Thursday, August 23, 2012

interns, jica, museums, oh my

Well, it's almost the end of another week! I've been in and out of the office all week, which has been pretty interesting. :)

There have been a couple of interns at the office for the past few days, presumably learning about what it means to work as a civil servant/in international relations/whatnot. On Monday Satou-san held a "What is JET" workshop for them, which I sort of helped with. I wasn't there for all of it, but basically we just explained what JET was (even though both he and I are new at our JET jobs, haha) and did some role-playing exercises with them.

The next day, Kondou-san and Hirata-san took the interns to learn about JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency), and I went along with them. We spent the morning learning about what JICA does before having lunch at a yummy Thai place nearby. As we were heading back, I found out that I had a meeting at 1:30 for the newsletter I'm supposed to help translate, which I had totally forgotten about. Oops. So we called to tell them we would be late, and then Kondou-san (who was supposed to go with me) ended up having to work on something else so I headed over to the CCIA by myself. I was feeling really bad about being late for my first meeting, but then when I showed up a little after 2:00 they told me that actually my meeting was at 3:00. -.-' So I just hung out with Gina for a while before we went to our meeting, so all's well that ends well I guess!

Then today, after finally finishing up the last of the translation projects I've been working on (yay), Satou-san and I went to the Chiba City Museum of Art! It was partly so that I could see the museum (since part of my job is knowing as much as possible about Chiba City and what's in it), and partly for me to pick up some vouchers to give to the Chiba JETs at orientation tomorrow. We met with the vice-director of the museum (vice curator? I'm not really sure. Second-in-command, anyway), who was nice but really hard to understand - I found out later that even Satou-san had trouble hearing what he was saying sometimes, which made me feel a lot better about myself, haha. We got to take a look at the current exhibit, which is all art involving animals, which was pretty cool. They also had a participation game where we had to find certain animals and write down what paintings they were in, but both Satou-san and I failed to find them all, even though it was the easy version. -.-' We did get consolation/participation bookmarks, though. :)

Tomorrow is finally Chiba orientation, which I've been looking forward to ever since I got here, basically. I'll get to see the other new Chiba JETs again and meet the ones who came later than my group, plus returning Chiba JETs! There's also a welcome dinner planned for afterward, which should be pretty fun. And then on Saturday I'll be going to a frisbee practice, which hopefully will be fun! I found out about this Chiba City frisbee team from Cory, who I knew from Carleton and also works in Chiba (small world!), which is very exciting. So it should be an exciting weekend. :D

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