for Kyoto without me on Tuesday, and I joined them there on Saturday morning. We met at Kyoto station and they showed me their new hotel (not where I'd made their reservations). But, who can blame them for not really liking a hot and humid ryokan so much?

I wanted to go up to Hikone, on the shores of Lake Biwa (I'm not sure why I wanted to go, I just got it in my head that Lake Biwa would be pretty), so we took the train up to Hikone, about an hour north of Kyoto. It's a rather small, dull town with only a few people in the streets. As we neared the castle though, more people appeared and the scenery seemed a bit more lively. We skirted around the castle moats and past its garden on our way to the shore of the biggest lake in Japan. I was trying to find a beach with things such as sand and waves, but I only found a small shoreline littered with trash and weeds. The sky was a little overcast and the wind was coming in strong from the immense lake. So, we stood on the tiny dirty beach and looked out over the water.We found a shopping mall and I bought a lot of gifts for people back home. We spent a really long time there, and by the time we left the castle was almost closed. Mom and I went up the large hill to look inside the relatively small castle. Hikone Castle is another original, not a reconstruction. It's rather pretty, and there are impressive views over the town, surrounding mountains, and the expansive of lake to the west.
We walked back down the hill and across the moat into a garden. The sky was still cloudy but the bridge over the pond still looked rather pretty.After some difficulty, we found Dad and Katie and made our way back to the station in Hikone and got on a train bound for Kyoto.

Once back in Kyoto we looked around Kyoto Station. Even though I’d been to Kyoto twice before, I never spent much time in the station. It’s a huge modern structure that sweeps up escalators and wide staircases to a sky garden 16 storeys up. We went all the way up to the top and the Kyoto Tower, just across the street, loomed in the night sky. The moon was bright and the air was warm, and it was a long way back down to the ground floor of the station.
We ate dinner and retired to our room, despite the fact that Katie really wanted to find something to do. I tried to explain that there really wasn’t much to do, as Lindsey and I had found out earlier that much by trying to check out bars but not finding too many to our liking. So, after walking around for a while, Katie and I returned to the hotel and eventually everyone went to sleep.

On Sunday, I suggested we go to the Higashiyama area, where there were still some sites Mom, Dad, and Katie hadn’t seen yet, and some nice shops where we could buy things. We stopped in the Yasaka Pagoda which is not near Yasaka Shrine and actually went inside. I hadn’t been in a pagoda before, so it was a little interesting for me.
We took the Higashiyama strolling path up towards Maruyama Park and Gion and there were lots of girls walking around in full geisha attire. They all had semi-professional photographers following them around to take their picture between the rain showers that kept coming every half hour or so. We went through Maruyama Park and up to Chion-in Temple, which is free and has some nice grounds.
We looked around at Chion-in and then walked through Gion to find something to eat. After lunch at Müchen restaurant, we went to Nishi-Hoganji Temple, which I wanted to see because it’s huge and I hadn’t seen it yet. Parts of it were closed, so we didn’t get to see much. The best I could do was take a picture of this nicely decorated gate while the rain came down.It was then time to get on a train and go back to Wake, where we arrived Sunday evening.

On Monday, I taught at elementary school and came home early. We looked at a shrine near my house where I’d never been before and prepared to go out to dinner with my English conversation class from Wake. They wanted to have a party for my family and a sort of goodbye party for me. We met at a new restaurant where we didn’t have to sit on the floor and didn’t have to eat a bunch of sashimi and it was very nice. My family had a good time talking with my students, Jack made a nice speech about how he hopes I have fond memories of Japan, and they gave me a beautiful painting on a heavy scroll of paper. It was amazing and looked very expensive. A few members of the class who haven’t come for months were even there. It was a fun night.Afterwards we walked home in the rain and everyone packed stuff up. I sent home a package and gave Mom and Dad a whole bunch of my things to take back, but it still seems like I’ve got so much stuff. I’ll have to find some way to get it back, I guess.

The visit from my family was very fun. It was great to have them here in Japan with me, to show them my house and my life here. They didn’t get to see where I work, but of course Mom and Katie came to Wake JH when they were here before. And it was a very nice party with my conversation class and I was really touched by the gifts they gave me. I already miss my family now that they’re gone, but I’m happy that there’s only a little bit more time left before I get to go home. And I feel lucky to have had such nice people in my evening classes who have tried their best to take care of me. It's all part of the long goodbye.