On Christmas Eve we had a little party. Ray, one of the lads we live with, made loads of food, including delish meatloaf and chocolate scones, om nom nom. Derry made tofurkey, which turned out quite well! I ate a ridiculous amount of cheese and crackers.

Derry's mum had sent over a Christmas Cake and some Christmas pudding. These went down quite well with the Japanese folk. I found it very amusing to see people eating Christmas cake with their chopsticks :)

On Christmas day we exchanged our gifts. Derry got me a hair dryer, a curling tongs, a ring, loads of Pocky and the best teddy bear ever. Derry Claus fuckin rules. We went into Shinjuku in the afternoon to have a Christmas pint with Sean Lugosi in Dubliner's Irish Bar! We don't know Sean very well but it was great to see a familiar face and to hear his impressions of living in Japan. I got a pint of Strongbow for 1000Yen (€9.19).

Then we came home and made our me-xmas-ican feast. I ate 5 tacos and a giant portion of nachos. I'd been craving mexican so bad for the last few weeks so it was awesome. We watched Elf while we ate.

After dinner we Skyped both of our families in Kildare, Laois, Dublin, Offaly and Chicago. We finished off the day and the bottle of Captain Morgans, watching Bad Santa and Home Alone with our fave roomie Ryuta:
An interesting Christmas to say the least.

So I have FINALLY gotten a job. I officially live here. Up until now everything was up in the air and I honestly didn't know if the whole Japan thing was going to work out. Myself and Derry had started working on our backup plan which was to move to Korea, because going back to Ireland with our tails between our legs was not an option.

The job seems awesome. It's in a Bilingual preschool in Tachikawa, which is about 30 mins away from where we live. I only have to teach a couple of classes a week, so I won't have to spend ridic amounts of time planning lessons, and the rest of the time I'm just there to participate in the activities and talk English to the kids to provide a bilingual environment for them. Easy!

It's slightly less money than I had hoped but I suppose for someone with no experience coming in at the middle of the school year, I can only be so picky. And it's still double what I was making at home! Furthermore, it's a LOVELY school and I'd much rather work with kids singing songs and going to the park than teach 40 year old men the functions of the present perfect progressive tense, ya know?

My next step will be to start the application process for my visa, and to start looking for private students to tide me over until I start working full time, because I don't start until February and I'm definitely going to run out of money before I get paid in March! Uh oh!

I'm feeling pretty positive about everything, which is good because I had just about given up hope, and I really didn't want to go to Korea, haha!

Yay Japan!

I haven't been updating this much, because we haven't really been doing anything very exciting. My two priorities are jobhunting and not spending money which puts a severe limit on the amount of fun things we can do.

We have been having a laugh though, going on lots of walks and doing a bit of sightseeing. I put some photos up on my Tumblr:
hamsterhatesyou.tumblr.com

I've had a few interviews so far but no job offers. The job market is a bit more competitive than I had anticipated and every week that goes by my bank balance drops and I get a bit more nervous. A lot of the jobs on offer right now are for an April start, which is when the new school year begins, but we can't last that long on our funds.

Hopefully things will work out. If not, we have a backup plan :)
I'm keeping a positive attitude and I think I'm getting a lot better at interviewing so hopefully something will come up soon!

xx

:(

I had an interview for a job today which would have been PERFECT.
But I was told I probably won't get it because I have an Irish accent.

FML.