On the job training!!

Rain don`t go away!

Hello I hope to find everybody in fine spirits!!! Currently I am just hanging out in the teachers room and I just finished a class of 24 ichi-nen sei or freshman in the US. So I received every question you could think of from Do you think I am sexy? Do you have a wife? Or get this what apartment number are you!!! HAHAH It was very funny to me that they would ask you these questions and the other teacher would just sit there and laugh. I only answered some of the questions and left some others to their imagination LOL. Anyway in about 2 hours I will go play soccer with the students outside even though it is pouring rain.

The Birthday Incident!

So yesterday I came to school even though I had the day off because my teacher friends invited me to come and watch a dvd of the rafting trip we took a few weeks ago. I will try to show you some of it soon by the way. So I came to school about 430pm and I get inside the classroom and they had bought me a cake and a present for my birthday even though it is not until Sunday! It was really nice of them and considering they know almost no English they still did it. I was happy. My friend hiropon bought me some new shin guards and a pair of soccer socks. It was awesome!! After that I went to eat some grub with my friend Fumiko at the local izakaya near our apartments. So lately Ive been pretty good sometimes I really don't have time to do anything else but work and eat. So now that I have time Im typing my blog.

Grillin it up!!!
So I don't know if I told you but my family sent me a badass George Foreman Grill and I just wanted to let you know it really rocks. I grilled up some steak and made velveeta shells and cheese on Tuesday. Damn that was good!! So Family thanks it really works!! haha :) Tonight I am supposed to go to a drum and bass show with my favorite new zealander Sarah. It will probably be a really late or early night. Then tomorrow Saturday we are supposed to have a bit of a celebration for my birthday. My brit friend John told me something nice last week, I told him that it was weird not having any family here when its my birthday, and he cut me off and said hey we are your family here. Its nice to know even so far away from home some people got your back. I'm trying to copy my friend Patricks blog by putting some surveys up so watch out for that. And please leave some comments whenever you can its greatly appreciated. Oh and uncle bobby I bought a Renault Road Bike it is really nice you would like it. 18 gears. Ok talk to you all soon... peace

howdy

So things are pretty crazy over here at the moment. School is in session and I am at school all day from about 730am to 530pm. I usually meet a friend or two for dinner or whatever and then afterwards come home to sleep and do it all over again. I will be posting more stuff up soon I just wanted you to know that I'm alive. The students are really cool and a bit shy but thats just kids you know. Tomorrow I don't have any classes in the afternoon so I'm going to go practice with the school soccer club. They are very excited to play with me. Today I was approached by the Spanish teacher we began to talk for about 20 mins in Spanish it was really nice to hear Spanish again, I had forgotten a lot already. So this is good for me. Well I will try to put some pics up soon and a video of a club that we went to last Saturday night. Talk to you soon :)

Sorry for the wait

It's been a few days since my last update. I have been wanting to right but lately I've been just too bloody tired to do it at night. The language academy went really well, I learned a bit although many of the things I learned I already forgot. It was really good though I'm just really dumb about that kinda stuff. Anyway, so on Wednesday afternoon I got a text message from my supervisor that said...."tomorrow at the teachers meeting you have to introduce yourself.... in Japanese" So I found out less that 15 hours before I had to give a speech in a foreign language to my fellow co workers. I was really nervous, so after I got home from the language camp I stopped my favorite local bar called Koko. My friend Fumiko works there and she is super nice. I went to ask her how to write my introduction. I had wrote most of it and she wrote the hard parts. I gave the speech the next morning and was getting compliments on how good my Japanese accent is. I guess I can speak well but I don't know enough to have a conversation.

