The conference
Situated neither in the middle of a calendar year or the middle of our contractual year, the Mid Year Conference in Kumamoto last week didn’t really live up to its name. Despite its literal shortcomings, many including myself found it to be both useful and enjoyable.
Now that us 1st year JETs have had a few months to test the waters of being an ALT, workshops began to have a faint, sugary coating of significance. Advice was offered, ideas were shared and anecdotes were told. Memorable workshops included the hilarious “Understanding the Host Culture” seminar by Ben and Sean - a couple of guys who’s onstage dynamic was funny enough to almost make me do a little bit of wee. The “Visiting Elementary Schools” workshop was incredibly useful too - and very well prepared, what with the prizes (including beer), costumes and projector slides that made the whole affair an orgy-like banquet for the senses.
For many JET’s who are exiled to the armpit of inakaness, the Mid Year conference affords the opportunity to enjoy a brief spate of city-based shenanigans. My hotel room came equipped with a real bed - something which I have sorely missed. Unlike the last hotel I stayed in, the view from my window was not a concrete wall, but a slightly more satisfying bleak and grey city skyline.
Having spent a considerable wedge of my paycheck on my flight to Singapore, the options available to me with regard to the predictable eat-drink-vomit sequence of events that most JETs indulge in during the evenings of these seminars was extremely limited. As such, I opted for a quiet meal with a group of JET friends from the gun* I live in. What started as a quiet meal soon cascaded down into a melee of badly sung Disney theme tunes and a bit of a bop at the Bar Which Is So Infamous To Kumamoto JETs That I’m Not Going To Embarrass Myself By Naming It ™, as the amount of alcohol being quaffed increased with a kind of hungry, animalistic passion.
Shunning the big party on the last day in favour of a more wallet-friendly activity (ie. going home), my little adventure into metropolis came to an early end, but left me quite contented.
*a ‘gun’ is comparable to a ‘county’. Villages, Towns and Cities make up a gun. A Prefecture (for example, Kumamoto-ken or Fukuoka-ken) is split into several guns. Japan itself is split into several kens.
Quirk of Japanese winter no.837583: Oden
Oden is a food traditionally eaten during winter in Japan. It is often described as a stew, but I more affectionately like to refer to it as a ‘grog’. It is a greyish soupy concoction created from all the leftover bits and pieces of food from a Japanese kitchen. Part meal and part exciting game of chance, an average pot of Oden might contain various parts of animals, potato, daikon, whole eggs and bits of old Chinese newspaper.
