We finally arrived in Osaka last night! We were so excited, but so tired. We took a 20 minute walk around by our hotel, and then went to sleep. We are staying at a hotel that has huge face statues outside to represent people from different races. The people here seem very friendly, and we feel safer than in Canada. Our hotel room cost Nova approximately $120 Canadian dollars, and it was about 14 x 8 feet in total. We had our own bathroom, that is exactly like a motor home bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower all in a shower stall type room. Tiny but functional. We tried some authentic Japanese cuisine last night before bed and this morning we had a buffet breakfast at the hotel. The snack last night cost us about $15 for a single sandwich and two cokes. The buffet breakfast was $10 each (800 yen each). We are having a very exciting time, looking around everywhere we go. The flashing neon lights are everywhere. We also found out that when you hear bring bring you need to move out of the way or else get run over by one of the hundreds of bicycles that swarm the sidewalks. Anyways, we have lots more to explore this morning. We are 17 hours ahead of your time. So it is Wednesday, February 26th at 9 am. We leave the hotel to go to Fukuoka at 11 20 this morning. We already have our schedule for the week. We start training next monday, and we have keys and a map to our apartment. Nova also gave us booklets with information about Japan, its customs, and how to eat in Japan. It also had safety tips for emergencies. We are well taken care of, and very happy. I hope this e-mail finds you all happy and well. We will write again in a couple of days or so. Love, Shay and Phil

Hello, We are learning all sorts of things every day. Today I read that the proper way to kill tatami (tatami are the tightly woven mats that are used as wall to wall carpeting in many houses) mites is to tape a plastic bag around the smoke detector, and then set off a special smoke bomb in your house, and evacuate for a few hours. Then you vacuum up the dead mites. Yeuch!!! Toady wa also figured out how to tie a cheesecloth down the sink drain to catch all the food particles. This place has some disgusting things to deal with. We also have information on avoiding cockroaches and how to kill them if they do get into your house. We set up our washing machine yesterday. It turns out that you hook it to the bathroom sink and turn the faucet on. The surprising thing is that you better have picked up the washing machine and put it in the shower before turning it on because it drains out the bottom onto the floor! Ha Ha Ha :( Luckily we can move the washing machine into and out of the shower fairly easily. To have a shower is a seven step process, and Phil is successful in making the gas water heater work about 30 percent of the time. I still have a zero percent success rate. The light in the bathroom turns on about 30 percent of the time too. So you stand at the light switch and wait to see if the light responded to being turned on or not. If not, you turn it off and then back on again, repeatedly until it works. On a brighter note, we have a very large apartment considering what we were expecting. The ceilings are 8 feet high. We have two bedrooms 12' x 9' 2 closets 3' x 9' x 8' kitchen 15' x 7' living room 12' x 6' toilet room 2 1/2' x 4' sink, storage, and washing machine storage room 5 1/2' x 4' shower 3' x 4' bathtub 2 1/2' x 2' x 2' Here is our address for those of you who do not have it already Shay and Phillip Jones #501 Dai Ichi Nishijima Building 1-12-21 Nishijin Sawara-ku, Fukuoka-shi Fukuoka-ken 814-0002 We found the ocean yesterday! It is about a 25 minute liesurely walk from our apartment. It is beautiful with light brown sand and blue-green clear water. There is a beautiful picnic area and swimming beach with breakwater cement around it. I am still figuring out how to send pictures via e-mail. Because our digital camera is such high resolution (5 megapixel) it takes up a lot of space on an e-mail to send a picture. Right now we can send one picture per e-mail, but we'll figure something out. We found an internet shop about 2 blocks from our apartment. It cost 300 yen for a membership (about $4.00) that lasts forever. We can use the internet for 1 hour for 450 yen (about $5.75). We will look into getting internet in our apartment, and Nova is signing us up for a cell phone in a couple of days. It will not cost us to receive international calls. Teena, Christina's e-mail address won't work. Please ask her what it is and tell me so I can add her to my list. I have christina_699@hotmail.com Anyways, I should go now. My hour is up. We are enjoying ourselves very much. Love, Shay

