The Junior High School

I met the Junior High School head teacher today at one of the schools I'll be teaching at.  It's a middle-sized school with four or five hundred students - all of whom attend after school clubs of some kind.  It turns out that these clubs are primarily sporting, but run the gamut through to traditional Japanese particulars, such as the tea ceremony.

Tomorrow I'm picking up my immigration card thing, i.e a visa (hopefully).  I've a decision to make: should it be a multiple entry (6,000 yen) a single re-entry (3,000 yen) or no leaving permitted.  I'm probably going to choose the single re-entry, in case there's a chance to go somewhere.

It's pretty damned cold here right now.  The Japanese don't believe in insulation, so you have to heat the room constantly.  If you turn the heater off, it becomes cold immediately.  This will (I assume) lead to enormous heating bills.  I am, therefore, wearing a dozen layers instead of turning the heating on.  I'm one stop short of a woolly hat.

There's no gym here (that I've found yet) so I'm extremely worried about what I'm going to do for fitness.  There's a gym half an hour by train (the trains are worryingly intermittent at the moment, due to the earthquakes) but it ends up being an all-day affair just to get there if I use the trains.  Instead, I'll use the new bike they furnished me with (an old granny bike, with a basket on the front and everything) and cycle.  I think it will end up being about 45 minutes each way, but the benefit is that I won't have to spend half an hour on the treadmill each time I visit, which will cut the gym-time down significantly.

All my boxes arrived from Korea in one piece - except the computer.  The CPU cooler fell off, twice.  Don't use stock Intel coolers on I7 2600k cpu's, they're rubbish.  I'm not convinced it actually on properly now, but short of putting a hole through the motherboard, it's as fastened as it will ever be.

The shortages of fruit juices and milks is mostly alleviated.  There are still a few bare patches in the aisles, but I expect those to be filled within the next week or so.  We're still having earthquakes every day, usually a few.  There's been one day without any.  Most are tame, with a couple of shakers thrown in for good measure.

Someone requested more pictures, so here's the first hit when you type 'iwafune,' (the tiny town where I live) into google.

This isn't actually where I live, it's a different iwafune (in Kyoto.)  It looks nice though.

My iwafune looks nothing like this.