I'd be lying if I'd say the past two weeks have been a walk in the park. They've not. My life is work, coming home at 9:30pm, having dinner around 10:15pm when my rice is cooked, watching some netflix, having a shower and going to sleep. It's different, but boy I love the teaching aspect of work!
My students are great fun and with every lesson teaching is getting easier. My coworkers are great, even though we usually don't get much of a chance to have a chat because — work. However, today onwards is working days aka no normal lessons and today I have for example found myself singing "Murijaanein kuningas" at work by accident (under my breath, of course).
I'm not going to lie and say that it's been easy to live here. It most certainly hasn't. It's not been as difficult as it was back in 2012, but it's not been easy either. It's been different. At times I do miss being an exchange student, despite all its challenges, you had people to talk to and you got to just go to school. Now? At the moment, I don't really have friends. I have work 12pm-9pm or 11am-8pm tue-sat. However, I do like the fact that I have my own apartment — even if my winter duvet is a joke but thankfully amazon is an option and will help you out.
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| Lunch on Wednesday — some things got better and I had snow crab sushi amongst others for lunch |
While I do sometimes wake up to a new day filled with dread, it's the little things that remind me of why I'm here. Like the restaurant I went to today for lunch — I got given an English menu but spoke Japanese throughout my lunch as per, and the waitresses were just incredibly sweet. When I go to a Starbucks and ask my sandwich to not be heated up, they'll apologize and say that it needs to be, they'll just heat it up a little. I go to a grocery store 15mins before it closes and the cashier doesn't have a face on that tells me "why are you here, we're almost closed?!". I get complimented on my Japanese even when all I say is "yes, it's okay" or something as trivial as that. Japan is not perfect, far from it, but I still love it. It has it's issues, my current situation has its issues, but Japan itself has not let me down. Even if for the past week all I've craved has been non-Japanese food.
I'm thrilled to have two days off, even if being alone on Christmas feels quite weird. I've never been a Christmas person, but now that I'll be alone? I've been getting emotional over 'Tiernapojat' today. Luckily, Toyama has illuminations and a potential fireworks show in the 24th, so that's where I'll be heading. In a way it is quite funny to all of a sudden to live in Japan alone — had someone told me this in May 2012, I would've laughed. Mainly out of despair and need to not be back. Now? I'm happy to be back, I do love Japan even if at times I don't.
In due time there might be a blog post with actual content to it, but this will have to suffice for now. There's only so much you can write on Facebook, right?
All the best,
Kiia
ps,
If we do normally talk on a regular basis or you would like to chat, please don't hesitate to message me! I'm off Sundays and Mondays, and 29th of Dec until the 7th of Jan — I'd love to hear from y'all but especially after work I'm just knackered. oops. I will answer when I can, cannot promise quality of responses and especially a generic "how's it going?" is pretty difficult to answer to — this doesn't mean I don't want to talk to you all. It's just.. life, I guess?
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