Give me a Sign
There are many unexplainable phenomenom in this world. Why, for example, do more people use Visa than any other credit card? Well, that isn't even unexplainable. Unexplainable has to be this last week, culminating on Thursday. I really don't have the answers for this one.
First of all, about a week ago, my Japanese English teacher nervously came up to me and showed me a piece of paper. She started saying something about recontracting. I had been forewarned about this by other people on the JET programme. For some reason, Japanese schools like to have a tenative schedule for about... the next 10 years. If a JET wants to stay on for a 2nd year, they have the option to resign... by the beginning of February. This particular piece of paper had a different deadline: the 20th of October. I have been in Japan for two months, teaching here for even less, and they are asking me to commit to a second year? So when she showed me this paper, I broke the awkwardness by laughing, "I know what this is about"... "Oh good" she said "So you're staying for a 2nd year!"... They just don't get it sometimes. Just to clear all this up, being the indecisive person I am, I will probably wait until the beginning of February to decide... by a coin toss.
Earlier this week, I had a memo left somewhere in the middle of the daily stack of papers. This one was an invite to an "Enkai", which if you looked it up in a dictionary, would be "banquet". Banquet is much too a classy word for what an Enkai is. A banquet scene makes me think of a marble floored hall, with tables covered in silk tablecloths and polished silverware. There are waiters with clean white towels draped over their forearm, all the ladies are wearing gloves and hats, and there is a string quartet playing quietly in the corner. An Enkai is basically a combination of a traditional Japanese dinner, and a NZ style piss-up. The mysterious part was that the invite was from the Board of Education, it was at a skifield resort, and it was for a thursday night- an overnight enkai. Surely they knew we had classes to pretend to teach at on Friday morning...
The monthly meeting for the 3 local ALT's at the Board of Education, was mysteriously moved ahead to October 19th- the same day as the Enkai.
The monthly meeting was different to other months. This time, we went to the BOE chief's office. This is a very busy man. He apparently never takes the time to meet with people unless there are local news crews around. (This is how I got on TV the first week of being here) The whole scenario seemed very unsubtle. The meeting was one of the strangest experiences in my life. The guy spent about half an hour explaining the weather patterns in this area of the world, in Japanese. He filled a classroom-sized whiteboard with diagrams. It was a very detailed explanation as to why the west coast of Japan is very snowy, while the east is very dry. It was very interesting, but I was just waiting for him to say, "ok, now sign here, here...and here". It never came.
We then had less than 2 hours to go home and get ready for this enkai. A mini bus taxi to the skifield (costing over $100US), and the banquet was commenced. I had a seat next to the Chief himself. He added a few extra details about the weather patterns, but I don't remember ever signing anything. I couldn't have, I was too busy eating. My word. There was so much quality food, but no-one was eating.
In all, it was a very good quality night. After the banquet finished, we descended the mountain, and a few guys from the BOE took us to some bars to drink some more. I just love the fact that employees at the Board of Education, ensured that we teachers got very drunk, on a Thursday night.
After a morning of teaching, I have recovered from my hangover, and yet, none of this is making any sense. All I know is that today is the 20th, and I haven't signed anything...
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