Abra In Exile

Hey guys, Selene here! Yes I am not Abra, nor am I even American! I am what Abra has affectionately begun to call an Island Folk - a New Zealander! So it has been quite an education for Abra becoming friends with someone from the small Island nation of NZ, with our own special vocab, and accent! I must say she has mastered it well, and after I gave her a NZ English dictionary for her birthday, we can communicate pretty well! With our numerous phrases with the word piss in them, and you aren't lucky when you luck out. Not to mention that I went to Uni and flatted with flatmates, etc, etc, the list goes on!

So it's been fun living in Japan and it's been great being close to Abra and Meagan, hunting for our boyfriends that seem to go missing all the time! Abra entertaining us with her beautiful singing, I'm sure someone, somewhere thinks she really does have the voice of an angel! She fills us in with fantastic stories of the Walla Walla missionaries, Marcus and Narcissa who missionised (!!?), but got STDs and were killed! The passion with which she tells the Walla Walla story is impressive, and anyone that hasn't heard it, you've really got to hear it! Oh yeah, and coming from the rugby nation which is NZ, to clarify a question that Abra asked: No, rugby players do not strip naked after they have scored a try and run around the field, in any other country or place other than Walla Walla!

So to move on to tonight, the plan was to video us at Japanese bars fratinising with the locals. Unfortunately it was not to be. We instead went and ate, something that is a common theme for most occasions we get together. Tonight was a favourite of Abra's, Nonno, cheesy spaghetti of course! Then we decided to have a few drinks, just because! We have hatched a plan to open up an illegal bar in Mine, a gaijin bar in fact. It will be in an abandoned house that Abra thinks she has found. It will be called SAM's (Selene, Abra, Meagan) Gaijin Bar. It will be BYOB, but it will have a cover charge for maintanence and stuff! Keep an eye out for it! So after belting out a few tunes, Meagan coma-ed, and myself and Abra are still going strong, though it is time to call it quits. We have a big night ahead tomorrow, as Abra has told you. I will verify that the Happy Cock is a fabulous place, I mean where can you get all you can drink for like 6 hours! And the fabulous thing is that it's cheaper for us girls! Do they not know that gaijin woman can drink lots and lots of alcohol!? Okay, no doubt Abra will fill you in on the night, so it's been real (Abra taught me that), catch ya later, Selene!

No matter what a certain devil woman/history professor tried to say about Malia and me last fall, I am not, and have never been, a cheater. Well, at least that was the case up until yesterday. The JET program offers a Japanese correspondance course to all its participants, and at first I was all excited to study Japanese (although I must admit that my enthusiasm may have had a bit more to do with being able to put a second foreign language on my resume and very little to do with wanting to become a more knowledgable person). Thinking I would receive my text book right away, I was disappointed to learn that the course wouldn't start until November. Still motivated to learn, I found a copy of Berlitz's Essential Japanese in my desk at the office. Although it was missing a cover and all the exercises were pretty much already completed, I immediately fell in love with the book. OK, so maybe not, but I actually made some progress as I followed the exploits of a Canadian named Mike Nelson and his Japanese friends in the book's witty dialogues. Yes, I was actually starting to get excited about studying Japanese.

And then, at the end of October, the JET book arrived. With a few tears, I said good bye to Mike and the gang and opened up my new text. To my dismay, there were no fun characters, no intriguing dialogues, no vocabulary lists and I was expected to be able to not just read katakana and hiragana but to write the scripts as well. My handwriting is so bad that writing in English is often a challenge. Therefore, I doubted that I would have much more success with the Japanese characters. But being the trooper that I am, I gave the new book a go. Of course, I had to hide my hiragana practice from my co-workers because I didn't want them to see what I was doing to their beautiful characters and my flashcard making came to an end as their were no handy vocab lists at the end of each lesson. Still, I pushed on. But finally, I hit a wall and just couldn't take it anymore. After completeing 3\4 of the book, I quit. My motivation was gone; I couldn't force myself to do it. I knew my test had to be postmarked by the 28th, but even opening the book required more drive than I possessed. Luckily, Meagan understood were I was coming from, and offered to let me copy the answers from her already completed test. At first, I resisted the temptation. I mean, cheating is bad. And it was not as if the test was even that hard, excpet for all the hiragana parts. I could have forced myself to sit down and do it and probably done reasonably well, even not having finished all the lessons. But I am weak. So I copied the answers from Meagan and spent my non-teaching time yesterday encoding them onto my answer sheet. I am hoping that next month's text book will be so interesting that I will complete all my lessons (and the test) on my own and on time, and that after doing so i will no longer feel so guilty about this past test, but if that doesn't happen I am going back to Berlitz and then I will be able to find out what happened to Keiko and her boyfriend Kenji and if Mr. Watanabe ever recovered from his hangover. It will be like coming home.

