Since this question is going to be harder and harder to answer in the coming months, I have decided to post a basic timeline of where in the world I will be, and when.  These dates are subject to change, especially the ones from August on.

My Life: A Timeline
July 21- July 29: Nara, Kansai, Japan
July 29-Aug 5: Manila, Philippines
Aug 5-Aug 10: Tokyo, Japan

Aug 10- Aug 23: Pittsburgh, Pa and Atlanta, Ga (exact dates TBA)
Aug 24- about Sept 15: Pittsburgh, Pa
Sept 15- Aug 2010: Tetouan, Morocco

Since today is my last chance to travel around Kanagawa before packing up and leaving, I decided to spend the day wandering around Kamakura and the surrounding area.  Kamakura is second only to Kyoto in the quantity and fame of its temples and shrines.  Its a cute town located right next to the Pacific Ocean.  It's touristy, but surprisingly peaceful, and though just an hour outside of Japan's two largest cities, Kamakura is lush and green, and according to my guidebook, is flowering year-round.  Right now is the tail-end of hydrangea season, but I still did manage to see some beautiful blue and purple flowers. 

Perhaps the most iconic picture of Kamakura is the Daibutsu, or the Giant Buddha.  It's actually located in Hase, a small town outside the city.  You can see my pictures of this statue as well as others in my Snapfish account.  Check them out by following the web address below:

   http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=992768017/a=140311026_140311026/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

Enjoy!

*I taught my last class in Japan and am officially on vacation!!!!  Yahoo!!!!

Today is hot.  The rain has let up recently, allowing an intense heat to settle over the area.  And it's not just hot- it's humid.  I realized the other day, while trudging up a flight of overcrowded stairs at the Sagami-Ono station, that I was breathing half oxygen, half moisture.  The air is so thick that you can feel it in your throat and lungs.  And as for my hair, well that's just a complete lost cause.  Today I finally went to the hair salon because I could not stand it any longer.  The guy chopped off a lot more than I had expected (and more than I think I asked for... but I did ask in Japanese so maybe instead of "just the ends" I said "hack of a few inches", I can't be sure.)   but the good news is that my shorter hair-do is much cooler and more managable in this humidity.  And hopefully my hair cut will also keep me from shedding lke crazy during my homestay in Nara.  My apartment gets so disgusting after just a few days, with hair tumble weeds rolling from the kitchen to the bathroom and sticking to my clothes and feet.  I really don't want to gross out my host family like that.  I would be seriously embarrassed. 

And so maybe it is because of this intense heat that I almost accidentally cooked myself to death inside my apartment.  The temperature has been rising lately, and so I have been using the airconditioner more and more.   At first it worked fine, but recently it seemed like it wasn't getting cold in my apartment.  Today was the climax.  It was so hot in my apartment.  I figured it was too hot outside and that my air conditioner just couldn't keep up with the heat and humidity.  I got out of my apartment and walked around for a while, enjoying the air conditioned stores around my house (it did not, however, occur to me that the stores' air conditioning was working fine.  Idiot.)  But I started to feel a little tired from walking around in the heat, so I headed home.  Inside the 'oven', I decided I needed to lay down for a bit.  An hour later, my doorbell rings and wakes me up.  I hadn't intended to go to sleep, but I am pretty sure that if my neighbour hadn't come over to my room to ask me a question, I would have remained in my heat-induced sleep coma all night.  By then, unfortunately, my brain was cooked.  I was so drowsy and disoriented that I think I first spoke to my neighbor in Spanish, and was really confused when she answered in English.  Finally, Koichi calls me on Skype, and after talking for a bit, asks me what's wrong.  I tell him about my sweltering apartment, and he asks me to hold the AC remote (which is all in Japanese) up to the web cam.  After a few minutes of fidgeting, sweet, cold air starts to pour out of the air conditioner.  I immediately feel 100 times better.  So what was the problem with my air conditioner?  I had turned on THE HEAT!  Yes, so in 90 degree weather, I had my heater blasting away night and day.   I almost gave myself heatstroke inside my own apartment. 

There is a happy ending to this story, though.  The AC is softly blowing 23 degree C air into my apartment, and I am starting to shiver a little as I write this.  I am kind of afraid to turn the AC down though after my near-death experience, so I think I will just put on extra-warm socks tonight, and maybe use an extra blanket to sleep.  I just hope I don't wake up with frostbite...

Hi guys!  I need your help!  It has recently been called to my attention that I write my Japanese letters out of order.  This got me to thinking.  When you write the letter 't', what line do you write first: the horizontal or the vertical line?  Take one second and write your answer in the comment box on this blog post.  I will tell you more about why I am asking this question after I get some feedback from you!

Thank you!

I'm feeling a little nostalgic right now.  You might say it's homesickness, but that's not quite it.

