Last week in Kumamoto

Yello Everybody,

Tonight is my last night in Kumamoto, tommorrow i'm leaving my apartment and starting my week and a half holiday around Japan before flying home to Australia. This week has been a bit hectic, i've been doing all the last minute cleaning, cancelling all my service(phone, internet etc.), sending parcels to Australia(2 parcels adding up to around 25 kilos) unfortunately there was a box size limited and my 2 cushion chairs didn't fit properly so i'm going to leave them here for the next NT and of course packing. On top of that I had my normal week in Kusunoki classroom(the closest of the classrooms, 10 minutes by train and 15 minutes walk) where I taught my final lessons from tuesday to friday. On saturday I had an office day which I used mainly to shred all my Peppy related documents(there's a secrecy agreement, although I'm at a total loss to who would want anything related to myself or to any of the teaching techniques, my theory is that it is part of the over companies policies which were past down to the smaller sub companies like Peppy regardless of actual validity) and saying some last goodbyes. Today was spent doing all the final cleaning and packing at my apartment.

All in all i'm very happy with how i'm leaving Peppy, i've given a gift and a goodbye card/message to every student(and left one for all the students who were unable to come to my final lesson), a gift and a goodbye letter to the JT at each of my schools(who have been a great help over the past year), a gift and goodbye letter to the AM(area manager, she is doing a great job) and a gift to each of the hard working Japanese sales and office staff, to whom I wrote out a short message in Kanji(I created the message and was given help translating it into Kanji by a JT and then personally wrote it out(very difficult I have a much greater respect for Japanese literacy now)). I received a thankyou gift and a board with messages/stickers/photos from the AM, some of the staff and JTs, which i'm very touched by.

I will miss Kumamoto a lot, this past year has been a great experience for me, meeting a lot of new people, interacting in a different culture, teaching young children and learning a lot of new things. While I am happy to return home to Australia, to see friends, family, go to university and to be able to communicate more easily, this city has become a home to me and I will miss it, it's people and treasure my memories of life here.

My plans for the coming holiday are as follows- monday 19th catch a shinkansen to Hiroshima, spend the night in Hiroshima at a backpackers, tuesday 20th spend the day in Hiroshima(seeing the A-Bomb Dome and the Peace Garden Square) and catch a late night overnight bus to Kyoto, wednesday 21st arrive in Kyoto, spend the day sightseeing and spend the night at a backpackers, thursday 22nd spend the day in Kyoto(the 2 main things I want to see are the Inari Fushimi shrine(famous for having hundreds of red Torii Gates) and the animation studios of Kyoto Animation(the outside anyway, inside is not allowed) who've done some of my favorite anime like Lucky Star and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzamiya and catch a late night overnight bus to Tokyo, Friday 23rd arrive in Tokyo, spend the day sightseeing and spend the night at a youth hostel, Saturday 24th, spend the day sightseeing and go to the Australian Embassy to vote in the Australian Federal Election, Spend the night at the same youth hostel, Sunday 25th, spend the day sightseeing(the main things I want to see in Tokyo this time are, the studio gibli museum(famous for the movie Spirited Away and many others, Hayao Miyazaki's company) and Tokyo Tower), catch a late night overnight bus to Nagoya, Monday 26th arrive in Nagoya, goto the Peppy head office and collect my final pay(Japanese pay system is very strange and annoying), spend the day sightseeing in Nagoya and catch a late night overnight bus back to Tokyo, Tuesday 27th arrive back in Tokyo, spend the day sightseeing and souveneer/gift shopping, spend the night at a Capsule hotel in Akihabara, Wednesday 28th spend the day sightseeing, in the afternoon go to Narita airport and catch an 8:00pm flight to Brisbane Australia, arriving at 8:00am in the morning Australian time(roughly 11 hour flight).