Settling in

Its Friday!! Which means school is only till 12.45pm today! Work was uneventful. There are only about 10 teachers around coz its summer holidays and most of them are on vacation. Being one of the top schools in the prefecture, the school conducts remedial lessons for core subjects during the summer vacation, leaving the poor students with only 2 weeks of holidays instead of an entire month. Luckily, English is not considered a core subject, so there are no lessons for me till term begins on 29 Aug. I used the time at school to memorise the hiragana alphabet. In the meantime, I am told to start preparing a short self-introduction to be made during the school assembly on 29 Aug.

Hooray! I got my missing baggage back! I spent the afternoon unpacking and putting everything away. Then I went for a run in the evening. Found "Yummy", the ice-cream parlour that my predecessor told me about. It looks like a nice cozy place. Apparently, they have cherry blossom flavoured ice-cream during spring. I found a little shop near my place just in front of the rice fields and guess what? Even in inaka (countryside) Japan, you still get a whole array of vending machines

This is my apartment block from the outside. (The name of the apartment is Rento Yukiguni. Rento is just adapted from the English word rent and Yukiguni just means snow garden.) I live on the third floor (also the top floor) right next to the stairwell.

I tell you, there are all these huge cockroaches and spiders all over the corridors! (I think it might be because I'm right next to the rice fields) Its scary man! I had to vacuum up rather large spiders in my apartment during my first couple of days. Then I stuffed the vacuum hose up with paper so that the spiders won't be able to escape! Heh heh...I felt so smart when I thought of that :) Check out this cockroach (it might not appear so but they're much bigger than those in Singapore)

Zoom in on the cockroach!

Eww...gross!!

On the upside though, I do have a great view from my apartment - rice fields and mountains!

In front of my apartment block, there are some bigger houses and they actually grow their own stuff. But the view isn't too pretty.

Then I met Patrick to have dinner at this small family-run ramen shop. Oishi! But I think it would be much better to have it in winter.

Kate, another JET from the neighbouring town Muikamachi who’s on her 2nd year, offered to show us around her town, which has bigger and more shopping places. We’ll be meeting for lunch tomorrow then she’ll take us around her town. So nice of her!