It's been a while, huh?

Hey everyone!

It's been another long while since I've posted, huh?

I haven't really been up to very much since I've last posted, to be honest...

Students are the same as ever. My first class of the week with the first years is by far one of the worst. No one participates or listens...and my JTE doesn't (or rather, is not able to) do anything about it. They really just don't care...and I'm not sure how you can teach to those kinds of students. :/ By contrast, the next class participates more and tries harder. So, I just ganbare until the 2nd class.

A couple of my other classes are really good though! They do their best and, even though they reply in Japanese about the topic, that at least means that they understand the English spoken to them. For example, I was doing an exercise about prepositions where the students had to draw something in a picture based on the location I told them. I told them to draw an ant on the sandwich, and in one of the worksheets, the sandwich was on the ground. One of my students loudly exclaimed "サンドイッチかわいそう！" which means "I feel sorry for the sandwich!!!" ...I look forward to classes like these...I hope I can help them speak more English though!

In my visit school, I teach 2 of my classes with a really quiet JTE. He doesn't really do much about controlling the noise level of the class, but the other class (that I teach with the my visit school caretaker) is fairly well-behaved. You can really tell that they respect her as an authority figure...and I hope that, by the end of my time on JET, I can pick up some of that presence while maintaining most of my original disposition. I'm not gonna become that teacher that yells and screams at their students to get attention -___-;

I must continually make my lessons easier for the visit school so they don't become bored or frustrated...which is really irritating! Some students have trouble writing the alphabet, so it's difficult to gauge how much English they actually know (or care about) >_>

On a better note, I managed to open a separate bank account! Why do I need two? My caretaker helped me open an account with a bank that is only in Nagano-ken...and if I ever travel out of Nagano, I must pay higher bank fees when I use other ATMs.  Hopefully this helps when I travel to Aomori or Tokyo...

Because online banking isn't really done in Japan, it's kinda difficult to wire money back home for loans. So, in addition to it being more convenient with bank fees, it is easier to transfer money back home with this more well-known bank than it is with the one that's only in Nagano. To transfer money back home, there were multiple options to choose from...but I chose to set up an account with an overseas remittance company called GoLloyds. I choose however much I want to transfer (in yen), the exchange rate is applied, and then I pay 2000 yen to GoLloyds. Sounds simple enough, but I'm waiting for my GoLloyds paperwork to be accepted by GoLloyds. I hope this goes smoothly, as I would like to pay off my loans ASAP!

On an unrelated note, I've been practicing with my visit school boy's soccer team for the past month (about). They have me warm the goalie up, play goalie (yay!!) and play in small-sided scrimmages. So far, I've met the first years and second years, but not the third years. The third years are doing job-searching at the moment and are unable to participate in extracurricular activities, but I've been told that they will return once everyone is done with their searches.  Who knows when that will be, but anyways, I was invited to watch the boys play a game versus a semi-local high school!

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but let me tell you the differences between Japanese-style soccer and American-style soccer. Japanese soccer is almost always played on a dirt field.  We Americans are babied by grass fields and often complain when the grass is dying or if the field is muddy/uneven in some parts. Well...these guys have to deal with uneven dirt, a very hard surface to play on (the ball bounces much higher than on grass fields), and it is often very slippery even with cleats on.  Because of this, their ball-control and passing are much better than other boys teams I've seen and they are much more team-work oriented than boys soccer in the US. 

Having said that, they didn't really play all that well in the game.  When they were pressured, their passes were not very good, their team organization wasn't pretty bad (poor defending from the midfielders and forwards led to a lot of counterattacks) and they were not very aggressive in the air. I'm not sure if some of the coaches know what they're doing either. They kept yelling at the kids to connect 3 passes like they did in practice. To be honest, I'd be more worried about controlling the ball and not passing when you don't need to pass the ball. It was a very high scoring game...and I'm surprised they came away with a victory. The other team had better moments, but I think they were just unlucky when putting away their chances. I think the score was 6-3? I couldn't really offer much help to the coaches (and I'm not sure how much advice they actually want to hear from me), but it really just made me miss playing college soccer...

Lol, anyways, didn't really mean to go into full "soccer analysis"-mode on you guys...  I'll get back to my daily life ramblings!!  ^^;

Even though I've lost a lot of weight from stopping soccer and eating healthier, it's only muscle that I've lost...and I need to stay in shape to make sure I keep the fat off. Muscle disappears first, then fat builds up...and I don't want that to happen, so I started to exercise a little bit more than usual. I ride my bike everywhere (to/from work, to the grocery store, to the home store, to explore, etc), started jump-roping, and even bought two 5kg weights to work on toning my arms!  Who needs to go to the gym anyways, right? I'd much rather pay a little and do a lot of stuff on my own for free. It doesn't cost money to use exercises that rely on using your own body weight (push-ups, sit-ups, Ryan's favorite [or maybe not his favorite, but my little brother's favorite] wounded turtles, tricep dips, etc)! Gym memberships out here are WAY too expensive and I need to save up as much money as I can to pay off my loans!! As it gets colder, I guess I can just keep jump-roping outside in my parking lot. I'll letcha guys know how that goes haha

I went to an all-Nagano ALT conference in Matsumoto this weekend. Matsumoto is in just about the middle of Nagano prefecture. It was kinda a pain to get to, but I met a lot of my fellow ALTs on the bus ride up...and it was really awesome being able to talk to them. It made the time fly by a lot faster. The conference itself wasn't too too informative...and I even had to go to a mandatory seminar about the winter in Nagano. I have central electric heating (which is uncommon in Japan), so it wasn't all that helpful for me. I guess I'm lucky? Yay for untraditional Japanese housing! One of my fellow ALTs, Jo, paid for my lunch, which was really nice of her!! I had nikuman, which is basically a steamed pork bun. It came with a salad and 5 potato wedges (kinda random lol). After lunch, there were more meetings and then I went back home on the bus.  It was a nice break from school, but I don't know how much I actually learned ^^; I got a few good ideas to take away from the conference, but for the most part, it felt like a review session to me...

But...maybe the conference was so boring because I'm anticipating a more exciting event this weekend. Ryan is coming to Komagane!!! :D He took a bus from Aomori to Ueno last night and, this morning, he took the train from Ueno to Shinjuku and right now, he is on a bus from Shinjuku to Komagane! He hit some traffic on the way over, but he should be arriving soon!!! =] I'm so excited!

I should probably stop writing and get to the bus station to wait for him. ^^

I'll write again later!