On a less scandalous note, this weekend I am planning to head down to Fukuoka to get my booze on, quite possibly at one of my favorite Japanese clubs, the Happy Cock, not to be confused with its sister bar, the Crazy Cock. The best thing about the Happy Cock is that they have this deal where you pay 2000 yen (about $20) and that gets you in and gives you all the drinks you want until 4 am or whenver closing time is. Just imagine the possibilities if you arrive at, say, 10. That's like 6 hours of pre-paid drinking! The past two times I have been, I have stuck to the Moscow Mules, otherwise known as the world's best drink, but Saturday, I am thinking, might be branching out time. I am hoping to resist stopping in at J. Crew sunday morning, but I can't make any promises. Tonight, Selene and Meagan are coming to town and we are thinking about taking Meagan's video camera to all of Mine's little bars and film ourselves getting drunk and fraternizing with the locals. Ever since the taiko performance, we seem to have an unhealthy obsession with making fools of ourselves in front of the Japanese. Should be a fun weekend, and then all the Yamaguchi JETs have a mid-year seminar monday and Tuesday, which should be boring, but won't require me to do much thinking and I won't have to teach until Wednesday.

Happy Thanksgiving!

One of the best things about living in Japan is the number of public holidays I, and everyone else here, get off. I mean, I have been here almost four months and have already had 5 or 6 three day weekends because of public holidays. This past Monday, we had another, and I decided the best way to celebrate Labor Thanksgiving Day (a holiday which in no way resembles our turkey day, by the way) would be to drive to the thriving metropolis of Ube, second biggest city in Yamaguchi, and see a movie. Accompanying me on this adventure in the big city were Selene and one of my students, Keiko. Keiko, the product of a Spanish father and a Japanese mother, lived in Spain all her life until her parents divorced and her mom decided to move back to her native Mine, which Keiko hates and will be ditching for boarding school or her beloved Spain in April. She is fluent in Spanish and English, thanks to her time at a British school, but can only speak Japanese, not read it. In fact, we know about the same number of kanji--like 5!
Anyway, after paying about $15 (I used my Whitman id card to get a discount) to see Phonebooth, a movie that came out months ago in the U.S. and that I would not have seen if I had had an option other than Spy Kids 3 (which would have been kind of cool actually as you got to watch it through 3D glasses, something I have sadly never gotten to do), Keiko and I got down to doing one of the things I like best in this world, along with eating mashed potatoes and discussing the career of Johnny Stockton. Yes, we gossiped. She filled me in on which teachers were popular with the students and which girls were planning to ditch high school and get married, and I let her know all about the two girls who had run away to Nagato with an older "bad" boy and how the prinicpal went up there to track them down and the fight between two boys the ended with one in the hospital. I really enjoyed talking to a Japanese student who, because of her upbringing in another country, also has trouble understanding just what is going on in these Japanese schools. For example, the students seem to have a completely bizarre sense of humor. Apparently, the pronuniation of the world "people" is the funniest thing they have ever heard. I made the mistake of using it one day in front of a rather rowdy class, and the kids were practically falling off their chairs, laughing so hard. But then my friend Meagan was telling me about how she attended an all school sex ed class at one of her junior highs last week and there was no response whatsoever after the guest speaker told the entire school that their principal masturbated a lot when he was a kid. Not a single snicker, not one giggle. Thinking she must of misunderstood the speaker as no one was reacting to her statement, she asked the teacher sitting next to her if it had just been announced that the principal masturbated. "Oh yes," said the teacher. "But only when he was younger." Okay. That is funny. That is a lot funnier than the word "people". Everyone thinks masturbation is funny. If I had been told that, say, Mr. Plato, the beloved ex-principal of Cleveland High School had been quite the masturbater when he was younger, I would have never stopped laughing. Haha. I am laughing right now, just thinking about it.
