Nate, Aya and I met up with the new Ako ALT, Louise, for our first dinner, on Monday night! We met her at her apartment so she wouldn't get lost in Ako trying to find Minato-ya, haha, and took the opportunity to check out her 'mould' room while we were there. It was totally feral, even by male standards! :/ Thankfully she seemed to be in pretty good spirits and had cleaned up everything else in the apartment really well, with the help of the Ako BoE staff. So all good I guess. From there, Aya drove us all down to Minato-ya so that we could introduce Louise to meet Minato-san and get her her first bite of the best okonomiyaki in Japan, w00t! :)

I have to say, it's totally awesome to have a new person in Ako. Someone who can communicate, especially. Phillip faded away without a word, as is his style, and I still rarely hear from the ninja Claire, so I'm nothing short of ecstatic to have another real live enthusiastic talking native English speaker around. At Minato-ya we talked about all kinds of things, from her experiences in Japan so far to how things were back in Perth, and so on. It felt like I was back home for a while, what with her Perth accent and the places she talked about being so familiar. Definitely good times.