This week has been pretty busy, both in and out of school. I can't actually remember exactly what I did during school on Monday (was obviously very important) but at night I had dinner with Yoko at a little Italian place called "M's Diner". I often go past it on my way home from school and have always thought it looked quite nice, so finally got around to trying it. It was pretty decent too, which is rather surprising for a foreign food restaurant in Japan, haha. We had a parma ham and cheese pizza and a creamy tomato and scallops pasta ... very delicious.

After dinner we were going to go for coffee but everywhere we tried was closed ... damn Monday night! I was riding my bike to all these places while lucky Yoko zipped around in her bubble car, so needless to saw I was sweating like crazy by the end. When I got to the last place we tried, Patisserie Noel, which was also closed, Yoko was waiting for me with some water she'd bought from a nearby konbini. She's such a sweet friend ;)

Tuesday was a long but interesting day as well. In first period, Nishitani-sensei caught me completely by surprise by coming to my desk and telling me we had a final OC class. It turned out that somehow our wires had crossed last week and my understanding was that all ichi-nensei classes had already finished, when in actual fact there was still that one last class. Yikes! Thankfully, though, I hadn't been able to do the music lesson with them the week before, so it worked out nicely. After that I swung past the preliminary round of the chorus contest, a part of this year's school Bunkasai (cultural festival). Every class had to sing a song and the best three from each year were selected to compete against each other in the chorus contest final on Thursday. That took up most of the day and then at night I caught up with Ewan for a quick beer at a little bar near the Welfare University. It was a pretty cool place with a ryokan attached, although the bar was very quiet and as I expected there were no young people around, hehe.

Wednesday was the main day for Bunkasai, when the school stopped and everyone just had fun for a day. Lots of parents came and all the clubs put up various displays in rooms around the school. Even my ESS kids (somewhat grudgingly) did up a poster about Australian food. I wandered around all of the rooms with some of the ichi-nensei teachers, generally being amazed by the hidden creative skills that the kids have. One of the rooms that impressed me the most was the sewing room, where the kids had their own original designs up. They'd made some absolutely amazing jeans, dresses and yukata. I also discovered a really cool magazine there, called Gosurori (ゴスロリ). This is extremely bad English for "Gothic and Lolita", and featured a whole heap of amazing Gothic (and terrible 'Lolita') clothes. Now I want to go buy some romantic gothic clothes, hehe.

After checking out the rooms I hit the food stalls outside, worked by the extremely genki third year students. They all came running up to ask me questions and try to get me to buy food, although I only managed to end up with takoyaki (which was delicious). I was also escorted around by two of the girls from my fan club (tee hee), who managed to tell me all about their summer vacations through fits of giggles. Always amusing. In the afternoon we went to Harmony Hall and watched some traditional Japanese performances, including a comedy about udon, a 'rakugo' ghost story and a man who did amazing tricks with spinning tops. At night I was exhausted but managed to head down to badminton. I only got one (very good) game in before my legs gave out though, hehe. I'm still sore from the frisbee tournament, and had some bad blisters that I didn't want to worsen before climbing Fuji this weekend.

Yesterday was another day of Bunkasai (yes, they're very serious about it), held at Harmony Hall. The brass band performed several songs before the event everyone was waiting for - the chorus contest final! San-nensei class 3 ended up winning it, with class 8 coming in second. I was pretty happy about that as 3-8 is one of my favourite classes and 3-3 were the favourites and sang beautifully. After the closing ceremony I headed out to lunch with Masaie-sensei, filled the afternoon with something I can't remember and then just before I left, got called into Kouchou-sensei's office. Fourth time in two weeks, hehe. This time it was to let me know that I'd been picked by Oouchi-sensei to help out at Yashiro Orientation, which I was really happy about.

At night I raced across to Kakogawa to pick up some documents from my friend Emerald, and then zoomed back to Himeji to meet Yusaku for dinner at 6:30pm. We finally managed to get into the little izakaya we always try to go to but which is always full, and it turned out to be quite decent.

After dinner Yusaku and I happened to wander past the Softbank shop, so I stopped in quickly to pick up my old phone. Softbank had finally sent me a message to let me know that they'd finished repairing it. After the guy at the counter found my new phone, to my utter disbelief he put the *old* battery back into it. Complete with the water / short circuit damage on the contacts. To say I was unimpressed was an understatement. And to top it all off, he told me that I would need to order a new battery because the old one was damaged. I was like ... what the hell is the warranty for if you don't replace the god damn battery?

I've been thoroughly unimpressed with Softank recently but this was the last straw. First up, they told me it was going to cost 5,250 yen to repair the phone. Then a week later they contact me by SMS to tell me it's suddenly going to cost 8,400 yen. And finally, after waiting nearly a *month* for the phone to be repaired, they give me the old broken battery back and tell me I need to buy a new one. And this is all without even mentioning that my phone is basically brand new ... they replaced the electronics and the outer case, so god knows what is still left from the original phone. Why they decided to repair it when they could have just given me a new one (and it would probably have been easier and cheaper for everyone). Anyway, the long and short of it is that phone companies are the same world over - a big bunch of wankers. I had a good vent to Yusaku (in English) while we were in the store, and while the guy had no chance of understanding, I'm fairly sure he got the drift of it from my facial expression and tone.

Anyway, afterwards I went to Tiger Pub to catch up with Hisako and Makoto too, and then raced home to some much needed sleep. Today we just had the closing ceremony and the students have now finished for the summer, lucky little tykes ;) I'm going to do some prep for Tokyo Orientation next week and then head out at 4pm ... I'm heading to Dan's place tonight before our mammothian trip to Mount Fuji tomorrow and have plenty to do before I go. Should be a good weekend ... day off on Monday is nice and climbing Fuji should be a great experience. It's the last time I will see some of my friends who are heading back, so will definitely be aiming to make the most of it!