Thursday night my brit friend Tom and Jon asked me to go play some football with them... they said "lets get a bit of footy on yeh?" I was excited, so after work I went to the train station and met the guys at Tennoji Station. Needless to say that everyone was British or Irish and so on. I was a bit intimidated because I was playing with some good guys. I was able to pull a few good moves and my fitness level is still pretty high so I wasn't dying like the others as much. It was really fun right when we finished it started to rain so hard. I went back home and was really tired. Friday was great because it was my first class. I wasn't really nervous at all because I had some experience. It is very difficult to slow down my speech and pronunciate every word perfectly. You see Americans speak very fast and often slur words together so I have to work on that. Over all the day was great and I had enjoyed it very much. I found some things really weird like the tiny skirts on the girl students, whoever created the uniforms are a bit crazy I think. I had about 3 students come into the teachers room and talk to me for a few minutes it was really nice. One guy just came back from the US because he was doing Exchange Student in Indiana. He told me,"I'm so happy to talk to you because if you were not here I would lose my English ability" I told him if he ever wants to chat just come by the office and we can chat. He was really happy about it. So basically I have to create an entire curriculum for the next 12 weeks and I have freedom to do pretty much anything so I will be racking my mind for ideas soon.

Friday night I went to eat with my friends fumiko and her friend. Afterwards I met my foreigner friends in Namba. Ok this is way long but just wanted to say thanks to everybody who reads this even if I don't know you just leave a comment. take care

Thank you to my family for sending that bad ass care package filled with goodies from home.. Damn I miss tostadas, being in Japan makes you really appreciate where you come from, and I am happy to say I am Mexican American, it's who I am! see you :)

At Language Institute

Sorry for no updates lately. I aｍ currently at the Kansai Language Institute for Japanese Learning. I am at a 3 day language training course so it is a lot of work over here. Everything is going good and when I get back to Matsubara I will start school because it starts on Wednesday. I am nervous about it but I will try my best. Well I will try to get online again soon to do some updates. I have a few new pics of my apartment on myspace. www.myspace.com/fpsv See you soon

burning

So today I went walking around with a few friends in Nanba part of Osaka. It was so hot today, about 96 f with about 80 percent humidity. It was ridiculous, and I sweat like crazy. Anyway I shot a few photos of the area so enjoy. On Tuesday I went to a Japanese BBQ, it was good but they really can't barbeque up the standards in Texas... anyway tomorrow and Friday we have orientations all day long AGAIN!!! :( I will be in meetings for a while. Talk to you soon I'm doing ok over here.

Crazy Weekend

Sorry for not talking to a lot of people over the weekend. A bunch of the young teachers invited me on a road trip to Shikoku, and Tokushima Prefecture. We left on Friday night. Keep in mind that only 3 out of the 12 spoke any English, and my Japanese isn't very good. So we left on Friday night, I have no clue whats going on but I jumped into a car and we started to drive. The first thing they wanted to do was make me a Japanese nickname, they ended up calling me Sen-chan... chan means young man and sen comes from the way you pronounce my name in Japanese, Bin-Sen-to. I was with a teacher nicknamed mugi-mugi, two girls hikari and atan. We stopped at the convenience store and stocked up on goodies and beer of course. We went to a ship in Osaka bay, we PARKED our cars inside the boat and we went along inside the boat to our sleeping areas. You see in order to get to Shikoku faster was to take a ferry across Osaka bay. It was so awesome I have never been on anything like that before. So we went on the top deck and laid out a blanket and in typical Japanese orderly fashion we started to introduce ourselves. After about 1 hour we came close to a HUGE bridge that connects an island to the city of Kobe. We passed right under the bridge. Oh by the way the bridge is called the Akashi-Kaiyo Bridge it is the longest suspension bridge in the world to date, as measured by the length of its center span 1,991 metres (6,532 ft). It was amazing to see at night. We slept and in the morning we woke up early went to our cars and began to leave the ship on our way to the new destination. We ended up in Tokushima and we parked and little did I know we were on the river suiting up in wet suits and jumping in a raft. We went white water rafting!! First off I am scared of water and I can't swim very well. They taught us how to rescue each other and how to swim to safety. The good thing was that I really didn't have the time to worry or be scared because you have to just do it. We would stop at some calm areas of the river and everybody would jump out and swim and play it was so awesome. We had lunch at some creek with a tent after 2 hours on the water. Then we set out again, we stopped at this area with some freaking huge cliffs and the guides told us to climb them. We didn't really think of why we were climbing the cliffs but we just were!! By the time I knew it I was at the tallest cliff many people had stopped at the smaller ones but a couple of us just kept going. So I peer off this cliff that had to be at least 30 feet high. Then the guide comes up to us and says, "well now that you're up here let me tell you how to get down!" LOL He tells us to hold our arms in a cross with one hand holding your nose and feet straight. Then he says ok jumP!! One guy goes before me, and then I get up there and he counts!!! ICHI!!!!! NIIIIIIII!!!! SAAAAAANNNN!!!!! (one two three) and I JUST jumped off!! It was freaking crazy and it felt so weird free falling and I landed in the water and I was so happy after I did that. Then we all watched every one taking turns jumping. After we finished we went to an Onsen (hot spring) and hopped in of course bare too!! haha It was really relaxing. We had dinner and played drinking games for the rest of the night. When we drove home I passed through Awaji Island and drove over the exact same bridge that we went under!! I got to see Kobe then we finally got home to Osaka. It was weird because I was glad to be back in my city. Well I will have pics of this soon because I'm an idiot and took my camera with the memory card left in the computer. So my friends will make a cd for me of all the pics. Sorry this is so damn long but it was a great weekend, and to think I've only been here 3 weeks. I'll try to make some calls tomorrow, see you !!! :)

