it has just occurred to me that i’ve really and truly settled into life in japan.. it seems like nothing really surprises me much anymore, and i think it doesnt help that i’m somewhat in a slump at the moment.
in all honesty, my job here doesnt require much of me, and although we’re officially at work for more-or-less regular office hours, the number of hours where we actually do work isnt that much. it varies from school to school of course, and it just so happens that in my schools, there isnt that much. plus i teach lots of junior high, where most of the time i’m nothing more than a human tape recorder, where i read – from the textbook, no less – and have students repeat after me. plus, because teachers in junior high are hard pressed to complete the syllabus, they dont have much time for non-textbook related activities, nor do they require me to help out much in lesson planning. in other words, there’s no room for creativity or improvisation even if i wanted to, nor are there any chances for me to do something a bit more challenging in class.
i find myself restless and looking for something to engage my mind with, but i honestly think i’ve just about reached my limit with studying japanese even though i’m nowhere near being good at it (then again, my chinese isnt that great either, so i’m not surprised at all) and think that i need to look for something new to interest myself in.
of course, the fact i havent been doing much at all – in terms of exploring and going out and about – since the trip to tokyo in golden week almost 2 months ago - also means that i’ve almost become the average osakan; someone who lives in city and hence doesnt do any exploration of his or her own backyard. lazy weekends and after-school hours. besides the language exchange i’ve recently started and my ballet classes – also means that i’ve gained some weight. arggghhh. need to get out of this slump!
* * *
again, i just realised that about 1 month ago, i blogged a post where i vowed to try to make the last few months of my first year in japan worthwhile.. yet 1 month on, i’m in a slum! :S it appears that it really is time to put in more effort to making the last month really count.
i leave for my 2 week holiday in china in a bit less than a month, so i have only this much time to make a difference, a difference that will hopefully continue on through next year. at least, i think starting the language exchange was a good decision; it gives me something to do and an opportunity to practice speaking japanese. goodness knows that i really need that; the irony of it, huh. i was just chatting with one of my JTEs yesterday when she asked me how my command of “everyday-conversation japanese” (日常会話) is going. it’s going nowhere, really, but at least with this language exchange, i’m hoping that i will be able to say the little that i can say a bit better.
* * *
speaking of china, the japanese government has apparently warned its citizen to watch out and be careful when travelling there due to the swine flu, although i think the situation in japan is more serious than that in china. at any rate, japan now has a total of 994 infected cases.
i also discovered the other day, when i was making enquiries to various travel agencies just for fun, that leaving 1 day later than originally scheduled would reduce my ticket price by 35000yen! that’s a whole load of money, and i’m somewhat annoyed that the agent from the original agency somehow didnt manage to get me this deal. either she didnt help me check around the date that i gave her (even though i told her that my dates are flexible), or that she did but there wasnt such a deal around then.
either way, i’m now leaving 1 day later and richer. awesome. there’s a “Silver Week” in september where we have 5 consecutive public holidays, and we were thinking of going to korea then. hopefully the money that we save on our air ticket might make a trip to korea possible at that time.. it would be nice to go somewhere, otherwise we’ll have to do with exploring the region, which isnt too bad either. if only it were already autumn then….
* * *
it seems that transformers 2 is now showing in singapore – it opened a week earlier in japan than anywhere else – and a bunch of us watched it last friday on the IMAX screen. originally i thought that IMAX would be like the rounded screen at the science centre back home, but it turned out to be just a normal screen, but bigger. it worked well still, though, as it allowed the viewer to follow the action from one end of the screen to the other.
i also watched terminator 4 last weekend (i’ve been watching lots of action flicks lately – just before transformers was star trek, which was pretty good actually), and if you have to choose between 2 action flicks, i’d say go for transformers 2, as terminator 4 was kinda boring. there werent any climatic scenes nor particularly exciting fights, even though there was action throughout, of course. it seemed like i was generally sitting there waiting for the story to unfold, kinda like Angels and Demons, but even so i think that the latter show was more interesting than T4.
anyhow, T4 is apparently the first in the trilogy that the studio is planning to make, which could mean that T5 will be the interesting one to watch, or so one can hope. at least for transformers 2, there were more ups and downs in the story than T4, in the sense that the good bits were good, while the bad bits were somewhat bad.
(SPOILER ALERT)
i watched it with a whole bunch of boys who complained about the poor storyline, the gratuitous zoom-ins of megan fox’s bust (unbelievable, isnt it? but complain they did, as they claim that they’re not teenagers anymore) and the annoying “you love me but you but you dont want to say it” bits of sam and girlfriend. my take on it is that if i watch an action flick, i’ll always assume that the storyline isnt much to speak of anyway, so i had no expectations and wasnt disappointed in the end. plus unlike them, i didnt quite grow up watching transformers, so i didnt go to see the film expecting to see giant robots smash up each other and thus wasnt disappointed either that the film also featured lots of sam running around, as well as the relationships between sam and parents and sam and girlfriend. it’s so obvious that there’s gonna be a 3rd movie though..
0 comments:
Post a Comment