NZ countdown!

Four sleeps till NZ!  Well, four for Jeff, because he can't sleep on planes, but five for me.  If I can get over my excitement about NZ wine on a plane to go to sleep! 

Things are pretty sad at school at the moment.  Out of the 12-odd English staff, around half are part-timers, so I assumed they would be staying at our school.  Turns out that for various personal reasons, most of them are leaving!  The teacher whose classes I find the easiest to teach is leaving, having only been here as a long term temp while another woman had a baby.  The woman that I did dinner with last year (and will again on Wed) is leaving for a junior high school.  Another teacher, who tried so hard to be friends that she went and watched Black Sheep to report back on it, mentioned today that she won't be here next year.  This sucks!  At this stage there are still three teachers that I'm friends with who aren't leaving, but two of the three may hear bad news on Wednesday.  Well, it would be bad news for me.  No idea how they would feel about it.  I'm pretty sure Kanmuri-sensei doesn't want to leave after eight years here (don't quote me on that number.  It's somewhere between six and ten), but she is also very very unusual in having been left in one spot for so long, so I think those eight years mean she is extremely likely to be shifted.  Often teachers are shifted every two or three years. 

I went to my supervisor today to try to get any information available on my teaching situation next year.  I had written out a list of questions that I tried him on.  Unfortunately he is of the class of human that, if he doesn't know the answer or doesn't understand the question, tries to give you an answer that sounds right, irrespective of its accuracy.  Nevertheless, I'm going to assume about 2/3 of what I was told will be correct.  According to him, I will continue to teach in the projector room (the rainforests of the world should rejoice in the saving on printing!), I will continue to visit Tode High on Tuesdays, there will no longer be a second ALT that I need to prepare a lesson plan for and I will be teaching both first and second year students.  The good news is that teaching second years will give me more on my schedule.  The bad news is that when I teach first years, the lesson topic is entirely my own choice.  This makes no sense to me, as I could give them great lessons on speaking about the moon in English, but it wouldn't help them in exams or everyday conversation!  Despite the fact they won't have a textbook, I think I'll run through the same type of topics they covered in the textbook anyway, just to give me SOME kind of guideline to work with!  Of course the freedom of spending the lesson however I like will be nice, but it also involves much more THINKING when I don't have a topic to cover with the students. 

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is a public holiday, so Jeff and I are having a Cleaning Day.  That way we can return to a nice clean, sparkly house.  On Sunday we got a head start, cleaning the kitchen (we even cleaned under the stove, Mum!).  Of course the problem with that was that Jeff then cooked spag bol.  There is no concensus on who dripped mincey tomatoeyness on the clean stove, but the fact is the lovely clean stove had to be hastily wiped down to preserve it's freshly cleaned allure!  Hopefully cleaning the floors and bathroom when Jeff has only one more night in the house will be safe.  As long as he doesn't decide to shave his head in the middle of the kitchen floor, or the hamster spit seeds all over my back and the tatami (it's happened before... The hamster thing, not the Jeff thing...), we should be good. 

After our Cleaning Day we have two days of work before heading towards the airport.  On Wednesday night we will stay in our seperate apartments, finalising packing.  Well, Jeff will stay in Jinseki so he doesn't get swallowed by my packing and accidentally zipped into my suitcase.  My technique requires much space.  In my defence, Jeff has been struggling to figure out what to take to NZ.  He told me he was wondering if thermals were necessary, to which I asked if he had ever worn thermals in NZ?  Sheepishly he said no, he hadn't, but that he couldn't remember what NZ was like.  My slightly homesick response was, 'Comfortable.  NZ is always comfortable.' 

Also on Wednesday, I will go to dinner with Inohara-sensei, one of the part-time teachers who is not returning.  I told her I didn't have much money at the moment so I couldn't come if it was going to be too expensive.  She got back to me today to tell me it was 3000 yen (roughly $45), but that if I couldn't afford it the cost would be shared round the other people going to dinner.  Of course not having money because I'm saving it to take it home is not a suitable reason for expecting others to pay your dinner.  BUT I can't get out of it on financial grounds because they said they would pay if I couldn't.  Awkward.  I guess I would still go, even if I wasn't in this tricky situation, just because Inohara-sensei is lovely and I want to stay friends with her even now she is not teaching with me, but it would have been nice to have the option.  I was hoping for a cheap dinner.  It's less that I mind the cost, but that a delicious okonomiyaki costs about 700 yen, a tasty burger and chips costs about 1000 yen, an acceptable Italian meal costs about 3000 and an edible huge traditional meal of sashimi and sliced sea slug costs about 6000 yen.  See where I'm going with this??  In Japan, how much I pay for a meal is a fairly good inverse indication of how much I'll enjoy the meal!  Hence I'm concerned about paying 3000 at somewhere pretty Japanesey.  I'm super super sick of paying lots of money for food that turns my stomach when I eat some simply to be polite! 

Of course, it may be one of those wonderful buffets (ask Steve or Geoff and Sandra about them!) where you can eat what you feel like, Japanese or Western.  That I would enjoy.  But I'll just have to wait and see... 

Speaking of food... in ten minutes I can leave here.  I am heading down to my apartment, where I will hoover the floor before packing the car and driving up to Jinseki.  On the way I will stop at the supermarket to buy our gourmet dinner of... supermarket salad.  Having said that, anyone who has spent any time in Japan will understand that you can buy all kinds of decent food at the supermarket, so I will have a choice out of about five different salads, or another five different traditional Japanese vegetable dishes.  Pretty good for a meal on the run - sure beats Maccas!  The only catch is I always get distracted by the fried goodies and often accidentally get myself a potato crochette or some pumpkin tempura.  Makes the salad idea a bit less healthy! 

Tonight, wish me the strength to buy supermarket dinner without buying anything fried, no matter how good it all smells!