The first adventures of Japan

So here's the view from my classroom, you can't tell but its the centre of Kagoshima and an amazing place, tons of restaurants, stores, bars and clubs all right beside my work. So really i fluked out with placement.

and here's a picture of "sticky poo" which i bought as a present for my manager at the 100 Yen shop (1 dollar). it says "MYSTERIOUSLY TOUCHABLE CUTE TOY" hahahahahah! the 100 Yen shop is cheap and therefore a great place to find "engrish" (badly translated English - i bought a mask called "Narcissistic Blue" for example which was completely random)

And a sign for a bar called "Crack". There's also a bar called "Fuck". hahahah i'm not even kidding, ill get a picture of it soon.

Here's two of my coworkers leading me down an alley in the plaza where we love to go to bars and restaurants like i mentioned. This was my first weekend here.
I can't take pictures for crap but trust me its a veryyyy cool alley. Thus why i tried to take a picture!
THE FIRST REAL ADVENTURE was bike riding around the Mighty Sakurajima (my volcano seen here). The first pic is from the ferry, the second much closer. Unfortunately the weather sucked and you can't see how mighty and awesome it really is. note the clouds of smokeeee or just normal clouds running into it!!


Look at how friggin beautiful it is tho! and theres a small city that lives at the base of the volcano (those crazy buggers).


I look bad in this pic because we bike rode 36KM around the volcano, and the first 12 KM i did on a bike with flat tires!


Check this out yo, beautiful



Here's a nice graveyard i saw


and this is the top of a Shrine that was buried in ash after the volcano erupted in 1914. It covered the island with a few meters of ash as you can see...crazy no? But don't worry about me, i'm across a very large bay from the Volcano incase it erupted, and they have systems to tell when its going to erupt and evacuation plans if necessary. Its all very safe apparently my elderly students tell me


And this is a lava path to guide the lava away from the villages. I dont know how well it would work haha. underneath this line is a cool fishing village i saw.

and a cool island:

And me in someones cool garden - if you look, see that shell? that's like an old WWII shell, so we figure the owner of the garden is some old WWII nazi japanese guy! eeeeeee. Otherwise why would you ruin your beautiful garden with a random old weapon???

and lastly a cool rock garden! after bike riding for 36KM, we were exhausted, and went to an onsen. An onsen is a hot spring - basically a pool that is heated by the natural heat from the earth (in this case volcanic heat). It was amazing, and my first time getting completely nude and walking around with old nude Japanese men.

It used to be that if you had tattoos you weren't allowed in the onsen because it showed you were a Yakuza. However times are changing and most onsens don't mind anymore cause of the growing popularity of tatoos - plus, i'm a stupid gaijin (foreigner) and obviously am NOT yakuza. So i had no problems. So that was my trip to Sakurajima!

Arriving in Japan

So here you go, some Japan pictures! First off: look at how much friggin food they give you on Japan Airlines, holy crap. They fed me like 3 times, and gave me free booze whenever i wanted. I had 3 beers and 2 plum wines! Woohooooo. And the beers were huge compared to what u get on NA flights! jeez! and each Seat had a small TV monitor and you got to choose what movies u wanted to watch! i watched Iron Man and Indiana Jones, and a Jackie chan movie i forget the name of.

And theres Japan when we were over it. Some small town or something i gues.
and whats a better first Japanese picture than...a friggin vending machine in the airport. Honestly theres a vending machine on every corner, its not a lie. They're really there.

Here's me at Narita airport, exhausted cause its 3AM vancouver time, after a 10 hour flight. Thats yumi! my friend who i met at York last year on student exchange who moved back to Tokyo.
And then i had a 2 hour wait before a 2 hour flight to Fukuoka, where I drank with a boss of mine from Head office (i didn't know it at the time and was probably a bit too casual but he seemed to like me, he was too casual himself!) and a few other teachers.

Here's my first glance at urban japan. Fukuoka random street. I should have taken a pic of a way better area...


There's me having a few drinks at 6AM Vancouver time before i finally went to my apartment for the night and crashed and went to sleep after watching some crazy Japanese TV. The other picture is a giant Alien replica made out of scrap metal. yep.


More pics of Fukuoka, awesome city really. Size of Toronto in population, not so sure about actual land mass...anyway, those are some pictures of what one of my bosses called the "smallest protest he's ever seen", done by the Japanese civil labour union or something, consisting of like 6 people with a Police escort. amazing. bwahha

Then i went on a 4 hour bus ride to my city Kagoshima! the bus ride had amazing scenery but you can't tell when its a rainy day and your camera is inside a bus with dirty windows:


Then i arrived in Kagoshima to find two teachers waiting for me at the bus station, who drove me to my apartment, and then we promptly went out for drinks with some of the other teachers! 2 from California, two Brits, and one New Zealander. All are damn swell :-D


That's it for my arrival in Japan, stay tuned for lots of drinking with coworkers, seeing the great volcano Sakurajima, climbing Mount Kaimon, and the long awaited pictures of my tiny apartment! woohooooo! And much more! Does anyone care? I don't care if you care! Im gonna post them anyway!