Hello, We just completed our second of three training days. I am training with Luke from England, Steven from Australia, and Mark from Wisconsin, USA. There were 17 new Nova teachers that arrived in Osaka the same week we did. I guess they arrive once per week. Today I did my first lesson entirely on my own. Most of it went very well. The topic was jobs. The focus was using present tense verbs and questions and answers. This was my first experience with only one student. One task I gave her was to think of her dream job. The perfect job. I would ask her questions about the job, and then try to guess what the job was. One question I asked was, did you go to university? She said yes. Well, after numerous questions, I couldn't guess, so I asked her to give me some clues. Her response was, "I'm a housekeeper". Well, that put me in my place. I had discounted the possibility that anyone would want to be an educated housekeeper as their dream job. When I questioned her about why she would want to be a housekeeper, she said, "I am married". I assumed that she didn't understand the question, or maybe she didn't understand the whole lesson. So when I got home, I told Phil about the lady who stumped me, and reminded me of our different cultural values. He figured it out. Her dream job is to marry rich, get a university education, and stay at home! It all makes sense now. I must have seemed to her like the stupidest English teacher she's ever had. Oh well! Tomorrow we teach five full lessons (45 minutes each), and we do it with another teacher watching from a separate room and evaluating our performance. I hope I can sleep tonight. So far the training has gone quite well though. Lots of encouragement and positive reinforcement. Well, we are still happy to be in Japan. I got to use my personal stamp today to open a bank account. And we finally got our Canadian Traveller's cheques cashed. We tried to cash them at about 5 different locations previously, and they all told us that they did not accept Canadian Traveller's cheques, only American. I felt like telling them that Americans really aren't better than Canadians, but I'm sure that wouldn't work. Have a great day! Wish me luck on my next few lessons! Shay

Hello, Yes, I finally found a friend in Japan. (Other than Phil, of course). Her name is Amelia, and she's from New Zealand. She works at Nova in Tenjin with me. Yeah, I forgot to tell you that we live by Nishijin subway station, and I ride the subway about 10 minutes to Tenjin to work. That's nice because Nova pays for the subway pass (it's called a teiki), and then I get to explore two areas of Fukuoka for free. It is also one of the bigger schools in Fukuoka. We have about 17 teachers working there. I guess total staff is about 25-30. It is four floors high, in a mall. Anyways, Amelia is very nice. She reminds me of Teena a little. All of the Fukuoka Nova employees in our area went out to the voodoo lounge last night after work for 100 yen beers. It was the first place I've been to in Japan that was mostly white people. Amelia is going to show me where to get free internet, a cheap cell-phone, and even apartments that are half the price of what we are spending now. I wonder what they look like. It's good to have a friend. Especially one who speaks English, and who knows about Japan. She has been here for 6 months. She was so thankful when I showed up because our office is almost entirely male. Bryhanna, I sent your letter today (Friday, March 5th) via air-mail. Let me know when you receive it so I know how long it took. I added a couple of Japanese things too. I hope you are enjoying studying Japan in school. Please ask me any questions that you have. Do you have to write a report about Japan? We are just now figuring out the garbage system in Fukuoka. It is ridiculous. Never again will I complain about taking out the garbage in Canada. The garbage has to be sorted into: recyclable cans, bottles, cardboard, and newspaper, burnable garbage and non-burnable garbage. Each type of garbage has a special bag to put it in. Each bag is a different colour, it has to have a special Fukuoka city garbage symbol on it, and you have to buy the bags at a grocery store. The cost of the bags pays for the garbage man and the garbage system. There are people whose job it is to look through our see-through garbage bags and make sure it is sorted correctly. Supposedly if you didn't sort it correctly, they give it back to you. We have an 8 page book that tells us the details of garbage disposal. Luckily it is in English. Each type of garbage is collected on a different day, at a different time. Surprisingly, burnable garbage actually means anything that is not recyclable and that