My First Enkai and Karaoke

I started school at the beginning of September, but for the first couple of weeks we had the Sports Festival. So I didn't really do any work. I just lounged around, helped to build tents, broke a tent, learned a new dance from the students and got sunburn.

As soon as it was finished, the teachers whisked me off for an enkai. I'd been told what to expect during this and what etiquette and behaviour was expected of me and I think I did pretty well. I don't know if I got lucky and was placed in a generally relaxed school, but a lot of things happened that night that I certainly wasn't expecting....

First off, one of the teachers brought with him a video of the highlights of the festival that day and, as there was a TV in the room, we hooked it up and I listened to them laughing and taking the mickey out of the students that messed up or looked silly (which I thought was quite mean).

Then it got weird.

While we were watching the students on the video making human pyramids, some of the teachers began to wonder if they could still do it too. Before I knew it, in the middle of this elegant party room was a human pyramid comprising some of the older teachers and the (female) principal on the very top!

After these rather astonishing acrobatics were over (seriously! One or two of those guys had to be my grandmother's age!) we headed off to a little karaoke bar on the other side of town. It was a nice little place, kind of like a lounge bar and there was already a group of tipsy middle-aged men there howling into a mike. The teachers took it in turns to sing slow love-songs (from what I could gather, still not having much Japanese under my belt, but the videos looked pretty sappy) and persuaded me to pick something from the English section. I was torn. I was actually quite a good singer, but I'd never done Karaoke before, so I was torn between following the trend and picking a slow song like they had done and hope I sounded okay, or do something totally different and possibly make an idiot of myself. It was basically a choice between showing off my voice or throwing myself in and enjoying the party for what it was.

I went for the latter and did something that, had I been in Western company, would have meant committing social suicide. I sang 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls. And I brought down the house!

ALTS assemble!!

Yeah, it's been a while.
I figured I had better start updating this page for people who want to know a bit more about what I'm doing here. So, I'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start...).
So, after an arduous twelve-hour flight (seriously, how does anyone sleep in those seats!?) we arrived in Narita airport, Tokyo.
It still hadn't sunk in that I was in Japan. I could have done a full loop and got back off at Heathrow for all I knew (or cared at the point in time, so jet-lagged was my brain). We got to the Keio Plaza hotel which is easily the posh-est hotel I have ever stayed in!

After we'd explored our rooms and nosied in our bathrooms (and pondered over the over-complicated toilet) we went out to explore Shinjuku.

That was when it hit me.

 

This guy was part of a dance-off between two (later four) teams dancing to various j-rock/pop songs and at the very end they all got together and had one massive dance. On the other side of the park was some sort of concert featuring a buff bloke and a girl with a squeaky voice. There was also free beer :) At least, I think it was free, I don't remember paying...

 

After about half an hour of happily wandering through the city, it occurred to me to ask the girls in front if they knew where we were going. They did. They brought us to the gorgeous Meiji Jingu shrine. There were a lot of foreign tourists there and the red-and-white donned shrine maidens spoke really good English. We stayed there for quite a while. However, it didn't occur to us to ask the girls in front if they knew the way back and when we lost them a while later, we had to find our own way back on the subway, thankfully with the help of another Japanese lady who spoke excellent English.

When I got back to the hotel later that night, after more beer and nibbles, I was buzzing and really thought there was no way I would sleep that night as I lay down on the comfy bed. When I opened my eyes seven hours later, my first thought was "Huh. Whaddya know..."

First case of Japan-glish

So here we go! A brand new blog just for you curious people who want to know what I get up to when I go to Japan. I hope it looks all right. I've had a fair bit of fun playing with the design and deciding on my 'self-fulfilling prophecy' of a title!

I went onto google.jp and searched for this blog (out of curiosity) to see what it would look like to a Japanese person and to see what google had translated my text into. Most amused when I saw that they had translated 'Dear Dopey' to 'Dear Sleepy'. Wrong dwarf!

Anyway, this post is really just a tester, to make sure it works. I shall be posting proper stuff about my horrendous packing process in the next couple of weeks. But for now, here's a dwarf:

See ya!