I'm pretty new here. After a chat with @selfhelp4trolls he suggested I give Hive a go so here I am. It is all very new to me and I have basically zero idea what I am doing, but I'm sure I'll pick it up as I go along.
Right then, I should probably #introducemyself.
Who am I?
My name is Dan. Some people know me as JaDan and others maybe as DanSenSei... but most people just call me Dan. I am 37 years old and I was born and raised in Sheffield, UK.
I currently live and work in Shiga, Japan as an English teacher. I came to Japan in 2016 and have also lived in Hyogo and Osaka prefectures.
I live with my wonderful wife, Erika, who is the love on my life. We met here in Japan, but she is actually from Brazil. I never expected to meet and marry a Brazillian girl when I moved to Japan, but life is funny sometimes.
She is 3rd generation Japanese and she also moved here in 2016. We met in 2017 and got married last year on Halloween. Due to Covid and all our families being in different countries, we didn't really have a ceremony, but we are not fancy so that's OK. Here is on of my favourite pictures of us together.
It's not just us though. It's us and our 2 little kitties MelonKun and PanChan. They are both rescue cats that were found on the street and other than the fact they like to wake me up at 5am by jumping on my belly, they are awesome. Here they are being cute, well MelonKun us being cute... PanChan is a bit of a gremlin... but a cute one... Like Gizmo.
A Bit of History.
Everyone likes a back story, right? So, I was born in 1984 and I lived in Sheffield with my family. You know, mum, dad, brother and sister. That kind of thing. Everything was cool. As a kid I enjoyed playing footie and super Nintendo. Nothing special to report.
When I was 11, sadly, my father passed away. It sucks but that is life I guess. Kudos to my mum for being strong enough to raise 3 little kids on her own. She is an absolute warrior.
In my teens, I found punk rock which completely changed my life. It changed everything for me and opened me up to all kinds of experiences. I still love it to this day and probably always will. Of course, I started and played in many bands over the years which allowed me to travel around, play music and meet a lot of amazing people that I call my friends.
I went on to study sound engineering at the University of Hull, which was a lot of fun because I could be involved with music. Completely useless degree, but a good experience. It fucked me up a bit, but I still had a pretty good childhood all things considered.
I also developed a bit of a passion for all things geeky like card games and board games. I also still like these things. It was a great way to spend time with friends, especially as I had no interest in things like drinking or drugs like a lot of the people around me had.
After Uni, I ended up working call centre jobs and what not which honestly, destroyed my mental health. I hated it but had no other options. This lead to getting pretty involved in some bad things as well as becoming incredibly depressed. This all resulted in a full breakdown, moving back in with my mum and a lot of counselling.
It was good though as I decided to make some changes. One of those changes was that I decided I wanted to travel and teach English. I went back to university to get my CELTA and then I did some volunteer work to get experience. This lead to me coming to Japan and to the present day.
What I Enjoy Doing.
Music is a huge passion of mine. I love going to see live shows and most of the people I have met in Japan, I have met at concerts and gigs. I think I miss this the most since the pandemic started. I hope I can enjoy this again soon!
Over the years I have taught myself to play guitar, bass, drums and a bit of a few other instruments. Over the years I have written and recorded various albums. Some of which you can still find on Spotify and stuff like that. Here is a bit of an example:
I would love to start a new band here in Japan, but it's hard to do that during a pandemic and working a lot. Maybe I can do this in the future.
I also enjoy board games, card games and video games. These days I play PokemonTCG, but have played almost every card game going over the years. I also love Carcassonne, Catan and Dominion. I like retro gaming, especially N64 generation and recently bought an N64 here in Japan and I am loving it!
When I came to Japan, I started making videos for my friends back home. I would upload them to YouTube so they could see how things were going. This slowly developed into a bit of a passion for content creation. For the last 5 years, I have been making and uploading videos about my life in Japan to YouTube.
Recently, it has evolved into a bit of a visual podcast, but it keeps me busy. If you are interested in that kind of thing, you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/jadan
This passion for content creation, linked with my enjoyment of teaching has lead me to start DanSenSei English. This is a project that I hope will help people learn English as a second language.
I found that many people here in Japan found learning English difficult because they didn't have t
me to spend studying. They also don't have confidence to speak and they find most English lessons boring. I tried to fix all of those issues with my videos, podcasts and website posts. Here is an example:
You can find more stuff that I make here: https://www.dansenseienglish.com
What do I want to achieve?
I came to Hive thanks to @selfhelp4trolls to try and find some new people to interact with and talk to. I have come to dislike social media as a whole, so this looked like a new and interesting way to have some interaction.
I also want to try and help as many people as possible learn English, so it seems like a good place to do that too.
I don't really have an end game as such, but I am looking forward to the ride and learning some stuff along the way. Hopefully I can meet some cool people and have some nice chats too.
Thanks for reading this fucking diatribe of a #selfintrodutcion. Let's have a chat and get to know each other!