Keiko and I also discussed the discipline problem at her school, which is the biggest junior high in Mine, and also where, on my first visit, I was sexually harrased by three 15 year old girls who tried to molest me as I ate my lunch in the teachers room. Last week, while teaching the first graders how to order "cheesubuhguhs" at a fast food restaurant, I happened to glance up and see a girl, wearing a very short skirt, climb out of the window of another classroom and and run along the balcony before climbing in another window and disappearing. Seconds later, a teacher appeared at the first window, looked out at the balcony, shook his head and walked away. Later that afternoon, the escape artist reappeared in my class. Stalking into the room in the middle of the lesson, glaring at all the other students and shouting at the teacher, the girl flung herself into her chair, crumpled up the worksheet we were doing and wrapped herself in the curtain. Minutes later, I watched in shock as she climbed out the window (which she just happened to be seated next to), waving goodbye to her fellow students and smirking in the direction of the teacher, who saw all this but said nothing. Later, the girl--who I recognized as one of my sexual harrasers and therefore determined was probably coming back to stare at me and perhaps grope me as well--returned to class via the same window, and started ripping worksheets and other papers to shreds. She then made an origami box, in which she placed all the shredded paper scraps, and then presented it to the teacher and me at the end of class (right before she screamed that I was pretty and ran giggling from the classroom, might I add). And still the teacher did nothing. Keiko told me this same girl once brought peanuts to class--a big no-no in Japan-- and proceeded to spend the whole class throwing them at the English teacher and nothing was done. Sometimes, after watching these students humiliate and disrespect their teachers, who are quite obviously scared of some of them, I wonder what's so bad about corporal punishment anyway? Wel, maybe not. Anyway, it would be a lie to say that window girl's antics weren't entertaining, although I have no idea how the students who actually so want to learn, manage to so in some of these classrooms.
OK. Time to study Japanese. Maybe.

I usually digest food pretty quickly. Like I can eat three pieces of fried chicken, a ton of mashed potatoes, salad, bread and dessert, and a couple of hours later be starving again and suddenly find myself standing in the kitchen with another chicken breast in one hand and a bowl of ice cream in the other. There is no doubt that my stomach can hold more than that of the average 23 year old girl. However, after last night's Thanksgiving feast in Shimonoseki, I don't even want to think about mashed potatoes or stuffing again for a long, long time. 11 of us met at my friends Jo and Jocelyn's apartment building to celebrate my favorite holiday, some for the first time. Through various "connections" at the US Marine base in Iwakuni, Jo and Jocelyn were able to get two of the marines to deliver a turkey to Shimonoseki, which we cut in half so it would fit in the Japanese ovens, which are actually microwaves. We also managed between us to come through with two pumpkin pies, a huge salad, sweet potatoes, yorkshire puddings, Stove Top stuffing, apple crisp and 2 pavlovas. I, of course, made the mashed potatoes. Potatoes here are typically smaller than those in the homeland and come in bags of three or four. Thinking that when I make myself potatoes, I usually use a full bag, I decided that 11 people would probably require like 7 or 8 bags. I forgot, however, that nothing I do in terms of eating mashed potatoes could be considered normal, and after peeling and cutting 6 bags worth of potatoes, everyone told me I was crazy and they couldn't stomach seeing me put any more potatoes in the pot. I tried to argue, but in the end they were right. We ended up with enough potatoes to feed at least 20 people comfortably, and this was with me sneaking at least a serving and a half from the bowl before the meal even began.