burns. This includes plastic and styrafoam. I just can't put styrafoam in the burnable garbage, so I put it in the unburnable garbage. We'll see if it comes back to us. We haven't disposed of any non-burnable garbage yet because it only gets collected on the 3rd Saturday of each month. The washing machine will be fixed soon. Supposedly most Japanese people keep their washing machines on their balconies. Our balcony has an electrical outlet and a drain, but no water faucet, so our washing machine can't be put on the balcony. We only hang our clothes to dry on the balcony. It is strange to hang your underwear on a fifth floor balcony overlooking a major street, but everyone does it. I try to hide it behind the railing, but the railing isn't very thick. We sent in a request to have our electricity looked at. The breaker was blowing daily. Nova sent someone the next morning. He spoke Japanese only, but he installed a new breaker switch that says 30 instead of the old one that said 20. I hope that makes the breaker not blow every day. My last day of training went reasonably well. I was ready for it to end. Each lesson I taught was observed and evaluated by another teacher. The evaluations were better than I thought I did. Today I only teach 4 lessons, and there is nobody watching me. Yay! I am going to go in to work an hour early and do some planning for my lessons. We are on salary, so we don't get paid by the hour. We get paid by the month, which is strange because we get paid the same for a short month such as February, as we do for a month that has more days in it. We get paid monthly salary x (shifts worked / shifts scheduled). That means that if we work all scheduled shifts, we get paid salary x 1. If we work overtime shifts, we get paid less for them if the month has more days. It is hard to wrap your head around, but it seems fair. We just had luch at an Italian cafe near here. We had real Italian pasta. It was awesome. The cafe is called Italian Tomato Jr. Cafe. Have a great day! Shay

Hello to all of my friends and family, We are settling in to life in Japan quite well. It feels like we have been here for much more than just two weeks. Yesterday we bought two cell phones for 1 yen each. Then they told us that it will onlly cost 2,700 yen for set-up fees! Oh well, I guess it was too good to be true. That's only $33.75 anyways. My phone number is 090-3416-5036. Phil's phone number is 090-2851-7990. I don't know what numbers to press to phone us from Canada. Those are the numbers we use to phone each other. Our cell phones have e-mail capabilities, wireless internet access, and digital cameras built-in. They also have text messaging, which is free, so that is how we talk to each other. I will try to remember to send you our work phone numbers too. If you call us, it is free for us, but please remember that we are 17 hours ahead of your time! Mom, I received your card inthe mail yesterday, March 9th. It took 15 days in the mail. I must have sent your card by airmail for you to have received it so quickly. I don't know what happened. I just gave it to the post office lady. She spoke to me in Japanese, and when I didn't respond in Japanese, she wrote down a number. I gave her that many yen (about 600 yen for three envelopes). She bowed and said, "air-ee-gahto go-z-ay-ah-mus" which means thank you very much. Luckily people are very honest here. Aunty Darlene, yes the coffee here is wonderful. It can be very expensive in some places. I have paid 400 yen ($5.00) for a very small cup of coffee at a restaurant before. Some places are more reasonable though. There are Starbucks, Mister Donuts, MacDonald's, and KFC's all over the place. Karen, the thing above our kitchen sink in the picture I sent you is a hot water heater. A gas line and a cold water line runs into it. When you push the button, you hear a flame ignite the gas, and very soon hot water comes out of the faucet. You can change the dial from lukewarm to boiling hot. That one works very well. Unfortunately the hot water heater in the shower doesn't work nearly as well. If you're in the shower, you can 't change the temperature of the water or else the heater turns off completely. You just have to guess how far to turn the dial before turning on the water in the shower. Doug, we will keep looking for a sword or a cane for you. Getting Phil to go shopping is like pulling teeth, and getting him to go shopping happily is almost impossible. We did find a neat second hand shop a few blocks away from our apartment. We will check it out periodically. I will just have to leave Phil at the batting cages, the bowling alley, or the "Amusement Machine" (arcade) and enjoy some shopping alone. I guess gambling is illegal