Leaving Vancouver

Training was a blast and all the teachers got along great, our trainers loved us so we went out for drinks together on the last night, they're sweethearts and i miss them dearly! The one in the pink is actually the one who interviewed me in Toronto and offered me the job, the one on the far right who's NOT wearing pink is the other trainer who was the biggest sweetheart and laughed hysterically constantly, despite the fact no one said anything funny.

:-D, this is all the teachers minus Phil who was out grabbing dinner.

Phil was probably the one i got the closest to as we went out a few times on the town while everyone else preferred to stay at the hotel. He's in the next pic:


Honestly I've taken so many damn photos but I don't really know which to put up so i just am picking some random "important" ones.

Us at the airport waiting for our 10 hour flight to Narita (Tokyo).

Next blog...finally i'm in Japan!!!!

Partying in Vancouver

So i'm too lazy to recap lots of stories so i'll just let the pictures do the talking! basically i met tons of great people in Vancouver, lots of Aussies, a couple New Zealanders, a German who we called Hans even though his name was Kristoff, some Brits, the Austrians,

so it was a potpourri of people from around the world! We ate lots of cheap, CHEAP pizza, went to the arcade alot, and spent lots of time enjoying the nightlife by sitting on a patio of the Roxy Burger bar, which was awesome cause its a patio on the main downtown street in Vancouver. So we played games like Binary, lets-see-how-many-times-the-same-homeless-guy-asks-us-for-change-after-forgetting-he-did-already-5-seconds-ago, Watch Oliver Hit on The Bartender Unsuccessfully, and etc. So all in good fun.

The one story i'd like to tell was an amazing one - me and Phil (another language teacher) went out with an Aussie (Michael) and Hans the German. Hans got picked up by a 40 something year old American broad who got into a screaming match with me and Phil because she doesn't like Sarah Palin.

I don't like Sarah Palin either - but this woman is a hardcore rightwing Republican who thinks no woman is fit for any authority figure type job. We then convinced her to admit she believed Obama was a terrorist, which she did. Anyway we were just pulling her chain and having fun with her but man did she hate us socialist canadian bastards hahah. she was also MARRIED trying to pick Hans up.

Either way she was retardedly drunk, and her and her friend John (another incredibly racist and sexist conservative but a sweet gentleman ironically) actually ended up leaving the bar STIFFING HANS WITH THE BILL (phil and I had left long before cause we had training the next morning). Hans refused to pay the bartenders and they threatened to call the cops so he said "fine call the cops but im not paying it, i didn't drink it".

So the cops came and Hans talked to the cops but nothing really happened...the cops took his info and said he had to pay the bar, Hans said no, and the cop said he'd be back to arrest him in a few days if he still hadn't paid. The cop never came back. Hans can tell you the story and its much funnier when it tells it...

Here be some pix

the one on the left is the famous Hans, in the left pic theres two new zealanders who were in my hostel room (dave and shaun). in the pic on the right, my beloved aussie brethren Shane and Olliver. Michael is not in the pic cause hes not cool enough.

The pic isn't very good but its of me on a cop car pretending to get arrested, but the police themselves wouldn't join in grrr. we took pix of them anyway (look below) cause they loved us! And shane acting like afool ho ho ho


this is our boyband pose picture, where we all look off into different directions. Originally i had my back to the camera, and now i think i should have stayed that way.

More Vansterdam fun

This is dave gomes taking a pic of me drunk as a skunk at his place, after i was chased by a homeless guy trying to sell me fake ganj (honestly, and i wasn't trying to buy either, it was really random.) Vancouvers one huge drawback is the HUGE amount of homeless people, and they ALL harass you. every single damn one has a story to get your change:

-spoon man, me and the aussies favourite, who plays the spoons and we always holler at him to come over

-the guy who says 'can you spare a hundred?' then says "cents" after youre like wtf

-the guy who says he'll climb a pole for some change

-the guy who says "my parents were killed by ninjas, and i need money for kung fu lessons to avenge them

-the hobo artist, who drew a pic of our table without our permission then was really upset when we didn't have $5 to give him for it:
There's a million more hobos too.
Forgive my stupid pose but i was falling backwards honestly! this is in a Chinese garden or something in Vancouver. I thought it was very beautiful.


Anyway here's the rest of the pix from my day with Gomes and his buddy Chris, great guys.

Dave Gomes is an emo girls wet dream as you can tell. Keep staring off into the distance, babe.

And hurray for frisbee!!!
Then me and Chris went to see the famous CCHQ and partied that night, but no real pix from there :-Phere's CCHQ