The Wonderful World of Carl

Wow, I just realized I haven't sent out a post since the beginning of August. Alrighty, well do I ever have lots to tell. The title of this post is not an ego trip, I swear. It's just that a while back I was discussing snack food in class, and many students informed me that their favorite snack food was Carl. Thinking this was a joke I kind of passed it off, but they insisted it was true, and told me how to find it. It doesn't actually say Carl on the bag, but the Japanese name is the phonetic translation of my name. In Japanese it looks like this. カール. I hope it displays right on your computer. After that I tried to find as many kinds of Carl as I could and these are the results. Plain and Cheesy Carl. BBQ and Oniony Carl. Curry and Salty Carl.

I guess management is happy with my performance at work. I have received a lot of extra training, so I have more responsibilities than some of the teachers who have been there longer than myself. I also just got my 6 month performance evaluation back and it was pretty glowing so they're going to let me stay. It's an easy job though so I take the praise with a grain of salt. From what I hear you've got to be amazingly stupid to get fired. I got a lot of overtime in September which added up to a lot of extra cash, so I bought a second-hand PS2 to maintain my video game addiction, and to use it for watching all the DVDs that Andrew sent me .We also bought a very cheap Japanese DVD player so we had more options at the video store.

Let's see what else has happened. I got an agent so I can try acting in Japan. No work so far. I've also picked up a couple of private students, so I am teaching in their homes. It's a little bit different though as they are children and their level of English varies. One girl I teach is six years old and uses "like, you know" in her sentences. She's better than 50% of my adult students at Nova. The most amazing of all of the events that have happened since my last post, however, is that we climbed Mt. Fuji, or Fujisan as they call it here. Not to be confused with Mr. Fuji the WWF wrestling manager from the 80's.

If you have read any posts by my friend Joe, whom some of you know and some of you don't. He climbed Fuji in July. His experience was a bit different as he went with friends form work, and some co-workers of one of his students. We decided to climb out of season (climbing season ends sometime in August) and went with a tour group. So it was far less crowded on the mountain, however no one in our group spoke English, including our guide. This made for an interesting trip. Before the trip we made sure we were well prepared, we borrowed some jackets and a backpack for Colleen, I made a couple of containers of trail mix (which you can't buy ready-made here) and we stocked up with liquid and chocolate bars. It made for heavier backpacks but we didn't want to be caught unaware. We had to be at the motor pool at 7:50 and seeing as Colleen and I usually go to bed very late, we decided "Hey, lets just stay up! We'll sleep on the bus!" Bad idea. We knew it was a four hour trip there so we figured that was plenty of time to rest up, and it would have been. Our tour guide had other ideas however. First we had to go to Kyoto to pick up more passengers, and then we had a rest stop, then a lunch break, then another rest stop, and finally I believe there was one more rest stop in there before we finally made it to the mountain. And each stop was punctuated by a good 10-15 minutes of instructions from our tour guide, none of which we understood. So in short, when we got to the mountain, we had been awake for more than 24 hours. We arrived at the 5th station of Mt. Fuji in the bus, which seems like cheating because it's halfway up the mountain, but I guess that's how it's done. Once we got inside, we were all directed into a changing area, where other members of our group started changing into expensive climbing gear, headmounted flashlights, spiked boots, oxygen masks and climbing picks. This was the point at which Colleen and I went "Oh S**t!" Thinking we were completely underprepared. This proved to be unfounded though as we had heard from Joe that many locals have a tendency to overestimate the mountain and it was true. Oxygen? It was cold and highly elevated but no more than a cold fall day in Calgary. Anyhow, the changing was done, and we all sat down together to cram in a huge (by Japanese standards) carb filled meal. After the meal we were herded outside to the gathering area to meet our climbing guide. I swear this guy must have been 70, and he was standing there smoking. Once introduced he started barking at us in a rough gravelly voice, which we quickly learned (by watching the others) was instructions for stretching. Okay, nothing too vigorous, we finished and then he proceeded to give us a good twenty minutes of instructions about safety and technique. I'm just guessing here 'cause again, we didn't pick up a word except "toilet". Finally the talking was done, it was time for action. We were heading to the path up the mountain, at 6:00 pm. That's right, we were starting just as the sun was settings. We were climbing the entire way, up the mountain, in the dark.

Alright, that's enough typing for me. To find out if we survived click here, where Colleen will take over the rest of the story. For the pictures click here.