in Japan, but there are "pachinko" casinos everywhere. You drop little steel balls like marbles into the top of a machine. They fall to the bottom, bouncing off pegs as they fall. The holes they fall into at the bottom of the machine determines how many more steel balls you win. There are rows upon rows of these machines, and people buy buckets of steel balls to drop into the machines. They get around the illegal gambling thing because they purchase the balls at a store across the street, so when they enter the casino, they are technically just playing a game, with no money involved. Then they cash in their balls at the store across the street when they are done. I think I want to sell little steel balls! What a great business! All of the children stare at us. They are mesmerized by looking at us. There aren't many foreigners in Japan. Outside of Nova, we have seen about 5 foreigners (that we can tell are foreigners) since we arrived. Adults know it is not polite to stare, but children remind us that we are different. Some children give us huge smiles, and other ones look as if we are monsters. We figured out how to program our heater so that it remains a constant 17 degrees in our bedroom. Actually, we didn't figure it out, but it seems to work. We have another heater that we manually adjust. So far we could only figure out how to turn on the heaters for one hour intervals. Hopefully our electric bill is reasonable. If our utilities come to less than 8,000 yen per person per month, it is paid for by Nova. If it is more than that, we pay the difference. We also found out that Nova is not allowed to make a profit from providing us housing. That is good to know. Our apartment makes me feel like I am camping. We sleep on mattresses on the floor, we cook with a fancy two burner gas stove that sits on the countertop, we wash our dishes in a plastic tub inthe sink because the sink doesn't plug, and we hang our clothes on a clothesline to dry. Luckily I like camping! Our futon beds are the most comfortable I beds I have ever slept in. Phil agrees. There are windows all over our apartment. Almost every room has windows. Our 2 bedrooms each have two full length double sliding glass doors out onto the balcony. All of the windows open, and it is now warm enough to leave them open during the day. I don't know what the temperature is here, but today was the warmest it has been so far. We were walking around town today in pants and t-shirts, enjoying the sunshine. We even had lunch on our balcony. We need more furniture though. We have two chairs total in out apartment. We have 2 plates, two bowls, and three forks. Our interior walls are fine stucco, which is odd. It is like having tiny rocks covering your bedroom walls. Very strange. We live across from a karaoke place. It is apparently open until 5 am. Yesterday evening a man sang the same song for hours. There are also many kinds of sirens that drive by our house at all hours. Also, it sounds like a person drives by talking in a loudspeaker a few times a day. I have no idea what they are saying. maybe it is advertising. At first we thought it might be a message to evacuate or something, but now we are used to the loudspeaker people who drive by. Are Grandma and Grandpa Pighin home yet? Do they have an e-mail address? When do they get home? Mom, could you show them my e-mails please? If there is anyone else who would like to be added to my list, it is no trouble to add more people to my regular e-mails. Just let me know their address. Another strange thing here is the musicians in the subway stations. Anyone who wants to can sing or play an instrument or both in the subway stations. They are not asking for spare change like they are in Canada and USA (San Francisco). They have enough money, and they just like to entertain people. They even attract crowds sometimes. People just sit on the stairs and watch them play/sing. It is nice. They are usually pretty good too. Sometimes they gather in a whole band. Anyways, my hour is more than up. Talk to you later. Love, Shay :)

