Picture post!

First of all, I can never see what's what before I upload, so I'm just throwing up a bunch of photos and then talking about them. Once I get the Internet hookup at my apartment, I should be able to keep up better with my photos.



Okay these first four pics are of an Aikido master who gave a demonstration my first week.
Here's my wonderful niece and nephews hamming it up in front of the camera.




These are some pics from training week at a ramen shop. Those in attendance? Chris, Kurt, Kenny, Kevin, Rich, and Matt R. An awsome night of big bowls of ramen and huge bottles of biru!




Here's som pics from the night we went out after the last day of training - lots of eating and drinking and singing and mic hogging happened.

Two random pictures of my apartment in Utsunomiya - what I cook on and what I bathe and shower in - you can guess which is which.
The poster we made at the end of our training week.
My washing machine and sink and vanity in Utsunomiya.
My training group.
Kevin sensei having a zen moment.








The rest are pics from nights out, pachinko parlours and walking with my brother, sister-in-law, and their kids through the Shinjuku and Shibuya areas of this HUGE city. I know this isn't too much of a commentary, but I'm getting sleepy.

Utsunomiya!

Well, I:m here. I:m sitting at the international center typing this thing on a keyboard that randomly switches to kanji and has shift characters all in different places, but I:m not overly concerned with correcting them, so just know that the colon is an apostrophe and the plus sign is a colon. Well, I have had a fairly busy week, but am glad that I have these nice breaks in my schedule. I generally get to work at around 12+30 and then prepare for my 1pm class. then I have like 2 or three hours to kill before my evening classes. The teacher who lived in the apartment before me was loaned a bike by the teacher that lived there before him, so I get to use it until May when the teacher who owns the bike comes back. This means that if I want, I can tool on home and relax a bit - it:s like a 5-10 minute bike ride home.

How:s teaching here? Very structured, which may sound boring, but it actually enables me to prepare relatively quickly - once I get the structures down, I know things will sail along swimmingly. Yesterday, I taught three classes and a private lesson - this all went well and the students are super eager to learn. I:m also learning to do basic things like,
-shop in a grocery store where I can:t read a thing
-change sink trap filters
-hang out laundry on my balcony (I have a washer but no dryer)
-wear layers to bed so I don:t freeze at night
-operate a kerosene heater
-point at things rather than use my phrase book to be understood
-make a meal without salt+ this one deserves some explanation+ the night after I went grocery stopping at the aptly named 24 hour store called *Trial* (those were quotation marks), I decided to make pasta. I:d settled in, made some tea, heated my apartment and sauteed the onions and garlic in olive oil. I started adding tomatoes and basil and bay leaves when I realized I:d forgotten to buy salt. I didn:t want to walk (this was before I was given the bike) to *Trial* so I decided to figure something out. I first squirted some butter from a tube onto the tomatoes hoping some of the salt would help season it. I tasted it and it was no good. Then I remembered that I had some ritz crackers and cheese that had been left by the last teacher, so after shaking the plastic wrapper to get the salt out and then scraping the surface of the cracker, I ended up crumbling three ritz cheezy crackers into the tomato sauce. Then I sat down to tuck in. It wasn:t salty enough, and I don:t recommend adding ritz to tomato sauce - it becomes this weird salmony colored monstrosity that ends up only enhancing the blandness of your unsalty meal.

Today, I teach 4 classes and tomorrow (Saturday)6! Then they:re planning a party for me on Saturday night which will include karaoke. If I ever get internet hookup in my apartment, I:ll publish a picture post.

My New Address

Hey guys, if you want to drop me a line sometime, here's my new address:

Matthew Christensen
Mettsu Sakura #202
2-2-35 Sakura
Utsunomiya, Tochigi 320-0043
JAPAN

If, however, you want to send something larger - say, something more, oh, I don't know, care-package size (hint, hint), please send it to my school address as I can only receive packages at home if I am at home. Here's the address:

Attn: Matthew Christensen
AEON Utsunomiya
Utsunomiya NF Bldg. 5F
2-1-1 Baba-dori
Utsunomiya-shi, Tochigi-ken
JAPAN 320-0026

Just taught another class today - this one a bit harder because the structure was different from the first, but still a lot of fun. One of my students found out I played the violin, and asked me to join his community orchestra. Say hello to everyone, and keep me informed as to what's happening in your neck of the woods.

My apartment

A quick aside about work: This is the third day of being paid hourly to do very little work - we aren't taking calls this week so all I can do is have mini training sessions, write mock sites, and conduct mock interviews. I think I'll be ready to hit the ground running on Monday when I have my first two calls.

Last night, after looking at Jess's blog, I decided to try my hand at making a short video clip of my apartment so I could post it on my blog today. Some of you have seen my new apartment, but maybe I can tempt more Kato visitors up to Cathedral Hill to visit me in my studio. So here's the quick tour:



You like? You like?

YOU think of a title - my brain won't work.

I'm sitting at my desk at my new job listening in (well, not quite yet, but soon) to an interview with a law firm that one of my new work friends - A.M. - is going to be conducting. I have my own little cube - complete with Ice Bat, an ergonomically correct chair and keyboard surface - which I have no idea how to adjust, and my water bottle - to insure that I will pee every hour on the hour. That last statement reminds me of a conversation I was party to yesterday.

I was getting my keys to my new apartment - which is awesome, by the way - and walking down the halls with the caretaker when along came an old, crusty (lots of dead skin flakes trapped in spots around his stubbly jaw line) resident whom I'd remembered from the last time I lived there (SIDE NOTE - he'd received the package MSU sent me with all of my pre-TA materials the summer before I started teaching, but kept it in his little twerpy, stinky apartment. He kept coming up to my door to see if I was home, but as he never left a note stating that he had a package for me, I had no idea the books were there. He finally happened to come up at a time when I was home (two weeks after they'd arrived)).

Crusty is walking down and the caretaker asks how he's doing. He promptly goes off on a story about his prostate and how he's got this damn dribbling problem. Then caretaker says, "I know EXACTLY what you're talking about. That dribbling gives me a hell of a time." Is this what I have to look forward to? Dribbling?