I cruised through my Thursday and Friday at school last week, not really having a huge amount to do. Ichi-nensei were still away so I was down to the three ni-nensei classes. They broke up the monotony of reading books, planning lessons and writing emails though, which was welcome :) The Thursday class was a standard boring reading and pronounciation class, but the Friday ones were more amusing. I got to do my body language activity in Takagi-sensei's class, which is a pretty much guaranteed way to make the kids a) laugh and b) pay attention and not sleep for a change, haha.

My favourite body language example in the activity is the 'follow me' one, which gets a wide range of generally dirty responses from the kids :) In one class, a boy actually answered 'ore ni tsuite, koi' (roughly "Follow me, baby" in English), which was close enough for me, hehe. Thanks for filling me in on that one a few months ago, Michele :P And as one of my students had said it previously, I felt it'd be ok to bust it out in another class too, which turned out to be mostly true. The kids roared with laughter and my team teacher went a bit red (I was doing the example with her at the front of the class). Hahaha. Good times. Any lesson where I can say 'Follow me, baby!' in Japanese has just got to be good, right? :P

Thursday night was Minato-ya night, before which I headed to Jusco in a desperate gamble to find some stronger deodorant. I found something that is meant to be stronger, or so the lady assured me, but I still have my doubts. I'll give it a go on a Monday when I don't have any classes, hehe. As an aside, I haven't told you, my wonderful reader in Australia, just how totally excellent you are, recently, have I? Well you are! So very, very excellent. So wonderful, in fact, that I'm sure you would find it well within your very kind stride to send me a box of cans of any kind of male Rexona. Please, please let me know if you can. I will reward you handsomely. Seriously.

Now, back to our regular programming. Errr, yes, so. Minato-ya! Yes, it was very cool. I rocked up early and after a while Nate and Miho came in, followed an hour or so later by Yoko and Mitsue. I hadn't seen either of the girls for months, so it was great to have them back. Yoko, who is wonderfully happy and bubbly, is heaps of fun to hang out with, so I was especially glad to see her again. Mitsue, who had been kinda distant in the past, was also friendly for some reason, and seemed impressed that my Japanese had improved as much as it had since August last year. Which I was kinda happy about, even though I know it should be much better. She said we should trade language and suggested that I drop in to visit the cafe where she works part time on the weekend sometime. I said I'd think about it.

Friday night I shot up to Himeji to catch up with my friend Amanda. We wandered across to the yaki-tori place I'd been with Hide the weekend before, and grabbed some tasty stuff-on-sticks. One of the waitresses here recognised me (not so difficult given the gaijin effect) and, seeing me speaking English with another gaijin, bravely spoke English to us and explained that she was studying at University. Her English wasn't too bad, although I think it was probably hampered by the fact she was really nervous, hehe. Despite her English and Amanda's great Japanese, we still managed to end up with a deliberately half cooked (believe it or not) chicken dish, which we sent back. They were kind enough to cancel it rather than charge us for it :) Half cooked chicken? Come on Japan ... I know you eat a lot of things raw (including chicken), but haven't you ever heard of salmonella?

After dinner it was up to Chum for drinks, where, as usual, I ordered my drink via the toy monkey that hangs around the cafe. I think the staff have gotten used to me now, haha. In fact, he asked Amanda and I if we would like to go to some sort of upcoming event there. Amanda couldn't translate all of what he said, but it seemed like something to do with fashion, makeup, fortune telling or some combination of them all. So naturally, not wanting to miss out on what could be a very interesting event, said we'd like to go and to let us know the details when he worked them out :) No doubt I'll be back there again soon.

