SOY sauce!!!

kikkoman soy sauce.

ever heard of it?

i`d hope so. because that`s a famous brand of soy sauce. and guess what? i`m basically next-door-neighbors with the kikkoman soy sauce factory. hahaha! saddest claim to fame ever. buuuut, i`ll take it.

so, hello from noda-shi, chiba-ken! i currently live in a small apartment in a very nice, quiet town. it`s really quite lovely here. the only problem is...it`s very cold! quite a bit colder than tokyo! i was surprised by that...i figured it would be the same. but i`m waaaaay colder here than i ever was in tokyo. maybe it`s psychological, i don`t know. could i have thought myself into goosebumps and chattering teeth? possible. eh. maybe.

let me tell you how i came about living here. so, remember the day i came here? the day i came here was the day i had to drag my weight in baggage across tokyo, watch my internship coordinator as he dragged my weight in baggage across tokyo and was thus humiliated, and the day i received some training in a form that freaked me out and made me not want to teach anymore. so before i even left for my new home, i was pretty stinking frazzled.

i was taken to noda-shi by a sweet little japanese man that is a salesperson for the company i work for. his english is fantastic, though of course, there are a couple malapropisms here and here. i love it. plus you can tell that he`s working on phrases he`s learning. he seems so proud to deliver them. and then he smiles and says, "i just learned that one." haha, it`s the best. plus he starts most of his sentences by saying, "it`s like this..." and it`s great. well, this sweet man took one of my bags (again, humiliating me) and we took many trains to get to nodashi. actually, we only took three, really. and one was a "rapid" train that went faster than normal trains!! that was pretty neat. except i would absolutely love to go ride a bullet train, or shinkansen...but this was a decent substitute. you could tell we were getting farther and farther away from tokyo, because the train announcements no longer had english counterparts. they were delivered in japanese and that is all. that made me nervous. getting off on the wrong train stop is scary business!! (or so i have read). but, we made it to our stop, the entire trip taking a little over an hour and costing a little too much ￥。　　so then we got off the train and tried to find my apartment. that wasn`t fun, because i was so tired of carrying so much baggage and watching poor little man carry my baggage, and it was FREEZING. so naturally, while trying to find the right apartment, we got lost. it took us about fifteen minutes before we could find the right one. what i really wanted to do was plop down and take a nap, but no, i couldn`t do that either. japanese man and i had to fill out a checklist that had to be turned in, like whether or not everything worked correctly. so that took about another hour, because dear little man couldn`t figure out why the gas stove wouldn`t light. about a million tries, 10 minutes, and a phone call to the office later, we found out that they weren`t gas stoves at all, but electric ones. doh! but everything was figured out, the internet was set up, and everything was good to go. as soon as he left my apartment, i set up my futon and took a nap.

the next morning, i met dear little japanese man at the train station so he could show me where the school was that i would be working at. so we went to the school where i met the principal and the deputy principal in the principal`s office. they spoke about 3 words of english between them. so dear little man handed principal and deputy my resume with my picture on it and they all looked at it and discussed it for a few minutes. i just sat there smiling, looking clueless all the while. then they spoke a few words to dear japanese man and went into another room that was attached to the principal`s office. dear japanese man turned to me and said, "liz-san, it`s like this. the teachers are having a meeting in there, and you are going to introduce yourself to them. please use japanese." oh, okay. wait...what??? but wait a minute, i`ve been practicing an english introduction, complete with slow, easy sentences and hand gestures!! i felt like chris farley in that one skit.."i don`t speak japanese!!" however, i walked into the teacher`s room and i did my best. and my best basically translated to this: "good morning. im liz. i come from america. utah. i love japan. i like music. nice to meet you." it was pretty bad. so then dear japanese man did more talking and we left, with deputy principal escorting us to the door. we bowed to each other and he smiled really big and said, "good speech." i love that deputy principal.

after that, dear japanese man and i left for the noda city hall, where i had to apply for a "gaijin card", or basically gain license for me, an alien, to live in a japanese city. kind of odd, yes, but i`d like to be a law-abiding citizen, so okay. there i also met members of the board of education, who also received a copy of my resume. dear japanese man did all the talking, and once again, i sat there with a big smile on my face, clueless.

after receiving the paper version of my gaijin card and receiving all sorts of pamphlets and things about living in noda, dear japanese man and i headed to the nearby post office to set up a bank account. yeah, it`s not like the post office back home. dear japanese man and i were there FOREVER. honestly, we must have been there over an hour. we filled everything out and had to wait our turn and found out we did it wrong, so we had to do it again and then wait our turn and then i didn`t have all the right documents, and had to find out how to deal with that...that`s all i caught, anyway. i couldn`t understand exactly what was going on. but i kept dozing off in the waiting area and that was embarrassing. after that long and excruciating period, we headed to a shopping center to buy the correct garbage bags. my garbage has to be separated into three different types: combustible, non-combustible, and recycle. apparently garbage is a pretty big deal over here. like, i might get fined if it isn`t correctly separated in the right bags. i also have to write my name on my garbage bags. weird.

and finally, i was able to return home to prepare for my first day of school the following day.

now, i have to go to the convenience store to buy me some breakfast for tomorrow, before i forget. more later.