Not Just Ninjas

The bloom is definitely off the rose today. For some reason, I was less lucky regarding content in my orientation sessions. We attended some team teaching seminars, but they just didn’t strike home or utilize time well. In the afternoon, I attended seminars on motivating your students and the logistics of one’s first month in Japan, but they contain mostly redundant information from other lectures.

The driving lecture was definately useful. Chris and I are thinking about getting a car in Noshiro so that we have more freedom to explore the area. Cars here are crazy cheap to buy, and crazy expensive to maintain. Cars are separated into white plate (deluxe) and yellow plate (economy), which affects insurance and shaken rates.

Behold the Shaken. This is a car maintenance tax that must be paid every two years, and constitutes the major expense for your car. One may buy a used car for $400, and find a hefty $2,000 shaken to pay later. Country wide tolls are also particularly fierce… I think the cost for us to drive to Tokyo is $70 in tolls alone. AND… I was told yesterday that there is no such thing as 0% liability, so if someone comes out of nowhere and hits you, you will still be responsible for paying something like 30% of the accident costs. Yikes. You will also be fined for talking on your cell phone while driving (huzzah! I totally get behind this one). The Japanese also back into all of their parking spots. One returning JET told me that she just pulls in straight when parking to watch everyone around her freak out in incredulity.

My final meeting of the day was with other people going to my prefecture. The presenters said something about being famous for their “unintelligible dialect” (ha ha… what?) and I started to freak out again… I am super nervous about the impending trip to my new home tomorrow. Chris and I will part ways again, as I take the plane and he tries to make it there by bullet train. I think Chris and I will be the only foreigners in town for awhile, as my predecessor is leaving immediately, and the returning JET from England who’s going to show us the ropes is on holiday for the next two weeks. There’s one other newbie, but I think he shows up in a week or so.

Breathe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 at 6:32 am and is filed under Culture Shock, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.