Ryan
Chasing greatness

Well I would have written sooner, but there is no internet in Welling where Megan’s family is, so no dice.

Did you miss me?

Our travels from Japan went without a hitch and aside from the exhaustion, we were pumped to be home. Megan cried on the train to the airport in Japan, which is great. It means she really had a great time and would miss it.

Since we’ve been back I have bought Megan an iPhone which has been an amazing investment. Even though there is no internet at Megan’s family’s home, her iPhone can still squeak an internet signal out sometimes.

In general everyone has been running around all crazy and stressed-like getting Rachel’s (Megan’s younger sister) wedding ready for this Thursday.

I do my best to avoid the whole thing, but that only works half of the time. Megan and Audra (Megan’s older sister) hosted a shower for Rachel, but I did most of the cooking for it before I was banished to another room with beer and movies and Megan’s dad.

Not as bad as you think.

Though he does snore quite a bit, and can be a little handsy.

In other news, we were asked to return to MES at the end of the summer. I told them I would only consider it if there were no job opportunities here. Well without internet and this wedding stuff, I haven’t been able to look at all.

Anyway, I got an email from Kimoto-san (Our boss’s boss) offering us the job formally with a $20/month raise! Thats like a 0.8% increase!

Sign me up!

They want me and Megan to go back to train all of the staff and be their managers. As well as teach a full load of classes. Apparently thats only worth $20 a month more than just teaching.

When we read that email we knew that even if we would be working at Burger King, we probably won’t be taking the job in Japan again.

Don’t get me wrong, it was an amazing job and an amazing year, but it wouldn’t be the same the second time around.

For those of you familiar with Tahlequah, I am doing my internet business from the Iguana Cafe.

I am officially finished teaching classes.  I have one more curriculum tomorrow and thats it.  I’m pretty excited!

I said, “Goodbye,” to my class Monday, Tuesday and finally today.  Some of the kids were great fun and great people who would be fun to be around any time.  At the same time, I never got too close to them, so the memories and pictures I took will be enough.

A few interesting things happened however.  Tuesday after I taught my classes, I went with Mami to meet the Hiroi family.  I taught them from last June until April.  I did get close to them and I will miss them.  The Hiroi family wanted to see me one last time before I left, so we met at a small restaurant, and while the kids had dessert, I played with them and soaked it in.

There was Yuka who is either 5 or 6 and is the definition of cute.  Then there is the boy, Kengo.  He is really funny and just great.  The oldest is Maho, and her personality is about inbetween the other two.  She is around 12 or 13 and had a little crush on me I think.  I don’t mind though, nearly every girl I taught did that.  Seriously.

I’m not making it up.

I’m not proud of it either.

Just a fact.

So we just spent some time together and said our final farewells.

After that Megan, Mami, Yurie, Ayumi, and I went to dinner together.  These were the Japanese teachers we got closest to and the people we will miss the most by far.  I know there was a language barrier, but we tried to let them know how important they have been to us.  We ate and laughed and talked until around midnight before we pulled ourselves away again.

When we think of Japan, they will be the first people that come to mind.

I have said all of my goodbyes and now I am just packing before we fly home Friday.  I’m dreading the flight, but excited for change.

It has been one of the best years of my life.  Not because it was all happy, fun, or even easy.  Far from it.  It has been one of those years where I felt like I truly lived life, and it was great.

Now for something kind of different.

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So today was my last day for teaching my Thursday classes.  While I loved 2 out of 3 of them, I am happy to be one step closer to heading home.  The classes themselves went fine.  I planned nothing special and just went about my business.

The kids however didn’t let me off the hook so easily.  Today is the first of what will probably be a long week of accepting bullshit crafts from the kids that I will have a hard time not being happy about.  Yes, I am sad to say goodbye to the kids.  Yes, I am really happy that they made a goodbye card for me.  No, I don’t know if I’ll be bringing 1,000 awful drawings of Pikachu that say, “Thank you Lian,” home.

