Don’t talk in English!

When I first came to Japan in 1997, the big chain school I worked at recommended all its teachers to open a bank account at Tokai Bank because of its proximity to the head office and the fact that the ATMs had English guidance. Soon after though, Tokai merged with Sanwa Bank and all the ATMs were replaced with the later bank’s Japanese-only machines. This caused long queues and much […]

Ordering books from overseas

I’ve just spent the last two hours browsing the books at http://teachershop.scholastic.co.uk/, and have come away empty-handed, but not without a fight! I registered, and went through the shopping cart procedure until the final step when I was finally able to see the shipping cost. For some inexplicable reason, the cost of shipping was 20% of the order, which in my case was over 7,000 yen! Feeling that that was […]