I caught my last train and went home via Saion, which turned out to be a good choice as Miyo and a friend of hers were there. Miyo had awesome some awesome clothes on, very Japanese! I was impressed. She goes to the university in Ako and is one of the youngest people I know, so she gets extra cool points. We all chatted for a while and eventually Miyo insisted on making me a drink, hooray! While she did that, I spoke to her friend a little bit. She spoke better English than Miyo but was extremely shy, which was a bit frustrating. Still, we had fun overall :)

On Saturday it rained all day and was pretty miserable, but I managed to get up and off to Akashi in the morning for the HAJET committee meeting. Everyone turned up and we spent nearly 3 hours working through all of the issues on the agenda. Got a lot decided on and worked out though, so it was definitely time well spent. I went shopping with two of the committee members, Matt and Kate, afterwards, so got back to Ako around 5:30. I had arranged to meet Kazu so shot off to meet him at his house at 6:45ish, getting drenched by rain on the way. We rode down to a yakiniku place near Minato-ya, and had a great dinner of various pieces of meat cooked on a little grill on our table, mmmm.

We talked for quite a while about various things over dinner, but eventually go onto a frustrating topic where I simply could not explain to Kazu what I was trying to say. It's a complicated enough topic to explain to someone fluent in English, and even his very good level of English wasn't enough to understand what I was saying. Naturally, I had no chance of explaining in Japanese. So that was quite frustrating, but swallowing my irritation, I managed to break it down to basics and get enough explained to him for him to know where I was coming from, and left it at that. After dinner we shot off to Saion to watch one of my favourite movies of all time, Snatch. I laughed a lot but hardly anyone else did, despite the Japanese subtitles, which leaves me convinced that British and Japanese humour are extremely different and incompatible.

Sunday was a relatively quiet day, I finally caught up my new friend Takashi and his wife. They met me at Paone at 1pm and we drove to Round1, a big entertainment complex in Okayama. We did some bowling, played some amusement machines, shot some pool and generally hung out and had a good time. Takashi can speak English pretty well and I was in a Japanese mood, so we spoke in a good mix of the two. His wife can't speak any English and despite being young and a few efforts of mine (using Japanese) to bring her into the conversation, appeared completely content to be the token subservient, silent Japanese wife. Frustrating, yes, but only because I let it be. I just wanted to make sure she wasn't bored out of her brains, hehe. I suppose I shouldn't worry so much, I'm sure if she wasn't happy she would have said something to Takashi. Maybe. Heh.

After bowling we grabbed a very unhealthy dinner at a Bikkuri Donkii (mmm sweet, sweet steak) and a coffee to go from a Chococro before driving back to Ako. I'd hoped to get back by about 6pm so I could head up to Ewan's wine and cheese night that he'd organised the previous Thursday night. It started at 4pm, so even getting there at 7pm would have been a bit of a push. Unfortunately the roads back from Okayama were heavily jammed, as usual, and we got back at just after 8pm. So I missed out on the night, unfortunately. Oh well. Can't do everything, I suppose, and I had a pretty full weekend. I can always go next time.

Back to school today and back to normality, mostly. Ichi-nensei were off today to make up for the holiday they missed last week before going to Hachikita, although it didn't really matter because I don't have any classes today anyway. The next few weeks will continue to be disrupted as this week a lot of classes turn into exam study for next week's 'mid term' tests. Joy, hehe. No classes next week :/ Still, it's not like I don't have things to do. Now that I actually have lessons, I can plan ahead, hooray! And admittedly I spent most of today working on Hyogo AJET stuff that blossomed out of the mammothian meeting on Saturday. I figure it's work related, though, and it's a lot better than sitting on Facebook, emailing or sleeping all day, hehe.

And that's about it. Nothing majorly exciting planned until the weekend, really. Badminton Wednesday night if my leg has healed enough, Thursday Minato-ya and then an English Teacher enkai on Friday. Saturday might have some Ultimate Frisbee, followed by an izakaya/karaoke birthday bash for Emma, Amanda and Goran at night in Sannomiya. I don't really feel like staying out all night so far from home, though, so I think I might catch my last train back. There are a couple of friends in Himeji who I haven't seen for a long while, so I might stop in there. Hypocritical? Maybe a little. My only defence is that Himeji is a lot closer to Ako to do an all-nighter in, and why not see two sets of friends in one night? :)