Tom Cruise

Last night was my impromptu welcoming party. I met up with another Interac teacher (Franchesca), her fiance (Kelsey, he's a JET), and the infamous Ian. Ian is the teacher that I replaced (see Into the fire). It turns out that he is an extremely thoughtful and generous person and his beef was actually with Interac and not the schools... but I won't go into it here.

Anyway, we met up for dinner, went around to a few places for drinks, had lots of laughs, I learned a LOT of Japanese that I don't remember, and I started to fade around 4:30AM. I'm really thankful that they covered taxi rides in my Japanese learning tapes because I had no problem (I think) telling the driver my destination. The only problem was that I've not learned my address yet (It's written in kanji), so I had to take the cab to the train station and stumble home from there. I'm extremely surprised I made it all night without being sick, but I am a victim of the dreaded day-long hangover.

In other news, work has improved a lot. I had dinner with two other teachers here in Joetsu last Wednesday and they gave me some great advice. The reminded me that that I'm not a teacher, but basically a clown. My job is to entertain the kids so they have a good time and enjoy using English. I guess I was putting too much pressure on myself to TEACH. 

So lately I've been having a great time at work... just acting stupid and making the kids/teachers laugh as I drill the target vocab and grammar. I've even made a few fans in the Jr. high, because I'm single (they made sure to ask that during the question-answer session) and because I supposedly look like Tom Cruise (WTF?). Apparently most Westerners get told they look like a celebrity, because we all look the same to them (which is fair, because sometimes they all look the same to us), but why did I get Tom Cruise? I was kinda hoping to get Brad Pitt.