Westward, ever Westward
A couple weeks ago the people I was staying with (George and Christo) and I decided that I needed to find someplace else to stay within the next few days. It was time, it made sense, and I needed that pressure to actually get something done. I found a couple people who seemed willing to charge not very much rent in return for help with chores and stuff. One found someone else who would be around for a longer period of time than I was planning (1 month or so), which was what she needed, but
the other guy seemed all right, it should work for him, we should get along, so I got in touch with friends I`d made on the Las Vegas trip and found a place to stay for the weekend while Ed (the guy with the room) checked up on my references.
So I ended up in this kind of sketchy situation. One of my friends lived in Berkeley in this apartment building that was kind of like a dorm, single rooms, shared bathroom. His room was way too small for me to comfortably crash in, but there was a room down the hall with a doorframe that was beat up enough to allow the door to be jimmied open with a credit card, so long as it wasn`t dead-bolted. We moved his mattress (it was so bad that he`d stopped using it) and a couple bed
pads into the room, he let me copy his keys, and I started living out of there.
This was an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Fortunately bed pads are surprisingly warm and the bathroom was right across the hall, so I could just listen at the door, and when it was quiet slip across unnoticed. But there was no phone or internet access, which made my ongoing job search incredibly difficult. And then, since I didn`t have a California driver`s license and wasn`t even able to show proof
of living in the state, I couldn`t get a library card. So I had to make do with the 15-minute internet at the public library or the 10-minute, ad-sponsored internet in the student union. As for phones, I either had to use 23 minutes off my phone card ($1.15) on a pay phone or beg someone to let me use their phone, which almost never
happened. For the most part if I went into a store or restaurant or anywhere and asked if I could please borrow the phone for a minute, I have a phone card, the looked at me like I was crazy and pointed me in the direction of the nearest pay phone.
I`m still kind of bitter about that. People, for the most part, unless they know you, refuse to listen or care. And yeah, there are a bazillion homeless people in the bay area asking for moneď˝™, but if you`re not going to give them any, you can still at least show them some respect by telling them so, and maybe they`ve got something else to say that you could be a nice person and listen to, nothing except a
couple minutes. And a phone? Okay, so sometimes places would need it for business, but really it doesn`t seem like much to ask, especially since I just needed it to get in touch with a friend, wasn`t even going to try to use it to find a job...
Anyway, I think it was Wednesday night my friend told me that someone had been by asking about the empty room, so I decided to move out the next day. Another friend from Vegas also lives in Berkeley and had also offered to let me crash on his couch for a couple days, and had a phone and internet, so I took him up on it. I spent most of Thursday looking into jobs after typing "volunteer non-profit job travel" into google, and eventually decided that teaching english as a foreign language
(TEFL) made the most sense, since pretty much anything else that came up either meant paying for it yourself, having experience in the adventure travel industry, or making a two-year commitment. So Friday I devoted to looking up programs in the US and abroad.
At this point I had pretty much given up on hearing back from Ed, and decided that what I wanted to do, if possible, was stay at my friend`s for the next week while he was home for Thanksgiving and use that time to find a good certification program and a job and/or travel up until then.
In doing my research though, I quickly found a certification program, located in China, that looked good and more my style than somewhere in the US. A class was beginning Nov. 29, so I wrote to find out if it would be possible to enter it, assuming not, and then spent the rest of the day finding out if the program was any good or not and other useful stuff about TEFL, ultimately deciding that the program seemed like it would provide a good enough education to be worth pursuing.
Then that evening I took off to go see some Mexican musical melodramas from the 1940s at the Pacific Film Archive, $7.50 for a double feature, good deal and a lot of fun. When I went back to the apartment, I found out that it would be possible to get into the Nov. 29 class, and so started looking for flights and e-mailed my dad, who is in Japan visiting his wife for two weeks through Thanksgiving, to
find out if it might work to stop by there on my way to Suzhou (just north of Shanghai), with comparative flight costs for different options.