Hello, We are getting accustomed to taking the subway. Sometimes we are crammed in and sometimes we are the only ones in the subway car. It baffles us as to where the wind comes from, two stories underground. It is windier than outside on the street, and then suddenly it turns off. We can't see any vents or machines that create wind, and it seems unrelated to the passing subway cars. I have asked several of my students where the wind comes from, and they have no idea. They say they never thought about it before. It is kind of annoying, because I hate my hair blowing in my face, and it is windy enough outside. The wind probably prevents the air from going stale, but I want to figure out the mysterious source. On Tuesday I was sent to ''You Me Town'' to work at Nova and cover for someone who was sick. Phil and I have both been sent to Nishijin Nova (by our house) to cover for sick people. It is great to see new places, and Nova pays for your transportation and gives you written directions with a map. I guess that there are numerous schools in Fukuoka, and we can be sent anywhere at a moment's notice. Phil received his schedule for March. He works at Tenjin, Nishijin, Hakata Honko, and Chikuzen Maebaru all in March. All Nova offices that we have come across so far are within a couple of blocks from the subway. Teaching is getting easier in leaps and bounds. You follow the same routine every class. The students are put into levels. The lowest level students only know a few words or catch phrases. We don't have to teach them yet, and there are very few of them. They are Elementary or Junior High School Students who have not studied English in school yet. The highest level students can carry on a conversation with you about international politics, free trade agreements, and things that I don't even understand. These students use words like renumeration and coincidentally correctly and with ease. The first few days I thought it would be a very difficult job, but now it seems easy. We will each have one of our lessons observed and evaluated by the head teacher on Tuesday. Afterwards we discuss with the head teacher what we think we should work to improve, and those goals are what is evaluated in our next observed lesson in 4 months. There is no pass or fail, and as far as I can tell, you can't get fired unless you wilfully do something really bad to intentionally hurt Nova. And they way the teachers in the staffroom talk, you get get many warnings before getting fired. Our head teacher even told us not to worry about our evaluations on Tuesday because quote ''Nothing is expected of you'', and it is just a chance to evaluate yourself and set some goals. Wow! We have noticed that many of the teachers have odd personalities. I may be stereotyping, but Nova seems to be a good opportunity for guys who can't find a wife in their own countries (for various reasons, some of them obvious) to come to Japan and find a wife. Most of our co-workers are male, and many of them are married to Japanese women, most of whom don't even speak English! And the Nova teachers who are married to Japanese women barely speak Japanese! It is, however, very interesting and entertaining to go out to the bar with lots of other Nova teachers. I have never before sat around a table with 10 other people, all of whom are from different countries. Ireland, England, USA, Whales, New Zealand, Australia . . . it is awesome. Supposedly there are 5 ''foreigners bars'' in Fukuoka. We have now been to two, The Voodoo Lounge, and the Happy Cock. There is technically no segregation. People of all races are welcome at every bar, but foreigners tend to frequent these 5 bars. Probably because the waiters and bartenders can speak some English, and you can meet other English speaking people there easily. At the Happy Cock, there was a sign on the door that said there is a limit of 10 military personel allowed in at one time, and the bar was currently full. It also said that if you have short hair you may be asked for identification, and are required to produce it. I asked the doorman if it was a joke. He said no. He told me that the military went there once and overpowered the bouncers, so now they limit the numbers. However, they do not id anyone else. It is your personal responsibility to decide if you are too young to enter a bar, not their responsibility. Everything in Japan seems to b your own responsibility. People do not wear bicycle helmets, even when crossing a six or eight lane highway, riding their bikes. They put their babies in baskets on the front of their bikes too. You can buy alcohol and cigarettes at any age, and both are sold in vending machines everywhere. Wine, beer, and hard liquor is sold at grocery and convenience stores. A package of cigarettes is 300 yen. (divide by 80 for Canadian dollars). I think that's cheap. People can walk down the street drinking a beer, and you can smoke almost anywhere, including in malls, stores, and restaurants. Now I appreciate the no smoking laws that I took for granted in Canada. Also, it is perfectly acceptable to get completely drunk, in your 3 piece business suit. Bars do not cut you off, once again it is your responsibility to decide when to quit drinking. We have seen some jaw-dropping cars in Fukuoka. I guess that if you can afford to drive, you can AFFORD to drive. Wow, and that is coming from me, a person