More news from Senior Ted

Ted's still having difficulty creating a blogger account, but in the meantime he sent this along to me for posting:

Hiya Bill,

I've been trying to set up a blogger account but it just isn't happening. Not sure if it's the old Mac I'm using, the Japanese instructions I'm trying to translate, or the Japanified blogger website. I guess just post this letter until I can figure it out. I didn't make it that long in london. I started to get itchy about having something worthwhile to do, and picking up the odd jobs that entail illegal work just wasn't cutting it. I called it quits and headed back to the family in St.Louis. My parents are selling their house, so I went home to pack up my stuff and haul it into storage, and give em a hand moving everything. I was home about 3 months when over the phone I landed a job here in Japan teaching English with the stipulation that I had to be in Hiroshima in 10 days. I said some quick goodbyes, got things in order, and arrived here in late May. Had a two week training period, then decided on taking a post in a town of 50,000 just outside of Hiroshima and moved out here last week. For the most part I'm an elementary school teacher at a couple different schools, teaching 1st to 6th graders. It's pretty fun work, just play a lot of games with em and then at recess I head out for some baseball or kickball. I do a couple evening
classes, adults, corporations, high schoolers, in all I only teach 22 hours a week which is sweet, but in the country side it takes forever to get places, so I'm on buses or trains about 10 hours a week. The plan is to be here about a year or so and save up as much as I can. Tentatively I'm hoping to backpack across Asia and through North Africa with the money I save, but a plan can change quite a bit in a year. So here's some odd things I've observed since being here.

- Some 7-11's sell dried seahorses as well as soup flavored pringles for snacks.

- All my elementary schools have a fleet of unicycles, which the kids use in gym class or recess.

- There's a surprising equivalent to a wet willy here called concho. A boy will clasp his two hands together in a fist, extend his index fingers, and proceed to run up to another boy and stick his fingers up the boys asshole. That's right. And it's only boy on boy, and sometimes the receiver will proceed to bend over and ask for more. One of the male english teachers got conchoed the other day, and I think it's
only a matter of time for my concho cherry to be unexpectedly popped, not something I'm looking forward to.

- Much like the bill murray commercial in lost in translation, i saw a commercial which just showed a bald bruce willis coolly taking off his sunglasses, then a shot of him standing next to two cars and all he says is Congratulations, wtf is
that.

- Similarly they have a thing for Jean Reno who has his own line of perfume here called "I love Jean Reno"

That's it for me, I'll try to give updates of weird Japanese shit when I encounter them. On other notes, Eddy, are you moving to St.Louis? Reed, I too am currently dating a girl named Emily. And a Creek reference, when I was in london, Joshua Jackson was starring in "A Life in Theater" with Patrick Stewart. The Captain reportedly had no idea who Josh was and completely upstaged Pacey.

Ted