Well, hello there. Welcome to my blog. In case you didn’t know, or just forgot, I am living in Japan right now in a place called Mito, Ibaraki and I am so on top of things here. Evidence of that is it only took me 5 months and 3 weeks to post my first blog. I apologize. I have always believed that once I got this first one out of the way I would keep things updated way more regularly with shorter, interesting posts whenever something happens that I want to tell you about.
Obviously, in my almost 6 months that I have been in Japan for, I have had more than a few exciting experiences, funny stories, made plenty of stupid foreigner mistakes, and dated lots of women (of course I might be kidding, joking, joshing, siking, etc…just pick your favorite word. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” book!) Because of these facts/jokes (choose again) I will not even make an attempt to tell you any small percentage of the things that I would have liked to tell you had I been keeping this up to date all along, only a very, very small percentage. Basically, I will just give you a very brief overview of a few things from my first half a year here and tell you about some of my adventures from the summer. Here we go:
I cannot believe that I have been here in Mito almost six months already. It seriously seems like just yesterday that I left the beautiful state of Oklahoma for a little island with many things that I like, and don’t like, that Oklahoma does not have. One of the first things I noticed here was how low all of the door frames are. I have added many new lumps to my head since my arrival. But I have thought of at least pro to this problem. As I’m sure most of you know, bowing is a very important part of Japanese culture. Well, thanks to this low door frame problem, I don’t even have to think about bowing to the Japanese people when I enter a room because I have to automatically do it anyway or I’ll end up with new lump #327 on my head.
I stay very busy here pretty much all the time and lately it has seemed to just get more and more busy. I am teaching English in two elementary schools and a kindergarten. My main school is Ishikawa Shogakko (Elementary School). It has 561 students and it has a kindergarten also with about 50+ students. My other school which I attend once a week is Yamane Shogakko. It is a tiny little country school and only has 33 students total. The kids and teachers there are great and I love it. I basically work from 8-5 every day and then in the evenings and weekends I do things like go to Japanese class, play basketball, play soccer, play volleyball, try to find time to run, go to church, go to EBC (English Bible Class-I will tell you more about this ministry in other posts I’m sure), and whenever I actually have a small amount of free time I try and cram something fun in there when I really should be sleeping.
OK, I need to cut to the point here so this blog doesn’t require a next page->. Let me tell you a very abbreviated, lacking many details, version of my summer and then I think I’ll be done for now. At the beginning of my summer break-wait hold on a second-first let me explain “summer break” for you. The students get one month off of school for summer, but the teachers still have to go to school all day everyday the whole month except for 5 days special vacation that we can use. We can also use some of our regular, yearly allotted, paid vacation days during this time. OK, back to my abbreviated summer. At the beginning of my summer I did some hiking along a beautiful river in the mountains, called Takigawa Keiko ku, with lots of waterfalls with my friend Patrick and his dog Kandi. Then I went surfing the next two days. One day with Mark Hancock, his sons Christian and Charlie, and also Katie Blake. The next day I went with Wade and Shinobu. Sadly, these are the only days I have been able to go surfing so far. Later that week I left for America to take part in my brother, Travis’s, wedding. I stayed there a week and then made the long trip back to Japan. A couple days after I got back I climbed Mt. Fuji with Wade, Minako, Katie, Kendon, and Julia. We climbed all night and then watched the sunrise from the top. It was beautiful. Less than a week after that I hopped on the night bus with Wade and went to Kyoto (a very beautiful, traditional style Japanese city) and Osaka (third largest city in Japan). In Osaka we got to visit Gavin and Lindsay Dao and then we watched the last day of the Track and Field World Championships. It was really exciting for us track nerds to watch all of those fast people run who we had only heard of before that time. That is the very abbreviated version of my summer. All during that time we had a couple typhoons, lots of earthquakes and other fun things like that. I also hung out with Hitomi almost every day when I was in town until she left for OC.
OK, I’m done. Sorry for the novel. I promise my future posts will not be even anywhere close to this long. I had to get all of this out so that I can write shorter ones from now on. I miss all of you guys and hope you are doing well.