It's all good

So I finally got my money exchanged yesterday, I went to a large bank called Sumitomo in Nanba and it was so easy and fast. I guess the machine the other bank used was crap as I suspected. Today my mission was to find a way to send money home all by myself. I went to my local small branch and used horrendous Japanese to tell them what I wanted to do. Since they are such a small branch they don't do that so they directed me in some really broken English and Japanese to the main branch in Tennoji, which is about 5 stops on the train away. So I went to Tennoji, I was very happy because there is a huge mall outside of Tennoji station called The Hoop. It is really cool and there is even a Louis Vuitton store on the bottom! Anyway I finally found the bank after walking around for about 30 mins, it took a while to do but I finally sent money home without even knowing much Japanese. It was fun and my treat was to go to the Hoop to walk around. So now I'm at home hanging out, in a few hours I will head a couple blocks down the road and have a few drinks at the izakaya with some other foriegner friends of mine. Well I just wanted everyone to know everything is good, this place is quite crazy but things are possible if you try hard haha. :) talk to you soon, thanks for the comments everybody miss you all

A New Bike

So today went pretty well I went to go buy a new bike since the one my predecessor left really REALLY SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway, I bought a nice speed bike with no stupid basket so I am not looking like a granny riding down the street and it is so much faster than the others. The bad thing about today was that I went to go exchange the rest of my US dollars (641) and they were putting my money into a machine to check it and they said that only 340 was valid money, which was complete bullshit!! All my money is real, so now I have only a little bit more Japanese money. I will try to exchange it tomorrow or the next day, if not I will just have to take the risk and send it home in the mail. We'll see... other than that my day was good, I sweat a lot and wow it really drains you. Well I will put some pics up some time this week, talk to you soon :)

vince

My New Home

So I just got back to my apartment right now. I was near Osaka bay with about 300,000 Osaka residents watching the annual summer fireworks show. It was so amazing. It took me about 1 hour to reach the area that is right next to Kobe Japan. I have never seen so many girls in Kimonos. There was traditional Japanese fair food stands EVERYWHERE!!!! I met a bunch of other JET people at the station right in front of the bay. We set up camp and just hung around until the show started. It finished about 9pm and we didn't leave the area until about 11 pm because of all the people. The others went to a night club but I came home because I would have missed my last train home. Of course I could have pulled in infamous all night party thing but I wasn't feeling too keen on that. Overall I had a great day and I was also able to talk to my family. So if you are on MSN messenger let me know cuz we can talk live for free. Here are some pics of the last couple of days be back soon !!!!!!!!!!! I miss home but I have to realize this is my new home for the mean time... it's going to take some getting used to but I think I can manage. Oh yeah and if anyone is coming then let me know when!!!! See you !!! :)

Hello

Sorry everybody for not contacting every one for a long time. The thing is that I have not had a chance to use the internet at all. I have been looking for a internet cafe but i finally was able to use the internet at my school. I am in Matsubara high school now and I have been to my apartment and it is quite small but I think I will like it. I have met two of my teachers. Kishi who is only 26 and she is very nice she helped me get a bank account and my new cell phone today. Also there is Yamada who is also very nice. I just wanted to let every one know Im ok right now. Hopefully soon I will be able to get the internet and put some pics up. Talk to you soon

vince