A 22 year old Nova teacher was found dead yesterday in the apartment of a 28 year old Japanese man in Chiba prefecture. She was apparently murdered and buried in a bathtub of sand. The man escaped and is still at large. The full story is here, but it has shocked everyone at Nova and is all over the news here.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23390482-details/British+teacher,+22,+victim+of+macabre+Japanese+killing/article.do
It took a while and a 20 meter long cord extending from my Canadian neighbors house upstairs but we've got Internet back.
Work has been going great. Everyone has been really friendly and the classes themselves are pretty easy. I'm teaching 8 classes a day and Sarah and I both have Mondays and Tuesdays off which is great. We've done nothing spectacular yet, eaten nothing strange or have had a frustrating but amusing travel experience. Give us time. Something is bound to go wrong soon. We've actually been spending a lot of time getting our apartment set up. I'll have pictures of it up soon but it's much bigger than I thought it would be (though the door jambs could be 8 inches taller). We like the place a lot but we've already found a new place to live starting May 1st. We will be paying half the rent there and will be living in the same complex as a bunch of other Nova teachers. It'll be great.
I'll have more up soon but I've gotta go watch about six episodes of The Office.
I just got home from my second day of training at the local Nova branch. So far, everything has been great. The staff and the foreign instructors have all been really nice and very helpful and the training itself has gone smoothly. Mostly it's just been learning the "Nova" way of doing things, which in comparison to a lot of the other places I've taught, is pretty good. All in all, it seems like it will be a pretty easy job and I should be learning a lot along the way.
It is different though. Nova's biggest selling point is how many branches they have and how convenient they are to find. Most are located a block from major subway stops. The branch Sarah and I will be working in is actually located on the 5th floor of a department store. 4th floor Menswear, 5th floor Conversational English. The branches themselves are also incredibly tiny. The branch we are currently training at has doors I have to walk through sideways; my shoulders are too wide for me to walk through normally. And the classrooms themselves are actually the size of Office Space cubicles. I've been introducing myself to students as Samir Naga-Nagonnna-teach-you-English but they don't get it. Maybe it's my delivery.
Anyway. We have our last day of training tomorrow, get to come back to our apartment and repack all our stuff and move into our permanent place on Thursday morning. It'll be nice to get settled and start work at our home branch. Assuming I'm not too tall to work there.
So I'm in Japan. Really quick recap: Went home for four months, saw friends and took a three week trip to Canada to visit Sarah, applied for and got a job for NOVA a Japanese English teaching company and I flew in three days ago.
I'm planning on being here for a year (like I did in Prague, and Korea, 6 and 10 months respectively) and so far it sounds doable. I'm living with Sarah in a two bedroom flat which is much bigger than our place in Korea. The job sounds to be a lot easier, less classes, much more professional and it seems like the teachers we've talked to all like their jobs. We have three days of training starting on Monday and then we start our jobs officially on Friday. With our experience, I'm sure this year will be cake.
So far though it's been the usual first few days in a new country. Sleeping, cup ramen, registering for a foreign card, getting lost, drinking, unpacking, getting really lost, yelling at self for forgetting to pack various items, determining if TV here is watchable (answer: yes, based only on weirdness), getting in fight with girlfriend over how lost we are. Honestly Sarah and I have both noted how we don't really feel like this is a foreign country. Is it because of how Westernized Japan is as a whole? Is it because we just spent a year (ok, 10 months) in Korea, a similar Asian country? Is it because we are such awesome world travelers that the entire globe feels like home to us? We'll find out.
In the meantime, I am committed to posting again and I will have pictures up as soon as I take 'em.
So I haven't posted anything for the last... five months. What happened? I just stopped writing. That's all. I have been busy moving home, readjusting, applying for a job, and getting ready to move to Japan (where I am now) but I could have easily been posting about what I was doing during the last 5 months, but I didn't. Apathy I guess.
Anyway. I am in Japan now and I will be posting more so stay tuned.
