As the due date (December 27th) for the Baby Mercer has been approaching, Kana and I have been trying to simplify our lives a little more and make it more “baby friendly”. One of the things I have been looking to simplify is my job. After watching the want ads I decided to interview and landed a job at AIM English Studio which only about 20 minutes away from the house (where as Royal Kids is about an hour).

I tendered my resignation on October 21st to Royal Kids International School and my last day there will be November 25th. I won’t start the new job at AIM until January 5th, 2006 as I planning on having all of December off to look after Kana and drive her to the hospital (now that I have a Japanese licence) etc.

AIM English Studio has been in operation since 1982 and is the brainchild of one Mikiko Nakamoto, the author of the “Learning World” ESL/EFL text book series, which apparently is the second best selling series in Japan. I will be teaching English to many age groups and work from the afternoon into the evenings freeing me up to help out Kana and baby in the mornings.

I have gone ahead and added a Guestbook to the website. We are seeing more and more traffic from people we don't know and thought if folks found some useful information on the site they might want to leave a record of their visit.

Hello. Well as you may have noticed, we have moved into our new domain space, http://www.themercers.ca.

It was a bit of a trick moving over all the data, as I made a lot of changes to the backend of things (to the mySQL database for you techies). It required me to rebuild the Osaka Photo Gallery (now retired as of 2012) from scratch, but I needed to update a bunch of the pictures anyway. In particular, I doubled the amount of pictures from our wedding, this was because when I originally did up the website we were still having all of our pictures converted to digital.

The Forum moved over quite well although there might be a couple hick-ups so if you see something funny please drop me an email to .

Last but not least, Kana and I are working on a section called "Craig & Kana's Crash Course for Canadians in Kansai"…kinda rolls off the tongue doesn't it? Basically it is a collection of articles on how to do different things in and around Osaka, from buying a computer, to finding foreign food, to finding a nice place to go for dinner on a Friday night. We just felt we might be able to help other folks in a similar situation to ours! Hope it helps.

Hey Everyone. Kana and I wanted to wish everyone back home a great big HAPPY CANADA DAY. I was commenting to some friends that this is my first Canada Day not being in Canada which is weird. I've got so many good memories of Canada Days, from Dad's BBQ get togethers, to fireworks off Clover Point to way back when Adam became a Canadian Citizen on Canada Day…GOOD TIMES.

We hope everyone has a fun and safe holiday weekend.

Cheers!

Just so everyone back home knows, Kana and I are okay. The train accident happened in Amagasaki which is just east of Kobe, about an hour west from where we live in Osaka. Our thoughts and prayers are with those families who have lost loved ones in this terrible accident.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_rail_crash

On Sunday night (April 25th) Kana and I had the opportunity to celebrate Anzac Day with some Aussie friends from work.

For those of you who don't know, (like me until I did some research) April 25th or Anzac Day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anzac_Day) is one of the biggest holidays for Australia and New Zealand. It is a day to remember the Australian and New Zealand Corps (ANZAC) who fought (and lost) in the battle of Gallipoli in 1915 during the First World War. Although the Aussies and Kiwis fought very bravely, they and their British and Indian counterparts could not win the battle and were forced to withdraw. This ANZAC Day marked the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign.

Anyways spirits were of a lighter nature at Tin's Hall where we went to hear Daniel who is the significant other of Narelle, one my friends from work (both from Australia). Daniel who is a really good guitar player and singer plays at different bars around Osaka. He was awesome on Sunday night (and like me broke his G sting in the middle of his set) and Kana and I had a great time.

It was good to raise a pint of Victoria Bitter and remember with our Aussie and Kiwi cousins the victories and defeats of years past. Cheers Mates!

People. Now Craig is like one of the most popular English teacher in Osaka.

One of my high school friends Kyoko who runs a talent agency, she asked Craig to do some "English Class" for kids over a month ago. What Kyoko asked Craig to do was spending some time with kids maybe doing gymnastic stuffs 2 Saturdays a month and he said OK. After that, as everyone knows, Craig got a job at Kindergarten. Kyoko did let us know what age group of kids will come to Craig's Saturday class and we knew there some adults joining as well.

Right, having kids (2-6 years old) & adults both at the same time in a class sounds pretty odd. What kids would enjoy doesn't make adults being satisfied. Despite of Craig's anxiety, I asked him to do this things for my sake, for friendship between Kyoko and me.

Anyways, we had the first Saturday class yesterday. We got there to the classroom at 10:00 and everybody including kids and adults were already there. I could tell kids got so excited when they saw Craig at first. Kids were just running around the classroom and looked so difficult to make them calm. Then Craig began his class.

Craig introduced himself, me to begin with and asked everybody to introduce themselves. To our surprise, some of the adults (middle aged women) spoke pretty good English. Actually one of them told us she had been to Victoria. I've met quite a few people who has been to Victoria and it is amazing. Telling you the truth, I on the other hand, had never heard of City of Victoria before I thought of going there. What a SHAME!

Getting back to the subject, oh, kids weren't listening anything, which might be totally expected things, however it was horrible. Honestly, some of them were violent and weren't listening to Craig at all. I guess I should use "Gong Show" to describe the scene.

