The coming of the O-bon festival brought with it the return of the Hyogo JET Orientation for another year! 39 lucky Hyogo SHS ALTs and the 8 BoE staff/experienced ALTs responsible for them all descended upon Prison Camp Yashiro for some mad learning and good times. It was a really interesting experience, going back for the second time around ... lots of memories, hehe. That said, my experience was very different this year thanks to being a helper rather than a particpant :)

Not that everything started smoothly, mind you! Continuing the tradition of business trips interfering with my holiday plans, I realised that I would need to be up at 4:30am on Wednesday morning in order to get to Yashiro on time and therefore had to cancel my dinner plans with Emerald. I tend to take business trips messing up my plans pretty well, but I'd been trying to organise a dinner with Emerald for several months now and we'd settled on this date because neither of us were free for weeks before or after it. Probably partly as a result of that irritation, I slept terribly on Tuesday night and was not a happy chappy when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed on Wednesday morning. Although I did feel quite a bit better when I later found out that all the other ALT helpers had slept terribly too, hehe.

I made the first train out of Ako with time to spare, and met Nate when he jumped on at Aioi station. In Himeji we scouted the bus station and grabbed a great breakfast in a vending machine restaurant near Forus before jumping on the bus with a heap of happy little new ALTs to head up to Prison Camp Yashiro ... w00t! To my initial concern and subsequent amusement (and admittedly, irritation), one of the ALTs on the bus was complaining about how lonely he was and how nobody lived around him. As I said, I initially felt sorry for him ... until he mentioned that he was a 5 minute bike ride from central Himeji. Let's just say that I had to practise considerable self restraint to not say anything I may later have regretted :D Thankfully 'friendly experienced ALT helper' mode kicked in automagically and I heard him out and made some suggestions, for which he seemed grateful :)

We got in to Yashiro itself at around 9:40am, just in time to get to the first meeting. From there, all the newbies started trickling in to check in. Overall it was a good start to the camp, as the only 'incidents' were two people who arrived 10 minutes late and one girl who 'forgot' her business clothes. After we smashed our way through lunch and the afternoon seminars to dinner, us exhausted ALT helpers were finally being to crash out one the ALTs were safely in their rooms at around 11:30pm. And best of all, no major incidents at night either, woohoo!

The next day was a lot more enjoyable as I a) had gotten some sleep and b) was actually facilitating some of the sessions. The first session was really crazy as I had the same speech to do for three separate groups, and only 20 minutes for each. I had to really move through it as I had a lot to cover, but I think they all got something out of it. Hopefully the example lesson plan I printed out for them will be useful, as this was one of the things I found most challenging to deal with when I started. Aside from that session, I also got to run a general Q&A session with Seo-sensei, a new JET co-ordinator, and I then teamed up with Nate to run the Hyogo/Tajima area networking session.

There were no major incidents on the second night either, hooray! Even the man who had come in to the training centre *before* the seminar to say that he would be coming in to complain during the seminar (which I think is extremely ignorant! :/) didn't come in. The infamous Yashiro is no longer quite so infamous, it would seem :) And again, as I've said before, I was really impressed by the new JETs. Most of them were attentive during the seminars and had fun during their free time without taking it too far. And while naturally there are always a few challenging people in every group, all in all they behaved really well. That made my life easy, which was definitely a Good Thing and I really appreciated it. Hooray new JETs, you rock! :)