Recent developments have made me change my plans. don't worry, it's nothing too drastic. i'm still set on leaving JET by the end of my current contract. the main change is that i will most likely cancel my planned singapore trip in december. instead, i'll make it a tokyo or osaka trip since i have to go to either of those 2 cities anyway to do something for the UK visa. i'm thinking of shipping my clothes and perhaps some other stuff back later in march, and asking for a gst waiver as a returning citizen. or maybe i might exploit a loophole that my friend told me about - we'll see.

before i go into details about recent developments, i wanted to mention an incident that further confirms to me that i shouldn't be a teacher. so as i was walking past the sec 1 classroom, i saw their form teacher outside talking to 2 kids, with one appearing to be in tears. later, i found out that one kid (A) had said something to the effect of the other kid being unable to do maths and english, causing that kid (B) to cry or otherwise feel bad. normally, i'd feel bad for kid B. not in this case, because kid B puts minimal effort into studies! i can't speak for maths class, but for english at least, this kid is always falling asleep, not paying attention, talking with friends, and there's just the general attitude of "english is too hard, so i'm not even going to bother". is it any wonder that there's no improvement? i suppose someone who's more teacher-inclined might say that kid B needs time to come around, and that people bloom at different times, and that kid A shouldn't be saying mean things. i'll agree with one point though - kid A shouldn't be saying that as they're not exactly top of the class either. feels like a pot and kettle situation in this case.

despite all my planning to have it happen as early as possible, it seems that i will be telling the kids about the new guy only less than a week before he actually shows up. perhaps i should have communicated that i wanted to let everyone know by a certain date. but yes...japan finding more ways to make things difficult for themselves. just spoke to the principal of the bigger school today, and he told me that there was no time (despite him promising to make time when i asked him about it last week), and blah blah. exactly the situation i was hoping to avoid! so we compromised - i'll tell them next week, during the lunch music time. not ideal, but it's better than his suggestion of catching everyone by surprise on the new guy's first day. i'll probably clear it with the principal of the smaller school on sunday (it's a school day because of a community event), to tell the kids on tuesday. thursday would be a little late, i think.

applied to 3 more firms yesterday. one was a re-application, since their job ad was updated to be looking for chemists. the other 2 were speculative applications, ie. the firms don't have appropriate vacancies, but i'm leaving my CV with them in case something pops up. no harm casting a wider net, right? i might send more of those out, with appropriately-tuned expectations that i won't be hearing from those firms. they didn't advertise a suitable vacancy, after all, and i'm being proactive by approaching them. i'm actually still quite skeptical of firms saying that they'll keep candidates' resumes on file and consider them when an appropriate vacancy opens up. maybe it's my cynical singaporean side again, but i'm more inclined to believe that firms just throw the resumes away, or at best, into a dark corner. at least that's how i believe it goes in singapore. reddit has stories of people in other countries getting contact from firms though, so maybe it's different there. speaking of singapore firms, one got back to me, more than a month after i wrote to them. it was a rejection, unfortunately, but i was still impressed with the director apologizing unreservedly for being late to reply.

future plans and trip thoughts! right now, the plan is to submit the UK visa application around december 20th. gives me a decent buffer in case anything goes wrong, and is late enough that i can wait until about june 20th to enter the UK. as part of the application, i have to submit my biometric data at a collection centre in tokyo or osaka. the decision is now between taking a domestic flight to tokyo, or the highway bus to osaka. the plane will cost about 24000 yen, while the bus will cost about 12000 yen. annoyingly, there's a 10000 yen surcharge for using the osaka venue but not for tokyo, so it roughly evens out. i'm considering spending a night in osaka, and staying for a few days in kobe after getting the errand done. i regret not buying some stuff back the last time, and i figure that i should make up for it while i can. my tokyo bucket list is really only one item long, and that's to try sushi dai, to see if the people getting up in the middle of the night to go down and queue are actually crazy, or on to something. figure i can do that in the future.

good news is that by doing things this way, i have about 6 more days of leave to play with. i'll probably put them towards the end of my time here. i'd initially wanted to start taking leave in january, maybe a couple days off a week, but i realize that by putting everything until the end, i may be able to take leave into april. hopefully i won't have to, because doing so would mean that the UK start date is going to be late, but the small comfort is that i can draw salary for a little longer here. it's the best of a bad situation, so let's hope it doesn't happen.

small reminder to myself: SMBC requires a minimum monthly average balance of 50000 yen ($500) to avoid paying the fall-below fee. it's 2200 yen per month, which is ridiculous! going to have to keep that in mind when i do the transfer back to my singapore account. the plan is to keep this account a little longer to receive my pension refund. once i do, i'll empty it out and close it.

-random thought of the day: Busy weekend incoming!-