After everyone said what they were thankful for this year--everything from American ovens and having good friends in Japan to tampons and socks were praised (I am not sure Jo from England really understood the point of Thanksgiving as she looked really puzzled when we told her that typically neither tampons nor socks are mentioned at Thanksgiving dinner)--we ate... and ate...and ate. After an hour or so of feasting, all plans to go out were abandoned as people changed into elastic waisted pants or loosened belts. Although I fixed myself a plate of leftovers to eat today, I am not sure that is going to be necessary as the thought of eating now, 18 hours after the feast began, makes me want to puke. I take this as a sign that my first Thanksgiving away from the family was a very successful event.

In other news, I had hoped to spend Friday night in my fleece suit, watching movies and daydreaming about the turkey eating to come. But when Meagan called from a bar where she was drunk and boozing with her coworkers and told me I had to come, I realized that my fleece suit could probably use a good airing out and headed to Shuho. A quite trashed Meagan met me at the door, where she ushered me inside and introduced me to her coworkers--4 middle aged men, 2 friendly Japanese girls about our age, 2 men wearing matching light blue jumpsuits, 1 man from our taiko group and a hooker. I suppose the hooker wasn't exactly a coworker, but she was seated with the group and one of the middle aged men had his hand up her skirt, so she seemed to belong with everyone just as much as I did. I actually thought at one point that her male companion for the night might be interested in me as well as he kept shouting at me "How much? How much?" but I think in the end he was just asking my age, which makes me feel kind of bad for indignantly announcing to the table that I was not for sale and glaring at all males present. Oh well. I remained relatively sober throughout the night, just in case I needed to defend myself from more offers to purchase my services.

Time for me to go for a run before heading out for the night. No school Monday, so the girls and I are having a movie night in Shuho. I guess we are making tacos, but I can't say for sure that I will be able to eat them. Poor full Abra.

After reading all about the adventures of Namsie and Jerrie on their personal live journals, I have finally decided that the time has come for me, Abra Cooper, to take my first baby steps toward joining them on the official list of internet nerds. I, too, am having a wonderful time and enjoying amazing adventures in Japan. Namsie is not the only one who has done battle with the deadly centipedes, thought of macaroni and cheese as one of the world's greatest delicacies or wondered where her husband might be. I have done these things too! And it is time everyone knew about it.


Although I am having a great time here in my new homeland, I still manage to find something to whine about every week. I am, after all, a masterful whiner. Currently, my major problem with Japan has to do with the lack of central heating and the fact that I see no reason for this lack. I mean, the Japanese government manages to pay millions of dollars to hire foreigners to come and "teach" English to the little kiddies every year, but they can't seem to find the money to heat their schools? I pondered this today as I sat in the teacher's room at one of my junior highs. In fact, I stayed in that room and pondered hours after I could have gone home because the room was the actually heated and I knew I was probably better off there than in my little apartment. A little over a month ago, when the first chill began to set in, I automatically found myself searching for the thermostat before I realized that, hey, I am in Japan and had better talk to my office about the heating alternatives that must exist somewhere in my new home. So one afternoon, two of the women from my office accompanied me to my apartment with the purpose of showing my how to stay warm in Japan. Thinking I must have some giant gas-fueled heating device hidden somewhere in the depths of my closet, I was surprised when all of the sudden the women were leaving, telling me that my heated table was my "number one option" for surviving my first Mine winter. Right.

Because I believe that it might be a little uncomfortable to spend three months huddled under a small table, I have been very active in the pursuit of alternative ways to keep from freezing to death. The most promising at the moment appears to be my new fleece suit that I picked up at Fugi, my grocery store, for approximately $10 U.S. Featuring white stripes on both the pant legs and sleeves, and perhaps about 5 sizes too big, my fleece suit is my current favorite wardrobe item. It keeps me so warm, it is amazing. And when I add my purple fleece socks, not only do I look fabulous, but I also forget all about my beoved central heating back home. Well, almost. I wish I had had the foresight to pick up two of these magic suits while I had the chance (the blue with red stripes was really quite cute as well), because I fear the day when my fleece suit must be washed and I have to make do with something less than adequate. I am hoping this won't happen until sometime in February. So I guess if I have to freeze this winter, at least I will be doing it in the most comfortable lounge wear I have ever owned.