i got a new part-time job! a couple we met by total chance when my wife and i went to a japanese-style restaurant by ourselves for the first time, wanted english tutoring and we traded Emails, later they said they specifically "DIDN'T want tutoring from a textbook" and anyway it ended up in that my wife and i will tutor them together every day for a month (=until the end of my spring break) and we'll get paid in a lump sum at the end of the month… AND the guy says after we've done it for a bit he'll try to bring other japanese people who want tutoring so we can get paid by them too. heh heh!!! i think they both work for an insurance company, and have tried to get english tutoring before but it didn't work due to the teaching method and that the tutors didn't really know any japanese so it was too confusing trying to make conversation. in our case, we can at least attempt to explain in japanese and then pulling out the dictionary etc is really minimal (this time we only did it twice - once was for "retina" so yeah).

we just had the first session today and it was mostly us working out the details of everything, so of course we don't know how it'll really go yet, but it's exciting! i think the point was we're getting paid 50,000 yen for the whole month and they're also driving us back to our house each day (so we only pay 600 yen a day in subway fare instead of 1,200), and if other people join in then those new guys will pay 5,000 a week each.

also the guy's the first one who actually really understands my eye problems, it turns out he's blind in one eye and has the same "if i do too much physical labour a part of my eye might fall out so i can't work as something like a mover or construction worker" problem. same guy said he's heard it's really difficult for foreigners to get full-time jobs but if i do sample translations of ex. a café menu or something for a 不動産 (supposedly meaning "real estate office" but it must be somewhat different from abroad because how can you have 5 real estate offices in every street in japan, i don't know — anyway, he said translating stuff like basic rental information or business schedules) and then just bring it into a shop and show it to them, they might hire me as a translator or part-time translator for example. at the very least, doing that will make me actually create a translation portfolio no matter if it gets me jobs immediately or not…

i always forget the real name for these (zouri?) but anyway, i bought some tatami shoes with rubber soles (=1,900 yen) a while ago and this week it's gotten to 17°C and i've finally been able to wear them outside the house. i thought people'd be staring, but the more time i spend here the more i realize traditional clothes aren't actually as rare as it seems (and i suspect they're more common the further away you get from the city), so i decided to try it.

end result is, most people don't give you a second glance. people stare a LOT LOT more by me simply having my white cane out or by me speaking english (btw they stare more when we speak english than swedish i think, but most japanese people can't tell the difference between english and swedish either so maybe it's just my imagination). my wife said that at just a glance you probably can't tell that these are tatami shoes and not just normal sandals, and that based on what someone told her yesterday japanese people don't seem to realize that japanese traditional shoes/socks aren't actually international (i guess because flip-flops exist they think of them as exactly the same thing?).

also i'd barely been able to sleep for the past few days, i think it's unconscious stress from being a few months late on my medicine or something, though after i ate some pineapple i got sleepy so it could be a deficiency on top of that. anyway i found the one clinic in sendai for my thing which supposedly has english-speaking doctors and know exactly how to get there now, but their WEBSITE has zero info about or in english and there's no email. i'm asking if i can get the SIM cards with a classmate who's done it for herself before today, and then i can try calling the clinic to make an appointment. it'll be my first call in japanese and i definitely don't know all the vocabulary so i'll have to research/study a bit first...