Well I have left Kyoto behind and have settled into my new city. Packing and cleaning up my apartment in Kyoto the morning of moving was somewhat surreal. I still feel like I am just on an extended vacation and will be going back in the next few days. A lot of people I knew in Osaka and Kyoto have been mailing me to check up on me which is nice and makes me realize that the two and a half years I lived there were not wasted. I decided to take a cab to kyoto station cause my suitcases were extremely heavy and I have become a complete out of shape wuss so I took a taxi. The taxi driver did not look too thrilled and actually I think tried to act like his window didn't roll down when i knocked on it to ask him if he could take me to Kyoto station. The bus ride out to my new city was nice. The bus had almost full reclining seats and the highway that we took ran alongside the ocean so it was quite beautiful.
I arrived in Kochi about 3pm and my new boss met me and then took me to my new apartment. Which is about 3 times the size of my apartment in Kyoto and the same price. After I dropped everything off she took me to the school I will be working at so I could watch a few classes because I had to teach a trial lesson two days after I arrived. The lesson I watched was basically a guy saying random words in English to the children and then the children playing uno for an hour. From what I can gather the quality of lessons is not the number 1 priority of this school. After that I just came back to my apartment and started to put everything away and at about 9 pm one of my co workers called me up and invited me out for some drinks so that was really cool of them.
They took me to this one place which is basically a glorified cafeteria at an overnight camp. It is just a bunch of wooden tables and there are about 20 to 30 places to buy food and booze. It seems like the place where the whole town goes to get hammered before they go out drinking. It closes at 11 and is really cheap so I think it will become the place I go before going out for a night out.
Last saturday I went out for an all nighter with a coworker and his friends. He and his friends were probably the nicest people that I have met since I have come to Japan. They love living in Japan and especially this city, they all welcomed me as if I had been their friend for years. The one thing I have noticed about living here for a week is that everyone who lives here seems so unpretentious which is a big change from Osaka. It seems to me that foreigners living in Osaka compete with each other for jobs and attention from girls and people look down on other people who havn`t been living here as long as they have. They also seem to complain a lot more about Japan and things about Japan that they don`t like. But everyone I have met here thus far has been the exact opposite and just seem to really love living here. It is refreshing and has given me new energy.
I still have not really started working my new job yet but if it is at least bearably good I think that I have made the right choice moving out here.