I have been studying Japanese every day for a few hours after work.  Usually, I watch these educational videos made by the NHK that I found on Youtube.  They are perfect for me.  I come home from work too tired to do any actual studying, so I just sit in front of the computer and watch these funny, entertaining videos that teach me Japanese.  I have never, ever had such a passive learning experience, and I really liked it.  It was relaxing, enjoyable, and yet I was still learning Japanese.  But tonight, I watched my last video.  I have officially graduated to Let's Learn Japanese 2, but unfortunately, due to copy write laws, that one is not available on the Internet.  I guess I should back up and say that these videos were made a year after I was born, so the chances of me finding the second videos in the series seem pretty slim.  Plus, I heard the second series was not as good as the first (but this is from Doomsday Wikipedia.  Does anyone else think Wikipedia takes the most negative approach to things?), and also the actors are different.  And I really like the actors, especially Sugihara-san.  She was funny.  I'm gonna miss her.... sigh... Hence, my nostalgia.  I am feeling nostalgic for yesterday, heck for 10 minutes ago, when I still had videos left to watch.  Hmmm, so depressing... so dorky.

I wish they made videos like this for Arabic.  This was no Khaled and Maha love story.  In the NHK videos, the people talked to each other instead of giving awkward, somewhat lulling monologues to the camera.  Looking back on those DVDs from Arabic 1, that was so wierd.  Who's idea was that?  Thinking about that story line, it still makes me feel uncomfortable.  What was going on with Khaled?  What was going on with Khaled and Maha?  What was going on with Maha and the video's director, because s/he seemed obsessed with her hazel eyes.  I hope someone from Arabic Club is reading this, because I am sure I am boring everyone else to tears.   

Ok, enough tangents for today.  I need to look for some new studying tools!  :-)

And another blog bites the dust... Yes, another blog got deleted.  At least this one was short!

I wanted to upload a photo from way back when I went to Kyoto.  It is of me and a Maiko, a novice geisha. Enjoy! 

I also wanted to thank everyone for their comments on this blog.  It really encourages me to keep writing knowing that someone is reading it!

I need to do more writing, and the truth is that I do write often.  But my evil computer often eats what I have written, censoring my words forever from the public eye...  I can be so dramatic (at times?).

So I am looking at just a week and a half left of work.  That means just one more Monday, one more Thursday and one more Friday.  I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  But the fact that one is seeing a light implies that one is currently in a dark space.  And so that's where I am now.  In a dark space, staring impatiently at that little glimmer, praying for it to grow... faster!

It's not that I am having a horrible time.  I still love Japan and everything about it.  It's just that my work is such a grind, and any break, be it a long weekend or, as in this case, the end of a contract, is like an oasis in the desert.  And I am so, so thirsty.

But the end is coming soon enough, so I suppose I should tell you where I will be headed for my last few remaining weeks in Japan.  I have to move out of my apartment on July 20th, and then will head to Nara to do a home stay.  Nara is in the Kansai region, near Osaka and Kyoto.  I am excited to learn some more Japanese.  I especially want to improve my listening skills.  I can figure things out pretty well on my own, given time and a dictionary, but even basic sentences in Japanese, when spoken, seem jumbled and impossible to decipher.  I also think there are a number of cultural factors at work here.  First of all, when I speak to people in stores, restaurants or on the street, they (surprise!) don't speak like a textbook.  That's true of all languages... or at least the one's I have studied.  One thing I think I am having a hard time with is that store clerks or phone operators or anyone in the service industry cannot speak to me, as a customer, in any short or simple languages as it would be rude.  So, for example, instead of just saying, "5", the person will say an entire monologue, very politely (based on the verb endings that I do catch) but completely unintelligible to my novice ears.  Seeing that I don't understand, some people will then give me a nice, clear, simple answer in English.  I know that I know the word for "5" in Japanese.  If they just would have said 5, I would have understood! 

It makes me think a lot about my students though, and the difficulty they have with circumlocution (being able to say one thing in different ways. Taboo, for instance, is a kind of circumlocution game).  I realized this the other day while riding the train home.  This woman was playing some English TOEFL Prep game on her Nintendo DS, and looking at the questions and how ridiculously hard they were, and how ridiculously pointless it was, it reminded me of my students.  The woman was agonizing over A,B,C,D- one was right, three were wrong.  Where was the ambiguity?  Where was the creative nature of language?  There was only one right answer, and if she didn't get it, she was wrong.  I suddenly saw my students, agonizing for what seemed like an eternity over a simple sentence, while in my head I impatiently churned over about 30 possible answers they could give.  But that was the problem.  My students weren't thinking about the possibilities, they were looking for that one right answer.  It didn't matter that the question was completely subjective ("What's your favorite color?" "Uhhh...").  Actually subjective questions usually were worse.  Why?  Because they were looking for the "right" answer to a subjective question.  And there is no right answer, so their was no answer.  I am glad I realized this, because it helps me understand my students a lot more now.  I also outlawed dictionaries because I was tired of students stopping the class to find words like "snow grouse" and "tone deaf" ('a bird' and 'a bad singer' would have been more than adequate in both contexts, despite not being the 'rightest' answer).    Dictionaries are counterproductive.  So, in my last week and a half in office, I will make sure that all of my students can circumlocute with their eyes closed (but I won't tie their hands behind their backs-they will need them for gesturing!)

I digress.  So, to recap my plans after my contract ends, I will head to Nara for a week, then fly to the Philippines for 6 days to meet up with Koichi.  He is working on research for his dissertation, which is in part on the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal.  I will be relaxing, and hopefully meeting up with a friend who I haven't seen since Spain!  After that, I will come back to Tokyo to rest for 4 days before flying to Pittsburgh.   

But for now, my plan is bed and a full day of work tomorrow.  Good night world!  おやすみなさい！　また今度！