Picking students up at the airport was a tug of war with the heat 🐧

In my job as a language school manager in Clark, the thing I was always worried I would get wrong was the airport pickup.

I often went to Clark International Airport to pick students up, and I did not want to be late for a pickup.

But if I arrived too early, it is quite hot outside the airport. At airports in Japan, like Kansai Airport or Narita Airport, ordinary people can go inside normally, right? But in the Philippines, you cannot go inside the airport without a passport or a boarding pass. People who are not involved cannot just wander in, so they have to wait outside in the heat.

That was the tug of war. I did not want to be late to the airport, but waiting outside the whole time was also quite hard, so I was always checking which plane the student was coming on.

There were a lot of planes from Korea, and there were very many flights connecting Clark and Korea, so telling those planes apart one by one was also quite hard. Though when I think about it now, it is funny.

Also, as a Japanese person, telling Korean and Chinese people's names apart was very difficult, and at the beginning I had a lot of trouble. When I said "Are you Mr. so and so?", I did not know how to pronounce it. If it is a Japanese name it is easy, but that part was difficult.

But the airport pickup was basically fun. While I was waiting I met all kinds of interesting people, and at pickups I met managers from other language schools, and we became friends and talked, so I have fairly fun memories of it.