~Austin
Obviously, in my almost 6 months that I have been in Japan for, I have had more than a few exciting experiences, funny stories, made plenty of stupid foreigner mistakes, and dated lots of women (of course I might be kidding, joking, joshing, siking, etc…just pick your favorite word. It’s like a “choose your own adventure” book!) Because of these facts/jokes (choose again) I will not even make an attempt to tell you any small percentage of the things that I would have liked to tell you had I been keeping this up to date all along, only a very, very small percentage. Basically, I will just give you a very brief overview of a few things from my first half a year here and tell you about some of my adventures from the summer. Here we go:
I cannot believe that I have been here in Mito almost six months already. It seriously seems like just yesterday that I left the beautiful state of Oklahoma for a little island with many things that I like, and don’t like, that Oklahoma does not have. One of the first things I noticed here was how low all of the door frames are. I have added many new lumps to my head since my arrival. But I have thought of at least pro to this problem. As I’m sure most of you know, bowing is a very important part of Japanese culture. Well, thanks to this low door frame problem, I don’t even have to think about bowing to the Japanese people when I enter a room because I have to automatically do it anyway or I’ll end up with new lump #327 on my head.
I stay very busy here pretty much all the time and lately it has seemed to just get more and more busy. I am teaching English in two elementary schools and a kindergarten. My main school is Ishikawa Shogakko (Elementary School). It has 561 students and it has a kindergarten also with about 50+ students. My other school which I attend once a week is Yamane Shogakko. It is a tiny little country school and only has 33 students total. The kids and teachers there are great and I love it. I basically work from 8-5 every day and then in the evenings and weekends I do things like go to Japanese class, play basketball, play soccer, play volleyball, try to find time to run, go to church, go to EBC (English Bible Class-I will tell you more about this ministry in other posts I’m sure), and whenever I actually have a small amount of free time I try and cram something fun in there when I really should be sleeping.
OK, I need to cut to the point here so this blog doesn’t require a next page->. Let me tell you a very abbreviated, lacking many details, version of my summer and then I think I’ll be done for now. At the beginning of my summer break-wait hold on a second-first let me explain “summer break” for you. The students get one month off of school for summer, but the teachers still have to go to school all day everyday the whole month except for 5 days special vacation that we can use. We can also use some of our regular, yearly allotted, paid vacation days during this time. OK, back to my abbreviated summer. At the beginning of my summer I did some hiking along a beautiful river in the mountains, called Takigawa Keiko ku, with lots of waterfalls with my friend Patrick and his dog Kandi. Then I went surfing the next two days. One day with Mark Hancock, his sons Christian and Charlie, and also Katie Blake. The next day I went with Wade and Shinobu. Sadly, these are the only days I have been able to go surfing so far. Later that week I left for America to take part in my brother, Travis’s, wedding. I stayed there a week and then made the long trip back to Japan. A couple days after I got back I climbed Mt. Fuji with Wade, Minako, Katie, Kendon, and Julia. We climbed all night and then watched the sunrise from the top. It was beautiful. Less than a week after that I hopped on the night bus with Wade and went to Kyoto (a very beautiful, traditional style Japanese city) and Osaka (third largest city in Japan). In Osaka we got to visit Gavin and Lindsay Dao and then we watched the last day of the Track and Field World Championships. It was really exciting for us track nerds to watch all of those fast people run who we had only heard of before that time. That is the very abbreviated version of my summer. All during that time we had a couple typhoons, lots of earthquakes and other fun things like that. I also hung out with Hitomi almost every day when I was in town until she left for OC.
OK, I’m done. Sorry for the novel. I promise my future posts will not be even anywhere close to this long. I had to get all of this out so that I can write shorter ones from now on. I miss all of you guys and hope you are doing well.
~Austin
P.S. I have lots of pictures from my adventures posted on Facebook. Check ‘em out. For those of you not privileged enough to have that time stealer, A.K.A. Facebook, I am going to try and start posting pics on a public site like Google Picasa. I’ll let you know when I do. Bye bye.
5 comments:
The girl on your picture makes me smile. She's so pretty and funny. Welcome to Blogger ne. I will try to post my blog too. はい、どうぞ！
hey, you FINALLY posted! haha! i like your "novel" and i am looking forward to hearing more stories. and thank you for mentioning my name!
It is so exciting to finally hear about everything you've been doing there Austin! I hope you're loving it, it sounds great. Have a good week!
I loved the novel. I've been laughing at Wade's posts a lot, but I'm glad you're sharing too. We miss you guys!!!
Great post Austin! i look foward to hearing more! miss ya!
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