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Published: August 14th 2011
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I had my first Nagano teacher's conference in Nagano City this week. It is a BIG prefecture, so to get to the city by highway bus takes about 2 hours. Apparently by train it is 5! (There are only local trains from my area, no bullet trains alas). So, it was a 5 am start as the bus stop is a 25 minute drive from my house, to get to Nagano City for 9.30 am. We had workshops in the morning and then a quiz/treasure hunt in the afternoon at the famous Zenko-ji temple in small teams with local high school kids to help us. My team wasn't so competative - the second question was how many icecream flavours in the shops near the temple, which ended up in us buying icecreams and spending most of the time we had enjoying them and taking a leisurely stroll around the temple.
In the evening we had a buffet party with five free drinks, followed by karaoke. I was booked into a local hostel for the night with a couple of other JETs from my area, Dean and Jane.
I'm still trying to decide what song should be my signature
tune at karaoke. So far I've tried Dolly Parton's 9-5 and this Friday night it was Bonny Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart - I think this is my favourite so far, although I still worry my vocals will make people's ears bleed. The karaoke bar in Nagano City was 1000 yen (about £8) for an hour with unlimited drinks and icecream for an hour - can't say better than that!
My plans to be in bed by 10 pm didn't materialise as I was still out dancing after midnight. After most of the JETs had either got trains back to their local areas, a small group of us went on to The Jigger Club, stopping to admire the London Bus in the centre of the city that has been converted into a hot dog restaurant. The Jigger Club turned out to be the size of someone's living room and we were pretty much the only ones there beside the staff, so we had the entire (tiny) dance floor to ourselves. After about an hour of the Japanese DJ's dance music we moved to the small bar downstairs, where many of the locals were chilling out and playing darts.
By 1 am we were starting to drop, so headed back to the hostel and tried not to make too much noise in the dorm (It wasn't easy climbing into a top bunk after several beers - I ended up sleeping in my clothes as it was too dark to get changed!).
The next day a group of us met up and had a wander round the city nursing our hangovers (I have to admit we succumbed to a McDonald's breakfast and a Starbucks, as a Japanese breakfast of rice and miso just wouldn't have cut it). The temperature was in the 30s so we ended up mainly hanging around the department stores for the aircon!
The bus back to Iida was late afternoon, getting us back for 6.30 pm. Jane still doesn't have a car and she lives an hour away from Iida City (I'm only a 10 minute drive from Iida). So, although the thought of it terrified me, Jane would have been stranded, so I offered to drive her back to her village of Yasoka. By this point it was getting dark. My new android phone had run out of charge, but Jane's had just
enough power to get us started. Unluckily, her sat nav took us a route she'd not been before - which was the narrow, winding mountain route.....then her phone power died and we didn't really know the way. Now, most of my friends and family know I'm a nervous driver at the best of times and usually need a sat nav in the UK to get me anywhere. So imagine me in my new car, still getting used to driving an automatic in a new country, in the dark on tiny mountain roads, without knowing a clear route....lets just say I was SWEATING! We got lost at one point along a tiny dirt track in the depths of some mountain forest. Jane's phone had enough juice for about 2 minutes of directions, so we eventually made it back to the main route and finally back to her house. She sketched me out a rough map for getting back to Iida and I charged my phone at her house so I at least could make a call for help if I ended up lost again, but thank God the route back was along a main road, and much easier than the mountain
way we came. It took me another hour and half to get back to my house, and I have never been so glad to get back in my life! It was a baptism of fire into driving in Japan, but on the bright side I can't imagine having to do a drive that bad and going down to the local supermarket is now a breeze.
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