T-minus 24ish hours!

Family visit number one!

Hi Guys! I can’t believe I’m leaving for Japan tomorrow! It came up so fast, I can’t even really process it. This has been a very, very busy week. JET is going to my first full-time job, and on top of that, dress standards are a bit different in Japan than they are here, so I’ve spent a lot of time shopping for workplace-appropriate clothing. It’s also a tradition in Japan to give small gifts to your new coworkers, so I’ve been  shopping for those as well. (I’ll be working at five different schools and I have a TON of coworkers, so one of my gifts is going to be 150 individually-wrapped packets of Crystal Light!  It is an American thing, and I hope they like it ><.)

  

Aside from shopping and packing, I’ve been catching up with my some of my closest high school and college friends and spending time with my family. My cousins, aunt, and grandma have visited me twice this month! They live pretty far away, so it’s a big deal. We had a lot of fun playing old family card games and board games. My cousins and I even climbed on the new ropes course at the Palisades mall. (It was so much fun. If you live in Rockland and haven't been, you should check it out.)

On the ropes course with the cousins!

And last Saturday, I had my last American singing performance for the next twelve months – with a group of my very good friends at a concert in Wurtsboro, New York. I’ve been singing with this group, Broadway Concerts Direct for almost seven years. I’m really going to miss singing with them this year, so I’m glad I got to do one last concert before I head off.

Before I go, I want to take a minute to say thank you to my wonderful friends, and to the community at Wurtsboro, and to my family, for being so supportive of me, especially over these past few crazy weeks. I’m so lucky to have you all in my life, and even though it makes leaving sort of bittersweet, it’s so comforting to know that I have people back at home who care about me (and read my blog posts! =P)

That’s it for now! The next time you all hear from me, it’ll be from the other side of the Pacific. Here I go!

I am moving to Japan in 10 days!

Hi Guys! So yes, it’s official: I am moving to Japan for at least a year! Here’s how this happened:

My new home in Ibaraki, Japan!

I’ve been pretty involved with teaching stuff in college. I tutored a few times a week, taught SAT classes over the summer a few times, and even directed a little bit of student theatre on campus.  I also had this amazing, amazing semester abroad in Paris last year, during which I was fortunate enough to travel to sixteen different countries and experience all kinds of things that I’d never even known existed before. Soo, when I was applying to jobs for after college, I decided to look for programs that would allow me to teach English abroad, and do two things that I love at once.

I was a “Comparative Literature and Society” major in college, which basically means that I took a bunch of different language, literature and culture classes and tried to synthesize them all into a giant research paper at the end of four years. My major language was French, but since I’m also really interested in Japan, my major allowed me to take a few classes in the Japanese department as well. I took a class on Japanese History, and, just this year, finally got to start learning Japanese. (It actually might be the coolest language ever …I should also mention that I’m also sort of an amateur linguistics nerd.)

Anyway, the combination of all these interests led me to the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, this great program through the Japanese government that sends over 4,000 English-speakers to Japan every year to teach English in Japanese middle and high schools. The application process was super intense, took a full school year, and included a 2-page essay and an interview at the Japanese Consulate. On my very last day of college classes, I heard that I had been accepted, and now I can’t believe that I’m flying over there in exactly 10 DAYS!  I'm going to be teaching English at a few different high schools in the suburbs of Tokyo, and I'll be team-teaching which Japanese teachers, which means that I'll (hopefully) also learn some Japanese! I'll use this blog over the next year to keep in touch with people from home and share stories about all the craziness and excitement that comes with living and working in a foreign country. Look out for details about my new home (and possibly my packing list) in the posts to come, and get ready to hear all about my adventures in Japan!