Today was the first day for a new teacher who I will call Maria. Unlike most teachers who are in their early to mid 20’s, Maria was somewhere between mid 30’s to 40’s, but was one of those people who always appears youthful and vibrant. Like most new teachers, she was feeling stressed and overwhelmed on her first day of work, mainly due to NOVA’s minimal teacher training. One of my supervisors asked me to help, since I was only a few months removed from being a stressed out new teacher myself. I worked with Maria to help her get her files ready and plan lessons. This made my day quite a bit busier, but I was happy to help.
After work we went out for a drink at a nearby izakaya. As we talked I learned that Maria considered teaching in Japan to be the next in a series of life adventures. She was one of those rare free souls who spends time travelling from place to place and really living life. After another drink or two, she admitted that at one point in her life she was the travelling mistress for a famous Grammy award winning musician (who will remain nameless here). Usually if someone makes a claim like that after a few drinks you take it with a grain of salt and smile politely. With Maria – I completely took her at her word.
After I went home, I was still pumped up from a busy day at work and the alcohol, so I tried to relax by borrowing a a bootleg DVD copy of Kill Bill from one of the other Hello House residents. The picture quality was crap, the subtitles were hilariously wrong, and the disc was damaged so the last 20 minutes were completely unwatchable. Come on bootleggers – take pride in your work!
(2014 Update) My original post lacked a lot of detail about Maria. I usually tried to avoid writing about my coworkers experience in the office while I was still working with them.
Drinking in Japan 