who has absolutely NO interest in cars. Yesterday I noticed 3 beautiful BMW's in a row. Ferraris and sports cars of all types are always on the road. There are also many cars that I could wrap my arms around the hood and nearly touch both front tires. They are so skinny. There are bicycle parkades everywhere. We can see two from our balcony. One of them has more than one storey. It has an escalator to put your bike on to go up to the next floor. Also, they stack the bikes on top of each other, just like cars, so that they can fit more in. Parkades have ramps, and you drive up on the ramp, then push the button and the ramp goes up. Then someone else can park below you. I'm not kidding. We went to the theatre a few days ago. It cost just under $50 Canadian for two of us to see ''Love, Actually''. We both enjoyed it. It was in English, with Japanese subtitles. Even though there were a few people in the elegant theatre, we were the only ones who laughed at all, so we felt kind of wierd. For $50 we laughed anyways. I think the Japanese translation must have lost the jokes. Luckily we picked up our ''Alien Registration Cards'' so now we can rent movies and watch them at home for about 400 yen per week. I don't like being an official, registered, alien, but it is our only identification. If you need to get ahold of us while we are at work, Tenjin Nova's phone number is 092-725-8377. No prank calls please. ;) Phil will be at Chikuzen Maebaru Nova in a couple of months 092-321-4441. We can't make overseas calls from our cell phones, but we can from the pay phone right outside our apartment. Mom said it cost her 39 cents a minute to call us. Not bad. Hopefully we can get a cable internet system hooked up in our apartment soon so we can chat live. Today we visited the Fukuoka Library. It blows any other library I have ever seen out of the water. Sorry, we are supposed to teach the Japanese about any idioms we can think of, so I am on an idiom track. It was a beautiful work of architecture and furnishings. It has a foreign section, and a North American section in the foreign section. There were a few rows of books that I mostly recognized. Phil was ecstatic. He was so excited that he signed out volume two of a book that he didn't know had two volumes. We had to go back and get volume one, because the story was halfway through in volume two. We also went to the Fukuoka City Museum. It was, um, uh, interesting. We should have gone through a little quicker, but I felt disrespectful to the other Japanese people who were there if I didn't spend a sufficient amount of time looking at the displays. Some of it was very interesting, but some of it reminded me of grade eleven history class. After that, we had lunch and watched the dogs walk by, with their proud owners. All of the dogs were wearing outfits. Some of them were just sewaters, but we also saw dogs with bowties around their necks, heads, and ears. One was wearing a bumblebee outfit, one had a sailor costume and hat, and one had on a full baseball uniform. These dogs were every shape and size. Some of them could fit in your hand, while others looked like St. Bernards. There was even a Ted! When we kept walking we came across a Dog Cafe. People brought their dogs right into the cafe, bought them dog lunches, and either sat in the cafe with their dogs, or they could take-out the meal! There was a dog show on the beach, and people were waiting in line-ups with their dogs. All of the hundreds of dogs were on leashes, and none of them were misbehaved. There were no fights. A girl even brought her cat, on a leash, to the dog show and none of the dogs cared! Dad, I found the homeless people. They live under blue tarps in parks. They hang their laundry in the nearby trees. I asked a student, and he said that there are about 10,000 homeless in Fukuoka out of 1.3 million people. I guess you can only get welfare if you can prove you need it, like if you are disabled. However, the homeless are not associated with crime in Japan. They stick to themselves. I saw one of them shining shoes outside a mall. The student also said that most of them are educated, and they read newspapers. I was told that they even pick up litter so that they have a purpose and can feel like they are contributing to society. We saw one homeless guy carrying as many bags of litter as he could hold. Maybe he was going to eat it. I don't know. Supposedly they are nothing to be afraid of. It was another beautiful, coatless day in Fukuoka city today. People were laying on the beach, throwing frisbees, and playing badminton. We went for a six hour walk, and we're exhausted. I have run out of things to say, so goodbye. I hope you are all happy and healthy. Love, Shay