Celebration on Successfully Completing Training

Training has been completed and I now have the tools necessary to be a successful Aeon teacher. We had a small graduation ceremony during which we received our Aeon pins while everyone in the room hummed the graduation song. Of course, after that it was time to celebrate!!! You can view my flickr set for this event here

Off to welcome party number 1.

I met up with my fellow foreign teacher John Paul and our Japanese counter part Chihiro for the first time sat night. I meet them at the train station and rode a bike to my welcome party. I had not rode a bike in almost 10 plus years but like the old saying goes, its like riding a bike you never forget. My welcome party was also a going away party for the guy I am replacing Kyle. Kyle is moving to Kobe to continue his teaching and marry his Japanese girlfriend. Both Kyle and John Paul are big tall guys well over 6’ and tower over everyone in the town.

I then tried my best to learn everyone’s name and learn a little bit about each person. Learning people’s names are difficult since I have not heard a name like that ever and often had to say it slowly and spell it out. Another difficult part of Japanese names is everyone name is similar characters mixed together in different spots so all the name sound the same. For Example the character “ko” means child and for some reason all girls names end in “ko” so I met a yumiko, akiko, yukio, yuko, maiko, mariko and for males I met a lot of “hiro” masahiro, hiroyuki, hiromasa, yoshihiro, yoshi and a bunch of names I clearly cannot remember for lack of even understanding what they told me.

The party was a lot of so fun, I was the center of attention and I loved it, usually I am used to having all eyes on me but I can get used to it. Everyone wanted to talk to the American and practice there English. I had to give a quick speech which everyone thought was great. But I had to behave since the manager was there and since she is my boss I wanted to be on good behavior.

Off to party number 2 where the craziness ensued. Before I got there the other teacher came back from Nomi Hodai or all you can drink. Since I was on my best behavior at my party I was the most sober one. We then signed up for Nomi Hodia at Karaoke which came out to be about $30 for 2 hours. It was our last night out together and everyone decided to get super faded. Robert from Missouri turned out to be a kick ass singer and did a great Axle Rose impersonation, we even had some Japanese people come out and he had some groupies. The girls Lauren and Jacky were off the hook and sang great. Alex and I sang “it ain’t no fun if the homies can have none” by Snoopy Doggy Dog. I met a new Aeon teacher from Okayama Ikimai named Brian from Los Angeles who is a cool guy. Dushan and Brian had a drinking contest for “Alpha Male status” with the biggest penis. Dushan won since he spilled both drinks all over himself without actually drinking it all. After he finished, he spiked the glasses on the ground like a running back that had just scored the winning touchdown. Half the people died laughing and the other half was appaulled. Being the drunken bastard I am, I found the stunt to be hilarious but also realized that I need to sober up and become the voice of reason.

Usually when something gets broken it’s time to go home so we decided to move to the next party. Unfortunately the other half of the party thought Dushan’s stunt was not very funny and one guy decided to insult him. Words were exchanged and it was time to play referee. I decided to distract Dushan by having him rough house with me and we decided to play who can hit each other in the shoulder the hardest. After our game I just heard “hey Chris hold my beer” I then heard footsteps and decided I might need to have some evasive maneuvers. Dushan had decided to tackle me and when I moved out of the way he did a swan dive in to the bikes. After that it was time to go, Dushan had hit drunken terror level 5 red or “severe possibility of drunkenness and stupidity.” After that I played Baysitter got everyone home and it was time to go to bed.