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So I've been a bit quiet-ish about the fact that I've been applying to grad school, mostly because I didn't want to spread the news around too loudly in case things didn't work out. But I suppose I can go public now that I've been accepted: yes, ladies and gents, I have officially been accepted to the MA in Critical and Cultural Theory program at the University of Cardiff. WOOT.
I'll be honest and say that I won't go to Cardiff unless I don't get accepted anywhere else - I really, really like their program, but the unfortunate truth is that it doesn't carry the prestige-factor of some of the other places I'm waiting to hear from, and that matters for my later applications for doctoral programs. But still, it's good to know that I have something to do next year, now. So now I just have to, uh, find some money somewhere. It's looking pretty solidly like I'm going to be in Britain next year, one way or the other - if I can pull off school, wonderful, but if I can't, my worst-case scenario will be to try to defer for a year, go to the UK on a working holiday, and work there and try to save some more money while applying for all the scholarships whose deadlines I've already missed (I figure that doing it from within the country can only make things easier).
Before anyone says, "Uh, dude, you're nuts to think you'll be able to save any money working in England," let me just say: I've been living in Tokyo, and while whether Tokyo or London is more expensive probably depends on how you calculate it, nobody can say that Tokyo is any significant amount cheaper (it's generally considered to be more expensive).
In other news: I am officially CURSED with bronchitis. I think I've still got it; I think I probably never fully kicked it from last time, though I'm not as sick as I was back in November/December. I am very tired of coughing, and very tired of curbing my social life to be responsible and go to bed and try to recover. I'm writing this on Sunday evening, and I expect I'll post it on Monday evening, and it is my hope to see a doctor at some point during the day on Monday. Not sure if I'll return to the same one I've been seeing, or if I should try to get an appointment elsewhere. Oy.
So, uh, let's see - what's been up? Last weekend I tried to lay low. Pretty much all I did that I can remember was to hop a train into Yokohama and meet up with an old friend of my aunt's who lives there. We sat down for awhile and had tea and things, and talked about the US, as she's hoping to head out there to study English for a little while. Very, very sweet woman, and we hung out for a good two hours, I think, but eventually I just had to take off because it was cold and wet and I was just feeling gross. She's invited me to go to her family home one day to see Fuji-san up close. I definitely intend to take her up on that eventually.
Oh, this week was the first full week of our NEW new coworker. He's a really good guy to work with; I quite like him. Name's Simon, and he's from Australia. The only thing that's a bit frustrating is that there's little or no chance that he'll actually finish out his contract with Aeon, because he's half-Japanese, speaks fluent Japanese and reads pretty fluently as well, and is pretty open about the fact that he came here looking for a real job and ended up taking this one because he was running out of money. I mean, that's totally fine; I'd do the same thing if I were in his shoes. I'm just hoping that he doesn't leave too close to my other coworker's April 1 departure, because the last thing is I need is to be the only foreign teacher with any experience assisting two newbies fresh out of training during one of the busiest seasons of the year. As long as he sticks around into May, it'll all be fine.
Oh, I had an amusing encounter two weeks ago when I was walking to the station in Shin-Maruko. I noticed another gaijin girl walking down the street. There aren't very many gaijin in the area where I live, so you can't help but notice them when you see them. Just in passing, like, "What are you doing here?" But anyway, this girl actually stopped me on the street: "Do you live around here? Because I see you everywhere."
Amusing factoid: foreigners in Japan all seem to assume that all other foreigners speak English. Guilty as charged. Though I have to say that one of the most hysterical experiences I've had since arriving here was watching two French men trying to eat sushi at my regular kaiten sushi place in Shibuya. They were trying to cut the nigiri in half using their chopsticks, and when that failed, one of them sort of disassembled his, eating the fish off the top first, and then the rice. In case anyone hasn't eaten sushi before: it's really a lot easier than that. You just put the whole thing in your mouth at once. Part of me wanted to strike up a conversation with them to find out if they'd eaten sushi before, and how long they'd been in Japan, but I was a little nervous because I had actually just a few weeks earlier had a conversation with two French guys on the train after work, and they'd proven to be really quite unpleasant, especially when they found out I was from Quebec (they didn't seem to think I understood the things they were saying to each other. I considered mentioning that my accent may be shot to hell from disuse, but that French was still really my langue maternelle and jokes about "se faire gratter la saucisse et les oignons" weren't going unnoticed. For people who understood that - they weren't talking about me, directly. They weren't being insulting; they were just being rude and obnoxious. You kind of had to be there to get the context; I don't remember enough to clarify it here). Anyway, I was on lunch and had to get back to work, so the point is, I didn't talk to the French guys picking apart their sushi at the restaurant.
