Okay.... So I'll admit... I'm a bad blogger! I haven't written in a looooong time, but here it goes!
So rather than try to re-cap the rest of my time in Turkey, I am just going to jump to Tokyo, where I am now!
Tokyo... where to begin? Well, I absolutely love this city! I could easily live here for a while. The people I have met, are incredibly sweet and helpful (particularly with my first few hopeless attempts to negotiate the metro/train systems here...). What I am REALLY enjoying is the anonymity of this city, and even though I am a foreigner, nobody seems that interested/bothered with me. Which is sooooooo nice! I have not been approached on the street by anybody since I've been here, and it makes me realize what a difference that is for me after living in Turkey. I guess it has its upsides and its downsides, some people have said it would be really hard to meet people or make friends in this city because of that, but at the moment I am really basking in my personal space here. Oh wait, except for the morning train ride to work!!!! OH WOW!! I will just say that it is absolutely true, people get jammed onto the trains and it is so full that you can't even move your arms... every morning is the same! It's not sooo bad, I mean it was actually a humourous novelty to me for the first little while because I just couldn't believe it, but now the novelty has worn off and I get a little grumpy every day on the train. I think because I am so big (comparitively) to the women here, all the women sort of lean on me, like I can hold them up!!?!?! No thanks! It's so funny/annoying. I really couldn't make it without my ipod.
Work is great, and my students are all really interesting people, many of them have studied English in Vancouver for a summer or at least visited. Lots of them also do voluntary work overseas in neighbouring developing countries like India or Thailand etc.. so I am really enjoying the conversations we are having, which happens to be my "job" to just have conversations with a group of really sweet and interesting Japanese University students. I think I am lucky because I am working at what is considered one of the top universities in Tokyo (kind of like Ivy League), and so my students are all pretty dynamic and interesting world travellers. I've been trying to spend as little money are possible, so I have mostly spent my weekends in parks or near the river hanging out with Leah, although we have gone out for Izakaya (like a japanese tapas bar?) a few times at a place where everything on the menu is 270 yen (three dollars) ha ha ha... So today I am off to the Tokyo Modern Art Museum!
I'll try to not be such a horrible blogger!
xo