Happy Sunday Minasan!!! The weather is slowly cranking up and it's getting more and more difficult to step out especially when you don't have a car and will have to walk to destinations. The dangers of heatstroke are real people! So today I want to talk a little bit about my life as an ALT in Japan. What is an ALT? Time and again, people from outside Japan would ask me: "What work do you do there?", to which I reply, "I'm an ALT." Wait, what? To people who have been interested in Japan as I had been before coming here, you would know that ALT stands for Assistant Language Teacher. Now, this takes different meanings as well depending on where you're teaching and I will discuss the role in detail in a Junior High School perspective as this is where I am assigned. I am basically an assistant to a Japanese Teacher of English.  I will try and get Jerome, Richard, and Leizel to talk about their experience in the Elementary school front so we

Okay. 3 years ago, I turned 30 and didn't really care much for skin regimens. Frankly speaking, I hate having to slap on creams and do face massage and all those stuff. I'm not a big fan of beauty rituals. I can do makeup. On my face that is. I can do a decent wing with liquid eyeliner, but basically, facial care, NADA. Thankfully enough I was born with Chinese blood and genetics blessed me with a low maintenance type of skin. I occasionally break out, but never really severe. My skin looks naturally tight (till recently, turns out being neglectful of your skin does eventually show). But genetics can only get you so far. Da da daaaaaan... (I wish I could do sound effects, but unfortunately I can't so please indulge me and do the sound effects yourself either inside your head or out loud). I was looking in the mirror, and there it was. I knew that one day this day would eventually come... FINE LINES!!! Okay, I'm not that vain and the lines weren't that

みんな、お久しぶり！ Long time no see everyone! Okay, so I know I keep promising to update more, but despite all the time I have, I can't seem to get into my blogging groove. But I guess I can churn at least 1 post a week. I will most certainly try. So, I can't even remember what my last post was. Hahaha! But lemme catch you up with my current status. Before December 2017  The first time I took the test was back in July 2017 for the N4 level which I passed due to diligently studying for exams and memorizing kanji every down time I get even if it's just for 3 mins. So N4 was easy for me, but since then, everything went downhill. I was lucky enough to score plane tickets on sale and went home for a couple of weeks during summer vacation. When I got back, I was really tired of going to school everyday. It was so boring and I got caught up in a game on my smartphone. In short, I was barely studying if at all. Before we knew it, it was December and we needed to take the

Wow... took me a whole year to write the sequel to my winter survival tips article . Last year, I and my colleagues experienced our first-ever winter in Japan and it was a real challenge. When this year's winter rolled around, we were a bit more prepared than before. Compared to last year's winter, this winter is definitely colder. Last year we had exactly one snow day that lasted about half a day. This year, we had a snow day where the white landscape lasted for a week and a half. After this episode, we had several more snow days and it was really nice but annoying. (Snow looks really nice and all, but I really hate it.) So as promised I am giving several tips for keeping your room warm in the winter. Tip #1 Mind the Flooring Insulating the floor is one of the first steps in keeping your room warm. If you have your space heater on and warming the place everything is moot if the floor is not insulated. So if your room is not lined with tatami, you can consider going

For more information on Oarai International Exchange Academy, you can contact me via  Facebook  or  Instagram , or by commenting on this article.  Life in a different country is never easy. You are far from family, friends, loved ones, and the comforts of home. Everything might look fun and glamorous in picture-perfect pictures but those, are but moments. A fleeting glimpse at the everyday life of a person. We are the first Filipino student delegates of the Oarai International Exchange Academy ( 大洗国際交流アカデミー ), a Japanese language school set in the quaint little coastal town of Oarai in the Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. We came to Japan with minimal knowledge of the language and have been, since arriving, consistently learning and improving our grasp of the language. Life in Japan, in Oarai in particular, has been quite the adventure with all the ups and downs and everything in between. Our life here is full of discoveries, realizations, little victories, a lot of tears, and a lot of h

I am a tropical girl. And I love it! I love the sun, the heat, the tan you get from walking from your car to the mall entrance. I love everything about the tropics. Okay, maybe not everything, because I do hate the flies and mosquitoes and the smell of dried sweat. But still, I am happy with the muggy temperature of my homeland. I was thrown into a whirlwind of events when I decided to go for my dream of going to study in Japan . And to add the cherry on top of my ice cream sundae, I was set to fly and arrive right smack in the middle of autumn. Not bad, cool weather, red leaves and all. And then the temperature starts dropping. And dropping. And... now, daily, we get -7 degrees Celsius every morning. Quick disclaimer...I am by no means an expert in surviving the freezer-like temperatures but this is a memoir on how I am currently surviving the sub-zero temperatures. So, how will a girl, who loves the sun and the heat so much, survive winter in a coastal town with a sub-zer

Atarashii Kotoba Kirei - beautiful ~ja arimasen - negative form (this is appended to an adjective, noun, or adverb indicative of the negative version of said word) hai - yes iie - no kudasai - please arigatou gozaimasu - thank you very much sumimasen - excuse me gomenasai - I'm sorry ohayou gozaimasu - Good morning konnichiwa - Hello/good day Kirei ja arimasen! This is a side story of an on-going joke we have amongst the group. The next episode is still in the works. ;p Upon landing in Japan, we were armed with our very, VERY limited vocabulary of the Japanese language. Of course we know the basics such as: hai, iie, kudasai, arigatou gozaimasu, ohayou gozaimasu, sumimasen, gomenasai  and konnichiwa. We also know a few descriptors here and there, some we've heard from anime, some from friends and some from family members who have settled here in Japan. Kirei is an adjective used to describe something beautiful, clean, and pristine. But mostly, when re

The Legend of the 711 Crew After arriving in Oarai and initially settling down in our respective apartments, one major problem hit us like a ton of bricks. We were hopelessly and totally disconnected from the net and have no way of communicating with loved ones, friends, families, enemies, and whoever else in the world. Now, I for one, was overly excited to share everything I'm seeing and experiencing with my family and my best friend. But since our phones don't have sim cards,don't work and were not really compatible with Japanese networks, (we haven't actually tried since prepaid sim cards are not really a thing here and they are not really big on selling just sim cards. I'll probably make a post regarding that as well...maybe soon.) we were, in a word, screwed. We had hoped that the apartments we were to be provided will have had internet set up for us, but unfortunately, they didn't. So here we were, miles and an ocean away from home, stranded in a sma

Atarashii Kotoba (New Words) From this post forward, I will start the post with the  Atarashii Kotoba  section to introduce a few basic Japanese phrases, words, and expressions to help you with learning a little bit of Japanese while being entertained with the colorful life of Silak. Jiko shoukai - self- introduction The 711 Crew I arrived in Japan on the 9th of October 2016. I arrived here on an early morning plane with 6 other Filipinos for the commencement of our life as students in Japan . We were part of a program that allowed us to study and work part-time in an international language exchange school for the next year and a half. Now, before the trip, none of these 7 people (myself included) have ever met in person. We may have chatted online via Facebook once or twice, but we were complete strangers to each other. So to make sure everybody is on the same page with the subsequent posts of the future, we will be doing a quick jiko-shoukai  of the 711-crew. Sunshine