After doing a little bit of work, I decided that it was time to go to bed and that I`d do more in the morning, but then I couldn`t really get to sleep and wanted to get my application to the program in right away, so filled it out and checked e-mail to find that my dad had written back from Japan and that I should go there. So I booked a ridiculously cheap flight with STA travel, leaving Sunday, finally got
to bed around 4.
Saturday I spent a little bit of time at a pre-game party for the big game between Cal and Stanford, and spent the afternoon trying to get in touch with everyone who should know that I`d be leaving the area soon and packing. That night I went to a party that I`d been invited to by a person I`d met at a party I went to while I was crashing at Joey`s a month earlier.
The next morning didn`t go so well. I slept through my alarm and woke up at 9:30, which was when I`d wanted to reach the airport. By the time I finally got to the check-in counter it was just past 11. I jumped the line and just walked up to the nearest available counter at the first-class check-in, which was okay since no one was in that line. Unfortunately, they close check-in 30 minutes before the flight leaves, so I couldn't get on the 11:30 flight I'd booked. Fortunately, there was another flight leaving at 12:55 which they were willing to put me on for just a surcharge rather than making me buy a new ticket.
But then when I gave them my debit card, it wouldn't work. We went through a whole process, they even sent it to the office by pneumatic tube to check with Visa, but they wouldn't accept it. I was just about in a panic by this point, because I didn't have anywhere near enough cash and that card is pretty much my only access to any money. Eventually they suggested that I try to get the money out of an ATM, and it worked, I got my ticket, that's all okay.
So I went to go get in the security line, wait for a while, then reached the ticket/passport checker and she told me to go get in a different line. Turns out my ticket was marked for secondary screening, somewhat understandable but very frustrating. So I had to stand and wait while about ten people headed to Guadalajara got pulled to the front of the line. Eventually it got late enough that I and another guy headed to Tokyo got to get in line. Then we had to do all the normal things, and our carry-on baggage was completely unpacked and searched, we got a thorough going over with the metal detecting wand... at this point I was kind of annoyed, but mostly relieved that I'd still be able to get on a flight. By the time I got through that and called Dad to let him know what had happened, they were calling my name over the PA system, but I did get on the plane.
An uneventful flight, although they didn't show the movies I'd been hoping they would. I ended up getting in about 5pm on Monday, Dad met me at the airport and took me back to his wife, Hatsumi's, sister, Sayumi's house, where I'm staying while I'm here, for dinner. I should revise that sentence, but I'm not going to.
I'm in a little game/internet place in Ikebukuro, and the guy next to me is watching what appears to be a comedy/horror movie by Broken Lizard, the guys who made Super Troopers, set on some Caribbean island or something. I didn't know that they'd made another movie.
Anyway, it's been good being here. I was a little worried about being able to get a visa to China from here, but I went over to the Chinese embassy on Wednesday with a photo and my application and was able to pick it up the yesterday morning. It's strange though, they charge more for US citizens than for anyone else. In the US too, although not quite as much more. Anyway, that's all worked out, so I'll be flying to Shanghai Sunday morning.
As for my time here, it's been pretty fun. Mel Butler and his friend Mary are here for a concert he gave at the Minatomirai Concert Hall in Yokohama on the Fisk organ there on Wednesday. He also played at an evensong and gave a master class on hymn playing last night, and gave a concert today, at the chapel at Rikkyo University. So I've been going to all this, kind of typical for travel with Dad, but nice. I've known Mel since before I remember, we was the organist in Rochester, NY when I was very small and an organ was getting put in there. Now he's the organist, I think music director, at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle.
Besides the organ stuff we also went to Kamakura, just a little south of Yokohama, on Tuesday, where there're many temples and shrines. It was fun to walk around. There are paths all over the place, and it was fun to explore. I think we've done other stuff too, I'm not sure what. Oh, on Wednesday night Dad and I worked on a very small practice organ that Tomoko, who, okay I'm not entirely sure of all the connections, but she got to Boston to study organ about the same time Dad got to Gloucester to work at Fisk. One of the stops on the practice organ wasn't really working so we had to take it apart and fix it. Then she'd prepared a dinner, lots of stuff, including some really fresh sushi, which we ate in a reservable lounge on the 32nd floor. It had a great view.
