Hannah in Japan

Hello again from Japan, I realised recently that I haven't written a whole lot about my job and what work culture in Japan in like, so I thought I'd dedicate this post to that. I'm currently working for a company called NOVA, and NOVA is what's known as an eikaiwa, or English conversation school, with small group classes of up to five students. We also have kids classes, which can have up to eight children. Students can book group lessons or man-to-man lessons. In group lessons, we are required to do lessons from the textbooks, whereas with man-to-man classes, students can request free talk, or bring their own material to go over. Each season, we change textbooks, so right now, we're using the summer book, and at the beginning of October we'll switch over to the 'fall' (or autumn) books. NOVA gets a bit of bad rap on occasion, but I don't actually mind it too much. I'm lucky to have a good manager, and I get along with most of my coworkers quit...

Hello again from a still stupidly hot, stupidly humid Japan. Great to know that you're consistent with your weather, Japan, but tone it down a notch, yeah? About 5-10 degrees cooler would be perfect, but anyway, enough about the weather. I've just returned from a trip to Kanazawa with two friends for the Obon break. Kanazawa is two and a half hours from Tokyo by shinkansen, and is famous for gold and seafood, especially crab. Day one, we arrived and checked into the hostel. We then headed out to explore the Higashi- Chaya district, which is an area with many teahouses where geisha perform. The buildings are all beautifully lacquered, and the streets are really nicely paved. We tried some of the famous gold icecream, which is vanilla soft serve ice cream with a sheet of gold laid on top. This would be the first of three gold ice creams on the trip. It makes for great photos, and we found another store that offered different flavours such as matcha soft serve with gold. Definite...

Hello again from Japan! We are now in August, which means it's the peak of summer here, and 30 degrees plus every day. Very jealous of all my friends and family back in NZ experiencing more comfortable temperatures, even though it's on the cold side. I've made it through the first month, so hopefully only one more month to go before it cools down, right? A girl can dream... I never thought I'd find myself longing for winter, but here I am. I've never lived in a place that gets so hot every single day, and even doing day to day chores and activities is exhausting and draining. You can't stay outside for longer than about five minutes, and doing any kind of physical exercise outside is out of the question. I was going running in the mornings about 3 times a week, but I've had to give that up as it's just too hot. When you're out and about, you kind of just end up hopping from one air conditioned building to another, and you end up looking around a lot ...