To the uninformed

Hey everyone, this is the first of many (undoubtedly, too many) blogs that I will be posting. I hope you check back often and I will do my best to paint the adventures of Dean with as colourful a palate as I am able.

So, where do I begin (again)? I am sure it will come as a mild shock to some of you to learn that I am currently in the beautiful countryside of Japan. The town of Muikamachi is my new home for at least the next year as I have signed a contract as an Assistant Language Teacher (hereafter referred to as ALT) with the Japanese government. Now, the way I understand it is that I get paid a rediculous amount of money to teach English - correction ... to "team-teach" English with a Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) - and to help internationalize Japan. I have been in Japan since July 24 and it has been nothing if not interesting to this point. I will try to elaborate in a moment, but I think I should tie up some loose ends first.

The last that some of you heard from me would have been while I was still writing about my time in Rome. You see, I wrote a great deal about Rome and I had planned on spreading it all out over 3 or 4 installments. Unfortunately, I never did quite get around to sending the last one, but maybe I will eventually. I suppose it has somewhat lost its relevance though since that was almost 3 months ago. Anyway, after a very stressful decision making process, I decided that I would live the beautiful island of Sicily for the greener pastures of Japan. In truth, it is much greener here, but I truly loved living in Sicily and the people I met there are world-class and are unforgettable. They deeply affected me. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to learn much from my work situation in Italy and wasn't being challenged by it and this situation largely prompted my decision. Fortunately, my employer understood where I was coming from and although he would have preffered me to stay until September (apparently, he saw saw value in the work I was doing, which is nice), he allowed me to go with his blessing.

Now, hopefully that explains things clearly enough. The truth is that the last 6 weeks since I left have been unbareably emotional and are something of a blur. I haven't had a moment to just sit back and reflect on the past 5 months. My life of laste has been full of amazing experiences and I just want to be able to put them all into perspective. I don't see this happening in the near future either because the next few weeks will be full of new adventures and misadventures as I embark on my Japanese journey. My current state of mind sees me living in Japan for only a year, but I am not so naive that I don't realize that most people that come here only intend on staying that long. Quite often they end up staying here. While I don't see that happening in my case I guess you never know.

So, with that I thank you for reading and please feel free to leave comments because I love to and need to hear from you. Oh, and just so you know, the next few entries will bring you up to date on my first week in Japan.

God bless, my friends.

Ciao regazzi