There might be more to write about, but there are messages in Japanese coming up on this computer and I want to publish this before it's too late.
the other guy seemed all right, it should work for him, we should get along, so I got in touch with friends I`d made on the Las Vegas trip and found a place to stay for the weekend while Ed (the guy with the room) checked up on my references.
So I ended up in this kind of sketchy situation. One of my friends lived in Berkeley in this apartment building that was kind of like a dorm, single rooms, shared bathroom. His room was way too small for me to comfortably crash in, but there was a room down the hall with a doorframe that was beat up enough to allow the door to be jimmied open with a credit card, so long as it wasn`t dead-bolted. We moved his mattress (it was so bad that he`d stopped using it) and a couple bed
pads into the room, he let me copy his keys, and I started living out of there.
This was an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Fortunately bed pads are surprisingly warm and the bathroom was right across the hall, so I could just listen at the door, and when it was quiet slip across unnoticed. But there was no phone or internet access, which made my ongoing job search incredibly difficult. And then, since I didn`t have a California driver`s license and wasn`t even able to show proof
of living in the state, I couldn`t get a library card. So I had to make do with the 15-minute internet at the public library or the 10-minute, ad-sponsored internet in the student union. As for phones, I either had to use 23 minutes off my phone card ($1.15) on a pay phone or beg someone to let me use their phone, which almost never
happened. For the most part if I went into a store or restaurant or anywhere and asked if I could please borrow the phone for a minute, I have a phone card, the looked at me like I was crazy and pointed me in the direction of the nearest pay phone.
I`m still kind of bitter about that. People, for the most part, unless they know you, refuse to listen or care. And yeah, there are a bazillion homeless people in the bay area asking for moneď˝™, but if you`re not going to give them any, you can still at least show them some respect by telling them so, and maybe they`ve got something else to say that you could be a nice person and listen to, nothing except a
couple minutes. And a phone? Okay, so sometimes places would need it for business, but really it doesn`t seem like much to ask, especially since I just needed it to get in touch with a friend, wasn`t even going to try to use it to find a job...
Anyway, I think it was Wednesday night my friend told me that someone had been by asking about the empty room, so I decided to move out the next day. Another friend from Vegas also lives in Berkeley and had also offered to let me crash on his couch for a couple days, and had a phone and internet, so I took him up on it. I spent most of Thursday looking into jobs after typing "volunteer non-profit job travel" into google, and eventually decided that teaching english as a foreign language
(TEFL) made the most sense, since pretty much anything else that came up either meant paying for it yourself, having experience in the adventure travel industry, or making a two-year commitment. So Friday I devoted to looking up programs in the US and abroad.
At this point I had pretty much given up on hearing back from Ed, and decided that what I wanted to do, if possible, was stay at my friend`s for the next week while he was home for Thanksgiving and use that time to find a good certification program and a job and/or travel up until then.
In doing my research though, I quickly found a certification program, located in China, that looked good and more my style than somewhere in the US. A class was beginning Nov. 29, so I wrote to find out if it would be possible to enter it, assuming not, and then spent the rest of the day finding out if the program was any good or not and other useful stuff about TEFL, ultimately deciding that the program seemed like it would provide a good enough education to be worth pursuing.
Then that evening I took off to go see some Mexican musical melodramas from the 1940s at the Pacific Film Archive, $7.50 for a double feature, good deal and a lot of fun. When I went back to the apartment, I found out that it would be possible to get into the Nov. 29 class, and so started looking for flights and e-mailed my dad, who is in Japan visiting his wife for two weeks through Thanksgiving, to
find out if it might work to stop by there on my way to Suzhou (just north of Shanghai), with comparative flight costs for different options.
After doing a little bit of work, I decided that it was time to go to bed and that I`d do more in the morning, but then I couldn`t really get to sleep and wanted to get my application to the program in right away, so filled it out and checked e-mail to find that my dad had written back from Japan and that I should go there. So I booked a ridiculously cheap flight with STA travel, leaving Sunday, finally got
to bed around 4.
