Your Japanese word of the week is...

"kankaku". There's two different kanji with the same pronounciation but the one I'm talking about today means "sense" or "feeling".

And that's what I spent most of today doing, getting a "feel" for my new job. In case you haven't heard, I got hired as a teacher for Seiritsu Gakuen (a private high school in Tokyo) to teach their foreign exchange students. I'll be teaching mainly science and math with an extra subject that is currently history. I'll also be doing all my internship work at the same time (until July that is). Once July's come and gone, I'll use my afternoons to help teach English at the school and other activities. Oh, it also means I'm here til April 2009............. =P

So today I shadowed the current teacher to get a feel for how the classes are run and got to meet the students (the department isn't that big right now, so there aren't many).

But over the weekend, Peter came to Tokyo!! I used to work with him back at Lexus and he's in Japan teaching English as well. If Tokyo is Vancouver, I sort of live in Coquitlam- accessible but sometimes inconvenient. Peter, unfortunately, lives in Aizu Wakamatsu in the Fukushima prefecture............ that's sort of like Kelowna.

No problem though, as he packed an overnight bag and hopped on the bus to spend a night in Tokyo.

I met him at the Shinjuku bus station and, after lunch, we saw bits of Shinjuku, Harajuku, the Tokyo Tower (there USED to be a picture of Peter in front of Tokyo Tower, but since he complained, it's now him in Harajuku =P.....), and Roppongi. After lots of walking, we took the train back to my city and stuffed ourselves silly at an all-you-can-eat restaurant.

The next day, we got up a bit early and checked out Akihabara and Ginza. We went into this awesome watch shop where the first floor has all these glass enclosures for different brands of watches and, when you walk in one, they're actually elevators that take you either to the second floor or the basement, where there's a small area that sells only that brand of watch.

So walking into the Swatch "cylinder" takes you down to the Swatch section. Go in the Omega part and it takes you up to the Omega area. It's pretty sweet. You can see in the picture below, one of the elevators has gone up.

So, all in all, a good weekend heh........... The next two weeks will be me frantically trying to prepare for my belt exam on the 23rd..............

PS- There's also an awesome spider sculpture thing in the Roppongi Hills shopping area. It's spider-iffic haha.......