too damn cold

I wonder how many times I've complained about the cold since being in Japan. Not that it's so much colder here, just that none of the damn buildings I'm ever in are really heated. At least not very well. The only one that's comfortable is the staff room at work. It's almost enough to make me want to stay later at work. ... Almost.
Otherwise I've just been keeping myself busy. Sort of. A few weekends ago I went skiing for the first time in perhaps 2 years, or maybe even 3 (don't quite remember). I was never good to start out with, and the long gap certainly didn't help to improve my performance. But I've been doing it intermittently since I was a little kid, so I'm comfortable enough to at least not be embarrassingly ridiculous. I probably wouldn't have gone skiing on my own in Japan, but some teachers offered to take me on their outing, and that it wouldn't cost me a penny. They were going to check a ski slope out and figure out the rules for a ski trip they plan on taking all the kids on next year. And I guess as a gesture of good will the ski slope gave the teachers that came up a free day pass with rentals. And they in turn were kind enough to invite me, though obviously I could be of absolutely no assistance when it came time for the business.
The previous day I actually went ice skating, making for a very winter sportsy weekend. It was almost like being back in Jamestown New York, where the only options for activities in winter were ones that involved ice and snow. I'm afraid that kind of thinking is too much for my Aussie girlfriend though. I may whine about the winter and the annoying lack of insulation, but I think she's suffering even more (though the new york times says that bodies never really acclimate to the cold). I get my own though when summer comes around, and it's about 100 degrees F with 100% humidity. All I can think about in that weather is if I'm going to die or not, while Amber seems only slightly uncomfortable. She says Melbourne isn't that hot, but our friend visited there over the winter holidays and said New Years Day went past 40 degrees Celsius (significantly over 100 degrees F). Ridiculous.
In other whiney news, my car's "shaken" (sort of literally translates as car-test) is past due, and I'm about to dish out a LOT of money to get it done. It generally costs around 1000 dollars and must be done every 2-4 years depending on the car (newer cars can wait longer, older cars can't). The older a car gets the more expensive the "shaken" and the more frequently it must be performed. This is ostensibly to keep cars safe and clean and all that, though I'm sure it's no coincidence that it also fuels the car industry here, as most people find buying new cars (which come with 3-4 years shaken) more desirable than maintaining 5 year old ones. Driving around, I feel that my car is the only one on the road made before the year 2000, and that probably is the case a lot of the time. I don't think in this world any kind of car can be maintained as easily and as affordably as a Japanese one. But the Japanese junk cars after 5-6 years to get a new one. Meanwhile desert militias prop machine guns on the same Toyota pick ups they've been using for 30 years. A funny world, this one.