Saturday I spent a little bit of time at a pre-game party for the big game between Cal and Stanford, and spent the afternoon trying to get in touch with everyone who should know that I`d be leaving the area soon and packing. That night I went to a party that I`d been invited to by a person I`d met at a party I went to while I was crashing at Joey`s a month earlier.
The next morning didn`t go so well. I slept through my alarm and woke up at 9:30, which was when I`d wanted to reach the airport. By the time I finally got to the check-in counter it was just past 11. I jumped the line and just walked up to the nearest available counter at the first-class check-in, which was okay since no one was in that line. Unfortunately, they close check-in 30 minutes before the flight leaves, so I couldn't get on the 11:30 flight I'd booked. Fortunately, there was another flight leaving at 12:55 which they were willing to put me on for just a surcharge rather than making me buy a new ticket.
But then when I gave them my debit card, it wouldn't work. We went through a whole process, they even sent it to the office by pneumatic tube to check with Visa, but they wouldn't accept it. I was just about in a panic by this point, because I didn't have anywhere near enough cash and that card is pretty much my only access to any money. Eventually they suggested that I try to get the money out of an ATM, and it worked, I got my ticket, that's all okay.
So I went to go get in the security line, wait for a while, then reached the ticket/passport checker and she told me to go get in a different line. Turns out my ticket was marked for secondary screening, somewhat understandable but very frustrating. So I had to stand and wait while about ten people headed to Guadalajara got pulled to the front of the line. Eventually it got late enough that I and another guy headed to Tokyo got to get in line. Then we had to do all the normal things, and our carry-on baggage was completely unpacked and searched, we got a thorough going over with the metal detecting wand... at this point I was kind of annoyed, but mostly relieved that I'd still be able to get on a flight. By the time I got through that and called Dad to let him know what had happened, they were calling my name over the PA system, but I did get on the plane.
An uneventful flight, although they didn't show the movies I'd been hoping they would. I ended up getting in about 5pm on Monday, Dad met me at the airport and took me back to his wife, Hatsumi's, sister, Sayumi's house, where I'm staying while I'm here, for dinner. I should revise that sentence, but I'm not going to.
I'm in a little game/internet place in Ikebukuro, and the guy next to me is watching what appears to be a comedy/horror movie by Broken Lizard, the guys who made Super Troopers, set on some Caribbean island or something. I didn't know that they'd made another movie.
Anyway, it's been good being here. I was a little worried about being able to get a visa to China from here, but I went over to the Chinese embassy on Wednesday with a photo and my application and was able to pick it up the yesterday morning. It's strange though, they charge more for US citizens than for anyone else. In the US too, although not quite as much more. Anyway, that's all worked out, so I'll be flying to Shanghai Sunday morning.
As for my time here, it's been pretty fun. Mel Butler and his friend Mary are here for a concert he gave at the Minatomirai Concert Hall in Yokohama on the Fisk organ there on Wednesday. He also played at an evensong and gave a master class on hymn playing last night, and gave a concert today, at the chapel at Rikkyo University. So I've been going to all this, kind of typical for travel with Dad, but nice. I've known Mel since before I remember, we was the organist in Rochester, NY when I was very small and an organ was getting put in there. Now he's the organist, I think music director, at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle.
Besides the organ stuff we also went to Kamakura, just a little south of Yokohama, on Tuesday, where there're many temples and shrines. It was fun to walk around. There are paths all over the place, and it was fun to explore. I think we've done other stuff too, I'm not sure what. Oh, on Wednesday night Dad and I worked on a very small practice organ that Tomoko, who, okay I'm not entirely sure of all the connections, but she got to Boston to study organ about the same time Dad got to Gloucester to work at Fisk. One of the stops on the practice organ wasn't really working so we had to take it apart and fix it. Then she'd prepared a dinner, lots of stuff, including some really fresh sushi, which we ate in a reservable lounge on the 32nd floor. It had a great view.
There might be more to write about, but there are messages in Japanese coming up on this computer and I want to publish this before it's too late.
posted by Colin at 4:06 PM
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