Shimane and all

Hey, time for those updates.

Today is my second day of work in "O"-cho. "O"-cho (meaning inside go out cloud, I believe) is a town (cho) of around 16000 people. It used to be two towns, but got combined into one, though it is still basically two isolated towns run by one government, from what I can tell. The part of town that I'm in is called Yokota (side field). It is pretty small. Anyway, I work at the local board of education. I even have my own desk and computer.
Yesterday, all the new Shimane JETs (including me) flew into Izumo (go out cloud) shi (city) airport, and were picked up by our supervisors to be taken to our respective towns. I'm the only new JET in "O", which is sort of out of the way. Most of the other jets were going to Matsue-shi, the capital and largest city of the prefecture, or Hamada, about 2.5 hours from Izumo by car. Matsue is only 200,000 people, which still seems like a lot for someone from Carlinville, but is tiny for Japan. That should give you an idea of what Shimane is like.
I have work at the board of education for the month because it is still summer vacation and all the students are out. Summer vacation is only the one month here, so I'm guessing they schedule the arrival of new JETs now for the purposes of getting them acquainted before any actual work begins. Because of the vacation, I don't have any actual work to do, but attendance is extremely important in Japan, to an extent that Americans would consider absurd. So now my work consists mainly of sitting at my desk, and sometimes talking with Jo, whose desk is across from mine. Jo's from New Zealand and has been here for a year. She used to do the job I'm supposed to do, and now has moved up to middle school. She's been extremely helpful because her Japanese is better than mine, and she's been through pretty much the exact same weird things that I am going through now with the new job. None of the stuff is bad, just general Japanese weirdness. It's amusing how the best-intentioned and most sincere help from Japanese people can sometimes seem confusing and even mildly aggravating to more independence-oriented Westerners. It's also weird how Australia and New Zealand are considered Western. Anyway, more on that in a later post. It's great here already.