Sakura at Night

Friday was the last day of training and all we had on Saturday was a quick health check, so it was mostly a free day.

This was a typical breakfast at the hotel, though most days there was something involving hot dogs. On Saturday I had a croissant, potato salad, chicken with vegetables, cabbage with other vegetables, mixed fruit, Japanese pickles, and orange juice.

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Training Week

Tuesday through Friday was training. We were there until about 8 or 9 every night except for the last day. It was very long and tiring! Training wasn't that long when I went through it before. I think we got more practice pretending to be teaching a class this time though, which is good I think. Though I think it would have been better spread over five days because long days are tough especially when getting over jet lag. But overall I think it was good. Most of the information was not new to me, but I did get some ideas for new games and activities.

 

Besides lunch breaks and grabbing dinner after training I didn't do too much, but here are a few pictures that I took.



 

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Hamamatsu Castle Park - Sakura!

Konnichiwa! I have been in Japan for a little over a week now. I'm in my apartment now, but I have a few posts to do to catch up.

Last Saturday my boyfriend and I left at 8:20 a.m. eastern time, had about a 3 hour layover in Atlanta and then flew to Narita and arrived a little before 4 p.m. Sunday Japan time (3 a.m. Sunday eastern time). I kind of dozed off for a couple minutes here and there on the plane, but never really completely fell asleep. Once we landed we had to go through immigration, send our bags to the hotel, and exchange money. Then we had to take a 45 minute train to Tokyo, and then take the shinkansen for an hour and a half to Hamamatsu. It was about 9:30 when we arrived in Hamamatsu, which was 8:30 a.m. back home so we had been traveling over 24 hours. We were super tired!

Training started on Tuesday, so we had a free day on Monday. I'm glad we arrived a day early because I was pretty jet lagged! I felt it more this time than last time for some reason.

I went to bed pretty soon after arriving at the hotel, but I did take the time to take a couple pictures. This was the view from my room:

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Etsy Shop Sale!

 

Three weeks from today I will be on a plane flying to Japan! Crazy! Excited! YAY!!!!!!!

 

I have a crazy long packing list and hopefully it will all fit in my three suitcases (one is a carry-on). I won't be able to take my Etsy stuff though so I'm having a sale. If you use the code BERRYJAPANBLOG you get 20% the entire order. So check it out here:  Strawberry Glitter: The Shop of Random Cuteness



 

 

 

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Iwata!

My boyfriend and I got our placements Sunday evening. Yay! My boyfriend will be teaching in Hamamatsu and I'll be teaching in Iwata, which is east of Hamamtsu.

I'm super excited about this location! It's on the Tokaido line so we have easy access to Tokyo and Kyoto. I'm further from Tokyo this time, but I can get there in the same amount of time because it's a more direct route. Yay!

Hamamatsu has about 800,000 people and Iwata has about 160,000.

We both have driving positions. It should be interesting to drive on the left side of the road!

I decided to change my blog and I'm happy with how it looks now. :) I used a template and I still have a little bit of work to do, but I need to figure out how to make some of the changes. But it's already a big improvement!

I'm even more excited now that I know our placements. I want to go to Japan now!

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Places to Visit

It's just a little over two months until I move back to Japan!!! I'm getting excited! :) I have already started a packing list. I have a lot more that I want to take with me this time. Hopefully it will all fit in my suitcases. :P

I have also been making a list of places I want to visit. I'm sure I'll add much more to this list, but hopefully I will also check off a lot of places! I have links about most of these places so if you click on the names you can see blogs or websites about these places! :)

Various Cities and Places and Such

Miyajima

 

 

Torii, pretty water, deer... yay!

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My Scrapbook

When I got back from Japan, I started making a scrapbook of my time in Japan. I decided to organize my photos by location or theme instead of chronologically. It took a long time to complete (I finally finished it in January or February of this year). I couldn’t fit it all in one book so there are two volumes. Here are some pictures of a few of the pages.



I put many of the awesomely cute stickers I bought in Japan to good use!

I marked the cities I visited on the map and also made those prefectures slightly darker. Hopefully I’ll be able to add many more dots to that map when I go back! :)

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