Student journal

Hey,

So I just read a student journal:

I want to beautiful face.
Just like Charly.
I want to more cute.
So I fite every day.
And I am going to cute.


I'm really not sure how I feel about this.  I mean, obviously it's flattering, but also it makes me sad - the idea of a little Japanese girl 'fighting' to look like a tall, pale, blonde woman.  And then another part of me admires her gumption - "I am going to cute"!

This reminds me a little of when a (drunk) girl at a party told me that she had heard about my au pairing experience and I had inspired her.  I was so happy to hear that, and then she carried on...  "You inspired me to do what I really want, so I got a boob job!"  Oh, the irony.  Never, ever did I think I would inspire anyone to get their boobs done!  The world works in mysterious ways!

Guess I just have to hope I don't inspire any Japanese girls to do anything crazy like try to bleach their skin.  Oh wait...  :S


In other news, our fundraising plans are coming along - I have spoken to the cafe where we will hold our fundraising lunch and they are in.  Now to choose a date...  Probably Dec 8th to give us a bit of prep time and make it Christmas themed.

The raffle is still going very slowly, although I have had another couple of people promise to buy tickets.  Hopefully I can sell a few to ALTs in Hiroshima this weekend.  Cross fingers!!

If anyone has any more fundraising suggestions, they are appreciated!

Hope you're all doing well and inspiring people in all the right ways.

xo

Planning, planning, planning!

Hello everyone,

How does this Sunday evening find you?  Personally I'm feeling terribly guilty - I should go for a run, in preparation for my 10km race next Saturday, but I have come down with a sore throat.  In the interest of shaking it quickly, I have decided to substitute a 10km training run with a 500m walk to the supermarket to buy lemons, so I can sit at home drinking lemon and honey drinks!  At least I can get an early night tonight and hopefully be back to normal tomorrow morning.  Cross fingers!  I hardly ever get sick (knock on wood!), so it would be terrible luck to be crook just in time for the race I signed up for ages ago and have slowly worked my way up to!!

In other news, Jeff and I have made our Christmas plans.  We will be joining a group of other English teachers to visit Thailand and volunteer in an orphanage for a week.  We will finish just in time to travel to Bangkok for New Year's Eve and will spend a few days exploring before we head back to Japan.  I'm sure I don't need to tell you how excited we are!  Except that, we are really ridiculously excited.  I mean, we went to Malaysia and Singapore last year and that was fun, but I'm at least five times more excited over this.  Partly because we are going with friends, which will make the experience so much more fun, and partly because of the volunteer aspect.  Anyone who knows me will know how much I love volunteering and fundraising for charity.  Yes, I stress way too much about it, but I also get the most incredible buzz out of helping others.  I am all too aware that I am a flawed, selfish, materialistic, self-absorbed human and volunteering gives me a chance to escape that (if anyone who works for a charity wants to offer me a job, I'm back in NZ in August!!).

The only downside to our Thailand plans are that we need to fundraise 15,000 yen each before we leave (a little over $200).  I THOUGHT I could raise some money fairly easily with a raffle - one in Japan and one in NZ, with a prize of 1/4 of the money raised from the raffle.  But I've had a really poor reception for it thus far, so I'm just hoping people are thinking about it for a few days before they donate...  Cross fingers!

Maybe my family have already sucked all my NZ contacts dry - I know Laura has been fundraising frantically for her two school trips and Mum and Kate did some fundraising for the Thai elephant sanctuary before they went.

Our other fundraising plan is to contact a wee cafe we know and ask them if we can hold a function there in December, then sell tickets to a lunch there.  We have yet to speak to the cafe (something we were supposed to do this weekend and didn't get onto!), but cross fingers they like the idea and we can go ahead in organising that.

What else is new?  Jeff has started counting down till we leave.  Sometimes I think it's because he is really anxious to leave, like when he tells me it's only 9 months and one week of classes left till NZ, but then other times I can see he will really miss Japan, like when he said, sadly, that it's our last autumn in Japan.  I agree that missing out on the autumn colours of Japan will be one of the saddest things about moving back to NZ.  Guess who will be planting Japanese maples when she gets a garden...!

Ok, it's dinner time now.  Time to heat my asparagus soup, then go get those lemons.  Then I have an evening of writing my latest Wide Island View (www.wideislandview.com) article before getting an early night!