But anyway. Back to my story. So yeah, this girl stopped me on the street and asked me if I lived in the area, because apparently she kept on seeing me all over the place. I felt a bit bad about that, because I'd never noticed her before that I could remember. To be fair, she was a good chunk shorter than me and had black hair, so I'd have had to get a very clear look at her face to notice that she was foreign, while I'm extremely tall for a woman in Japan (I'm even a bit tall for a man in Japan) and have big brown ringlets that scream I AM NOT JAPANESE from all angles. There was, however, this guy that I had kept seeing around - tall, probably a couple of years older than me, with reddish hair. I would see him on the train platform or on the main street by the station, and I've actually seen him in my building a few times (as it turns out, he lives in my building, which I had ssumed but didn't find out for certain until I spoke to this girl). So yeah, I ended up talking to this girl on the street for a few minutes, and I found out her name is Maya and that both she and this other guy I'd seen around are also Aeon teachers from the Ginza school. She arrived here about six weeks after I did. She lives in the same building as my coworker John, and her coworker (I think she said his name was Chris, but I could be wrong) lives in the same building as Simon and me. What I don't understand, though, is why they're on the train platform at the same time as me when the travel time to Ginza has got to be twice as long as the travel time to Shibuya from Shin-Maruko. Seriously, that's a long way to go. They'd have to go to Shibuya and then catch the subway from there, and then take the subway pretty much across town, which is no short trip in Tokyo.
That was kind of fun. We exchanged ketai contact info and we're planning on grabbing a coffee tomorrow, provided I don't cancel for fear of hacking up a lung on the poor girl.
Something I want to do some day when I have nothing else to do: go to Shibuya, get on the Yamanote train line (it's a main line that goes in a big circle and hits all the major centres of Tokyo) during a quiet period, and ride the whole circle. I think it takes about an hour, and would really be a great way to get, I don't know, something of a cheap Cook's tour of the city. It passes through Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku, Ginza (not Ginza station, but Yurakucho and Tokyo stations are both in the Ginza district), Ikebukuro, Ueno, Akihabara, Shinagawa, Gotanda, Ebisu, Kanda - those are very much in the wrong order, but still. I've made the full Yamanote circuit in bits and pieces and have spent time in virtually all of those districts already, but it would be fun to just lean by a window and go all the way around at once. With good music, of course.
Final note before finishing this up: I've had some absolutely incredible views of Fuji-san lately. I've finally started to remember to look on clear days after windy nights when my train crosses the Tamagawa on the way to work. We really do have an amazing view. It's actually quite close; the crater stands up from behind a nearby mountain range. Two things are really remarkable. One: its beauty. It's such a perfect shape; there's something so simple about it, especially when I compare it with the other large mountain in whose shadow I've lived (Mt. Rainier), which is equally beautiful in a very different way. Two: it's THERE, so massive and majestic behind this closer, much smaller mountain range, and at least nine days out of ten (in winter; probably more like 29 days our of 30 in summer) it's virtually or entirely invisible from the air pollution. I can't remember if I've commented on this before, but - Japan incinerates a lot of its garbage. This makes sense, as they don't have much landfill space. In most prefectures, they sort burnable from unburnable garbage - you have a bin for paper and burnable synthetics and food products and thing, and another bin for plastics and other non-burnables. In Kanagawa - my prefecture - they don't do any of that sorting. Some plastics, cans, glass, and cardboard are recycled, and everything else is just incinerated. I can't help but think that's a pretty big contributing factor to the downright LOUSY air quality out here. It's easily visible - the grey haze on the horizon, and usually far closer than the horizon, even on most sunny, clear days. Windy nights and/or typhoons blow all the smog away, which is why Fuji-san tends to be visible the following mornings. But after you see it, it's just amazing to think what's got to be in the air to make something so massive and so clear be invisible even on most sunny, blue-sky days.
Whoa. Rereading this, I'm realising the extent to which I've picked up the gaijin Japanese-English dialect. Case in point: saying "gaijin" instead of "foreigner." I also said "ketai" instead of "cell phone" and talked about "Fuji-san" and - well, this one isn't new, but still - didn't I talk about "kaiten sushi" (instead of "conveyor-belt sushi"). . . .
Eh, I guess that means I'm assimilating or something.
Oh, and FINAL final note - been reading a lot of Atwood lately. "The Blind Assassin" was really quite devastating to me. . . in ways that I won't go into here. Now I'm reading "Oryx and Crake", and I'm only about 100 pages in but I can tell that it's going to be devastating as well, but in a completely different way. This whole reading-for-pleasure thing continues to be novel (no pun intended) and I continue to enjoy it. Wild.
This entry was way too long. I doubt anyone's still reading. But it's for my own recollection as much as (maybe even more than) for everyone else's enjoyment, so I don't mind.