Tomorrow is our official going away party.  We are going to eat at the owner’s Italian restaurant.  It will be delicious, filling, tear-filled (Thanks to Megan), and followed up by video games.  I’m pretty excited.

The pig flu made it to Japan and has caused Osaka to shut down all of their public schools.  Japan, responding in the most fear-ridden, foolish way, has encouraged the following policies to be put into place.  The new teachers will not be allowed to teach at Kindergartens for one week.  It is a quarantine of sorts.  See, the flu is already in Japan, but they aren’t worried about Japanese people spreading it, just foreigners.  So the new teachers have to hang out a week without a fever, pay, or training because of the pig flu.

Furthermore, if the flu comes to Gifu and the Kindergartens shut down (Which they would), then nobody will be getting paid for that duration of time.  We won’t be working, so we won’t be getting paid.

Thankfully not a damn bit about the pig flu has any bearing on Megan and I and we are happy to be getting away from the hysteria.

Its funny how some days, when you look back, can seem really bizarre.

Tuesday started with my first play time. What that is, in a nutshell, is our company gets paid to drop one of us foreign teachers for a few hours of abuse at the hands of children.

It went plenty fine, it was a beautiful day. Beautiful and hot. I had sweat through my shirt by 10AM. My shoes were also full of the weird kitty-litter sand they use on the play ground. The rest of the day involved the children giving stool and urine samples, musical chairs, and curry rice for lunch.

After play time I cooled off by teaching 4 classes. I never stopped sweating.

Then our boss’s boss took us to dinner. I need to bring up that they don’t speak English and they also don’t really socialize much with us “Round-eyes.”

They were going to take us out to a “nice” sushi restaurant. Our definition of nice sushi runs about $1 a piece. For our bosses, who own a 2nd home in Hawaii, it runs around $6 a piece.

Here’s the Japanese for what I ate for all you know Japanese only because of Sushi:

• Kanimiso
• Uni
• Anago
• Negitoro
• Daiebi
• Ikura
• Kai
• Kappa
• Salmon

The descriptions are below.

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In class we sometimes play a betting game. It works like this. First I take 2-4 cards that the kids are learning and place them face up on a table or special mat. Then I choose one duplicate of those cards and place it face down.

The face down card is of course the chosen card that they have to figure out. So the bet by placing chips on the face up cards.

I reveal the face down card, and pay the winners and take the money from the losers.

The challenge is getting the children to not only play with their own chips, but be willing to lose them too.

Today was unreal in that respect.

Normally the greedy little punks only bet one chip. I have a rule that if you bet one, you can’t lose it, but you will only win one in return. If you bet two or more and lose, I take them. However, if you win, I will pay back double. That is to say if you bet 5 and win, I will give you 10 chips as well as the 5 you bet. Not bad.

I put the cards down for their selection. then I told them to get ready, because the secret card was coming. I purposefully let them see the secret card on the way down.

They still only bet one or two chips. Everyone one. Confidence was boosted because they thought I was an idiot.

I congratulated everyone and started again. I told them to get ready, and put the next secret card down. Only this time I used some of my sleight of hand to switch it at the last minute. They thought they saw one card go down, but in reality a different one did.

Half of the class lost everything.

After another round of this, I decided to change the game up. I had lots of these cards, so I put a peak in them long ways so that when I laid them on the table, they looked like tents.

Then I showed 2 identical cards and one different. I told them to watch that different card and began to shuffle them on the table.

When I was finished, they started betting. Every kid won. They were excited at having to follow my hands so quickly.

Then we played again. This time I used a different sleight of hand to which 9 children, and one teacher, did not catch.

Those poor souls bet everything on where they thought the card was. One student said clearly that he didn’t think that was it, and bet everything he had elsewhere.

Everyone lost, but he got tons of chips.

Everyone was freaking out the entire class. They never accused me of cheating, they never got upset at losing, and they wanted to keep playing.

Kids are awesome practice for card tricks.