Night,
Charly
xo

Bits and bobs

Hey there,

I am SO overdue on a post, I know!

At the moment I procrastinating not one, not two, but THREE important things (that would be TEFL, Wide Island View and work!), so I'm going to keep this really brief.  I just realised that the longer I put it off, the harder it would be too write because it would be so long ago I would forget what had happened in the interim.

So, for ease of reference, I'm gonna bullet point this...

• JLPT - that is, the Japanese test we sat way back when.  Well, we got our results back.  Jeff passed with flying colours, though not quite as high as I had foretold, and I failed by one point, so not quite as low as I foretold.  The plan was I would resit this December, but the applications closed while we were in NZ and we were so busy running round getting ready for that that I didn't have time to get hold of the paperwork, never mind get it done, complete payment etc.  Maybe next July, if I'm organised!

• New Zealand - was awesome.  I was so excited by all the new beers and ciders that have turned up in the supermarket since our last visit home!  We had a nice time catching up with family (well, those that were around, anyway.  Kate and Beth didn't even SUGGEST flying home from London to catch up... no love!) and later friends.  The wedding in Whitianga was really lovely and there was only five minutes of serious rain where the ceremony had to be shifted to the shed at the end of the garden!  I was really nervous about my wee speech at the reception, but despite Jeff's original verdict of my speech when I practised in the car ("That's kinda what I was going to say.  But mine was going to be much better."), I upped my game once I was in front of the 80-strong audience and Jeff declared I was "awesome".  Which means that either I was, indeed, "awesome", or that Jeff had had a lot of beer by that point.  Either is possible, but I'm telling myself it was the first!  Anyway, once I had got by speech out of the way, I was just left with warm fuzzies that I could be part of the 'team' at my good friends' wedding.

• Marathon - yes, that 10km 'marathon' is fast approaching!  On Wednesday I did an 8km run and felt AMAZING - possibly due to the new NZ-purchased running shoes!  But then yesterday I went for a wee run of a mere 5km and felt like I was dying.  I had to break to walk a bunch of times, I was sniffling, my ears got blocked and I felt queasy after.  Guess you really can't pick your good days and bad days.  Now I just have to start praying that November 3rd is a good day!!!  

• What else??  If you haven't heard yet, Jeff and I have made a final decision that we will be moving back to NZ when our contracts finish at the end of July.  And by NZ we MAY mean Australia.  I don't like it, but I know I'm cutting off my nose to spite my face when the pay is so much better over there!!  We keep discussing our options but I know we are wasting our breath.  Ultimately we just have to see where we can get jobs.  I was slightly relieved last night to talk to friends, another couple here in Japan, that seem to have a similar issues to us when it comes time to leave Japan.  That fear of moving somewhere when you have no job, no home (although I know Jeff and I can stay at my parents') and need to just pick a place to start a new life.  I guess everyone goes through the same thing, but it seems twice the hassle when you have two people to accommodate and feed with no income!  

Ok, I know that's very brief but I really need to finish TEFL - oh, that's right, TEFL.  I meant to explain my TEFL course closes on the 24th of October, so I have only TEN days left to finish up.  And I still have 20 hours to do.  So I really should finish this pile of student journals so that I can do TEFL at my visit school rather than carting over work to finish from my base school, phew!!  

Currently it's 3:10pm and at 3:25pm I have to attend a meeting in the gym for 35 minutes.  It will be all conducted in Japanese.  I have no idea what it's for and I doubt I will have any better idea by the time the meeting is over.  I used to think meetings were hard to understand when I worked for a geothermal power company, but I didn't know how easy I had it!!  

I hope you're all doing well and I apologise for this being so long overdue and not including ANY funny student quotes.  Almost quarter of my students owe me letters of apology for forgetting their dictionaries, so I promise to put them on here.  I love student apology letters so much, they make me happy.  I get gems like this one, one of the first to be turned in, "I'm sorry.  I didn't bring my dictionaly in school every day.  I think I want to bring it.'  I don't know what the 'I think' translates as, but it's WELL over-used by my students!!

Oh damn, there's the bell!  Time to post this!  I haven't had a chance to proof-read so I apologise now for any mistakes!  

Charly 

xo