But people, I'm telling you Craig has something, if you don't know that. As he paid attention to all of them and tried to make them feel they were having a good time, he suggested to play some games, songs and stuffs. Although it took some time to make those violent kids into the mood of attending a classroom, through playing games Craig got them. A kid who was too shy to speak loud at first, he laughed and talked happily at the end. Other boy who was also shy, he showed us his interest toward English from the beginning though, started to answer to Craig's question with making eye contact which he couldn't do at the beginning.

Craig was impressed by how the kids got to understand games and stuff so quickly even they hadn't study English before and told them how they were smart and did so well at the first class. Kids looked so happy to hear that and I know that gave them confidence and some more interests toward learning new stuff.

Adults also looked enjoy the class but we though we need to come up with some better things for them to do for the next class which is going to be on Next Saturday.

We had a great time with people and will have another wonderful time with them next week.

We'll update about Craig's Saturday Class as well from now on.

Cherry Blossom (Sakura) viewing is a big deal in Japan. Every spring when the Sakura trees come into bloom almost everyone in Japan will go to a local park and sit under the trees and “take time to smell the roses” as we say.

Because the first rain washes the blossoms off the branches makes Sakura so precious, and this fact is not lost on the Japanese.

People of all ages, from all walks of life take time out to gather with friends and family under the trees and reflect on life (and for those not so reflective to have a few beers).

Kana and I were so busy last Saturday that we didn’t make it to Sakura, and it rained all day on Tuesday washing all the blossoms away. Oh well, maybe we can make a video next year.

I’m starting a new job tomorrow.

Some of you have known that how my former job was boring and I hate that. Well, things have been changed by “the power”. If there hadn’t been a power, I don’t think everything would have worked just fine like this.

Well, Brent Conkle whom I met when I worked at DHL and whom I call “Big brother” runs his own company in Tokyo. He offered me a job opportunity and I’m working with him, for him. What they do is providing English learning curriculum and native teachers to Japanese companies. So there are native teachers whom I’ll work with in Osaka.

He is in Tokyo, head office is in Tokyo so I guess you think “HOW???” I know that is the question most of people would ask me. Well, Craig has already set up a small office space for me at upstairs in my parent’s house and I work here. Yes, this is the greatest part of my new job, isn’t it?

Basically I will be in charge of administrative work and maybe will do some other things such as recruiting native teachers or little bit of managing stuff eventually.

It’s going to be a big challenge for me, that’s for sure. It’s also an exciting stuff, needless to say and I think will be able to tell you more about my new job soon.

http://www.gettbac.com/index.html

It is 9:14pm here in Osaka and I got home about 45 minutes ago. The short of it is that I got the job at Royal Kids International School.

They put me in the infant class (as I later found out everyone does the infant class on their trial day) as it is the toughest class (ages 1-2). So if you can make it in the infant class you can make it in any class.

The Owners of the School (Mr. & Mrs. Okumura) were coming for a Staff Meeting at 6:30pm and wanted to meet me. So after working the day and then shaking the owners’ hands…they said I was hired. Must have been quite a hand shake.

So I start tomorrow morning 9:30 to 6:30 Monday to Friday with the odd Saturday class thrown in once in awhile.

When all is said and done it took sending out the resume to 6 schools and interviewing at 2 of them to land a job that is just what I needed.

After getting my spousal visa and sending out my updated resume I landed a couple of interviews.

The first one was with a company where you go to two different kindergartens everyday…needless to say I think I need a little more experience for that one.

The second one was for a kindergarten named Royal Kids International School. It is one school in the heart of Osaka with about 80 students (60 on site at any given time). Well the interview went pretty good and the owner asked me to come in for a one day trial to see if I like it and see if they like me. The trial day is today (Wednesday Mar.02)….so we’ll see how it goes…my first experience with kids in Japan.

Wish me luck.

Well some good news to report. My Spousal Visa was issued to me on Friday. Kana and I met up downtown to pick it up at the Immigration Office. It is good for 1 year (they have up to a 3 year but no one gets them anymore), so now I can start applying to the companies I have been keep track of.

Should be good times ahead.

I joined the Kansai Linux User Group (KLUG) this week as one of 5 inaugural members. I thought it might be fun to hang out with some international tech geeks.

One of the members suggested we help out with a charity “Computers for Cambodia” fixing up PCs for free to help those who need em.

Should be fun to say the least.

Kana is having fun at the new job, it's a little boring at times (getting up to speed on company policy etc), but it is a fairly decent job which isn't too far from home.

Good news everyone, I got a job today. I received a reply for the interview I had yesterday from the company earlier and I’ll begin to work on the 13th.

The company itself belongs to the same field as DHL I worked for before I went to Victoria and I’ll be an assistant of a boss at the new work place. It takes me about an hour by train to get to the office in Downtown so it’s not too bad at all. There are some occasions given to me to use English in both writing and speaking which I wanted to have for my next job. I’ll be busy and tired for first couple weeks until I get used to a new circumstance, people and job for sure, however I’m so excited to get back to work after this long vacation.

I guess I will be able to tell you about the job and company in a time. Wish me luck on my new job.