Substitute Teaching and Home Cooking

So we've been spending the past couple of weeks post-training as on call substitute teachers. Basically, we get a call every morning and go to a school to either help the office staff or teach lessons for a teacher who called out. Some days there are students or classes to teach, some days I sit with other foreign teachers and stuff little advertisements into tissues packets. So, in Japan, many companies will hand out little tissue packets with discount coupons or information about their company to people who pass by on the street. My company does this and guess who stuffs the tissues and hands them out? I do. I got to go out twice to pass a bag of hundreds of tissues out to passer-bys. Did I mention I get to wear a huge pink parka with my company logo on it while I do this?

I wish this was what I got to wear....

So at first I wasn't taking it too seriously, feeling pretty stupid in my hot pink parka and having a personal aversion to being shouted at by people on the street selling things. Buuuttt.... I can't go back into the school until I hand them all out. So I soon found myself darting over to just-parking buses to hand out as many as possible to departing riders, swooping down on teenagers as they unsuspectingly step out of the Mister Donut, and chasing down large groups of business men stumbling out of restaurants, hoping they'd be tipsy enough to want lots and lots of tissues.

Aside from all that (which I secretly find hilarious and enjoy in its own way), I've gotten to teach a few lessons. It's so great to be teaching again! This time I get business people, doctors, retirees, stay-at-home moms, shop keepers, college students, high school students trying to get into university, middle schoolers, kids and toddlers. It's been fun and challenging altering my teaching and language use according to my students' age, proficiency and needs. :) Of course, the kids classes have been my favorite, especially ages 9 to 12, which was a surprise to me.

The commute to these schools is different everyday until our official teaching schedule begins in April. Sometimes the train rides are a few minutes, sometimes they're over an hour. Now I'm covering a shift every Thursday until April in the school farthest from Nagoya. It takes about an hour and forty-five minutes from my apartment to the door of the school, all but 25 of those minutes is spent on a train. I was dreading it, but it's nice to look out the windows as the tall, busy cityscape gives way to rice paddies and flat, open land. I've also gotten a chance to get back into reading. (Thanks Summer and Evan for a world of awesome sci-fi, fantasy, and nonfiction, all in beautiful English!!!)

At home, we've been loving eating fish almost everyday. :) Here, a couple salmon fillets are close to $3 USD. Yes. So we eat it. A lot. Breakfast has been mostly Japanese, too. Natto, miso soup, okayu, fish, green tea, rice....

Okayu, rice porridge. Add fruit, veggies, fish, seaweed, sugar, egg... whatever you want. 

Buuuut we got a little homesick for some familiar comfort food. So I worked with what was around and whipped up some pasta and meatballs.

And Brett found Kraft parmasean cheese

Now.... the pasta is actually soba noodles (which Brett swears tastes like al dente fresh pasta) and the meatballs are chicken and pork, but I got my hands on some oregano, garlic and crushed tomato, so it happened! And it was gooood. :)

We got something like 24 meatballs out of it, so comfort food all week. Yay!



Other than that, we've been making our apartment a home, amassing plants and flowers, planning out a garden. Brett feng-shuied the furniture like he does, and it feels much homier now.

And in a month, we will be getting our first week long vacation! We're thinking about a trip to Ise or Miyajima, where there is some gorgeous nature, a beach, islands, and a very famous shrine. We'll see. :)