So some of you may be wondering what I'm actually doing these days. Well I still go to work 5 days a week. Sometimes I go to elementary school (which is adorable, yet tiring). Usually I go to junior high school (on and off stressful/easy/boring though usually somewhere in between). I take a Japanese class once a week from an old retired couple. I take notes during class (well "class" is just me and the old lady usually) and look up the words I didn't get later. They usually are weird Japanese words for parts of seasons or kinds of flowers or ways in which to enjoy trees. Sometimes I wonder if this "class" is the equivalent of a Japanese person trying to learn English by visiting a committee meeting of old women discussing the theme of the next local flower show in forty fort, PA. Except Asians love flowers so much, maybe they wouldn't find it as weird as I do. For instance, just TRY and buy flowers from someone that's not Korean in New York. You'd be putting yourself out. I've also been asked what my favorite flower is a bunch of times, which I can't imagine a typical American or Aussie asking a foreign visitor to their country.
One day a week I teach an adult English class to a small group of pharmaceutical researchers. Their company (Kirin, more famous for their beer than their pharmaceutical division) sends them all over the world, so they force their poor nerdy scientists to study English. I told them once that Japanese people always ask me the same questions, at least upon first talking to me. "Where are you from" (reasonable) "do you like Japanese food" and "can you use chopsticks." If they ask more questions chances are they are about food. Or possibly weather. But almost definitely one of those. The students asked me for the equivalent in foreign countries (they naturally assume that I either represent all of them, or at least that America can't be too different from them). The answer is of course there really isn't one. Places like America or Australia, or even Great Britain, are so full of foreigners that talking to them isn't really an experience. And Americans at least, don't really care. One of my friends in high school was a German exchange student, and she sat at my group of friends lunch table nearly every day for a year. But we basically never asked her about how things were in Germany, or to compare things, or ask her opinion on matters as a "foreigner" or a German. The fact that she was from somewhere else barely came up except when she said "wegetables" instead of "vegetables" and when she said the way we pronounced German car names was stupid ('fulkz fagon' or something...). Of course at 17 we weren't thinking of the rest of the world that much, but I think the same would mostly hold true into adulthood.
Japanese people (many anyway) are really genuinely interested in knowing about what I think about Japanese (_anything_) and how things are in America. In my last trip to elementary schools, a group of kids kept asking me these kinds of questions, though the teacher was probably egging them on. One of them showed me their "kokugo" class book, which is their Japanese language/culture class. It was basically a book telling kids how different Japanese people were to everyone else, and more specifically about Japan vs. the West (and more specifically, America). It seemed to occasionally mention China as well. It was funny to actually see real education materials like this, which helped explain in my mind the type of questions I'm always asked. They're basically taught at school that while all the people of the world are human, Japanese people are as different as can be while still being human. Growing up with this kind of foundation leads to some pretty funny ideas I think. At the same time a lot of people have both a superiority and inferiority complex over foreigners (by foreigner I mean "westerner." the rest of the world is more along the lines of "out of sight, out of mind."). They are almost always seen as cooler, more relaxed, better at languages, better looking, and being freer. But they are also irresponsible, not quite trustworthy, too loud, always late, and way too confrontational. Specific thoughts and ideas vary wildly from person to person, but pretty uniform is the very specific separation of "us" and "them." And it does pain me some to say that a lot of humans don't even fit in the "them" category to a lot of Japanese. They pay me a good salary to do not much at all, but Brazilian and Peruvian immigrants are relegated to shitty towns (like the ones near me) and equally shitty jobs. My school has a small handful of (half?)Brazilian kids, whom all speak perfectly fine Japanese. Most of them I never see being even a little bit social, and the one I do see making real efforts to be friendly is met with mixed responses. There are also 2 Filipino girls, who speak slightly less, but still OK, Japanese. They are further relegated to the "special needs" class, where their only contact is each other and their one autistic classmate. So on top of a stunted social education, they aren't actually taught anything academic at school because of their class placement.
But everyone tells me how cool I am when I get a haircut, wear a new sweater, or how good I am at Japanese when I get a whole sentence out. Still demeaning in its own way sort of, but not such a bad way to be handled if it has to be as an outsider. I doubt any homeroom teachers are praising the Brazilian kids for passing Japanese tests or encouraging discussion about the unique paths of life their families may have taken. Some days I can't imagine being in a harder social position than those kids...

...And moving on... I teach another class once a week with Amber. Mostly old men and women who want to get better at English for their international trips taken during retirement. Most of them are pretty hopeless though, and only go on organized guided tours in Japanese, and probably won't even use the English they learn. They are cute though, and very friendly. And one woman gives me and Amber (actually, just me, hahaha) vegetables that she grows herself. I'm afraid winter has put a hold to that for now though.

On the weekends... often I just hang out with Amber. My best non-amber friends are two Americans: Shane from Oklahoma, Erin from upstate new york, and a Quebecoise named Cynthia. With some regularity I also meet up with other friends, Ross from London, Matty from Scotland, Poni from New Zealand, and a few others. I may see them a few weekends in a row, or maybe not for a month. Just depends.
Amber I live with and see everyday. In the morning I get up 20-30 minutes before she does, and I even reset the alarm for her so she can those few extra minutes of sleep. One day I will mess up though, and she'll blame me.
She gets home 1-2 hours later than me usually, and is very tired from working with little monkey-children. She's currently reading a book about hikikomori, the Japanese syndrome for men who shut themselves away for months to years at a time. She finds the book, by some white guy, to be really interesting and full of lots of interesting explanations for a unique and disturbing problem. But in the end I guess we both think it a perhaps impossible concept for non-Japanese people to fully comprehend.
She's much better at Japanese than I am, and also gets much less frustrated with Japan than I do. Those two probably are connected, but I think the longer she stays with me the worse she gets at this silly language. On the plus side, I'm learning lots of lots of funny Aussie words.
I have almost no vacation days left until the end of my contract in July. I'm probably going to finish that contract out in order to hoard enough money for my next step in life. Then I'm going back home (wherever that is). While home I'll be spending much needed time with friends and family, while still thinking about what I want in my future. In the meantime, I'll be preparing for my next journey, which you can probably guess.
Amber came with me to America last year, and it's time for me to hold up my end. I'll probably enter Australia on what’s called a "working holiday" visa, which is a fairly open-ended visa good for between 6mos and a year. I'm itching to go back to school, and my time in Australia may actually provide a good opportunity to start that. But first I have to figure out WHAT I WANT TO DO, huh. If I can figure that out a little bit more in Australia, I'll try to get started. If I don't, then it’s back to America, and back to the drawing board.

I realize this is a rambling post, but it's good to just let my fingers fly a little. I'd like to give my thanks to the parental units for sending a much-needed package of marshmallows and hot chocolate, and to Andy for consistently sending the weirdest boxes of stuff.

Until next time,

Aaron