Last Private Lesson

Today I had my final lesson with my private student. We've had 33 lessons since the second week of February. She is the only private student who stuck with me for any sustained period of time. She knows how old I am (19) so I am very grateful she trusted me and gave me the chance to prove that I can teach English.

We would usually meet 3 times a week, at Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes. But she was learning so she could communicate well on a holiday to America, and she achieved that, so we have finished lessons now.

For our last lesson, she treated me to a lunch in a nice restaurant in Shinagawa. It was actually really sad to say goodbye. I enjoyed speaking with her so much, and I think we had a good time. She was so hard-working, her study went far beyond our lessons. She made word cards with all the vocabulary she got from me and made example sentences using the words, and carried them with her everywhere. She would watch and read English-language news, and had a great attitude to learning. She helped make the last four months enjoyable, and I will miss her.

After our final lesson, I went for a walk around Shinagawa. These pictures aren't thrilling, but they show Shinagawa station, and the area around it.

We sometimes met for lessons in this Starbucks in Shinagawa station. It's also where our first meeting was.

This building (Shinagawa Intercity) and its neighbours are very impressive, and especially nice in good weather (which today wasn't!).

This is a cafe where we sometimes met for lessons inside Shinagawa Intercity.

I walked back to the subway station and decided to visit Sengaku-ji (泉岳寺), which I'd passed at least fourty times, but never been to.

The blue building in the background makes me think of a Transformer or something, although it's actually just an NTT DoCoMo building.

I left Sengaku-ji and saw this randomly European building.

Then I headed back to Sengakuji station (泉岳寺駅) and headed home. These photos will only be interesting if you want to see what a Japanese subway station looks like. If you live in Japan, then stop looking now or you might fall asleep!

This is a pretty standard subway sign. It has the current station name in kanji, hiragana and romaji in the centre, and kanji and romaji for the previous and next station in the bottom corners. The previous station is usually greyed out slightly. The coloured circle has a letter and number. The letter 'A' stands for Toei Asakusa line (都営浅草線) and it's the seventh station from the start of the line.

Unless it was raining, or I was tired or late, I would get off at Sengaku-ji station and walk the 15-20 minutes down the road to Shinagawa station (it only takes 2 minutes by train) because after Sengaku-ji it changes from the Toei Asakusa line to the Keikyu line (京急線). This means it charges me the fare from my station to Sengaku-ji, plus the lowest fare on the Keikyu line, making it Y340 each way, which severely lowers my pay from the lesson!

Well, I will definitely miss the private lessons, and my student, but we will keep in touch, and it does mean that my day times are much freer now. Slowly my work is wrapping up. At the end of May now, my private lessons have ended, and I finish at Gaba on Sunday 29th June, and I've started telling my students that I'm leaving. It's so nice that they seem sad when I tell them. This working holiday will be over before I know it!