Hey all. Sorry for the sudden dumping of posts, I finally remembered to send them home from school where I can actually post properly. There are 15 new posts, so to make things easier, here's a link to view them all :) Enjoy.

This is rather frank and open post. Nothing too serious, but just be warned :)

I've been having some very interesting discussions with my local friends recently about 'dating' in Japan. This is rather fascinating for me, as I really don't see how Japanese people get together. The men and women are in general quite introverted and 'shy' (besides the crazy nanpa men, of course), and I don't think I've ever really seen a man make a move on a woman even in places where I'd expect to see it (bars, clubs and so on). So when I was out with Tabe, Ai and Kazuyo recently, I asked them what they thought. They all said that the best way, for girls anyway, is through a "friend of a friend". One way that they do this is called 'konpa', where a group of guys and girls will get together to hang out. It's usually done at a bar, izakaya or similar, and everyone sort of mingles until they find someone they like. Or not, hehe. If something happens, it happens, otherwise you go to another one.

I guess it's not really that different to how it works in Australia, although I think there's a lot random pick up attempts back home. When I used to hang out at places like the Raffles in Applecross, I used to see people 'working the crowd' all the time. It's a confidence thing, I suppose. All three of the girls moaned about how shy Japanese men are, and Ai said she'd even made the first move towards a couple of guys she liked. That's pretty impressive, I think. I suppose for Japanese women, it ,may even have come down to almost desperation! Either you make a first move or you stay single, because the horde of men that do actually really like you are all standing around staring at their feet and wondering what to do.

The other interesting thing is how Japanese people who have lived overseas approach dating. Living overseas really seems to change most Japanese people - it makes them a lot more open and confident. Ai and Tabe studied for a while in Australia, so they're good examples of this. They both said that while they certainly wouldn't rule it out, they would probably find it quite hard to find a decent Japanese guy now. This a general trend in Japan, in fact, with lots of women seemingly interested in gaijins. I think a lot of this is just various types of brainwashing, but everyone I have asked who is interested in gaijin have put up fairly good defences for it. Apparently we are taller, more chivalrous, more confident and generally more fun to hang out with.

While that makes me feel somewhat lucky to be in Japan, I really don't like being chased just because I'm gaijin. I know a few girls who seem to only be interested in talking to me and getting to know me because of that, and it makes me feel really used. The first few months here, the attention is totally awesome and you tend to lap it up and use it to spruce up the ego. After a while it gets tiring, though. Seeing that look of surprise and interest on a girl's face just because you're gaijin becomes tiresome and boring, not attractive. It's somewhat difficult to trust that people who say they like you actually like you because of who you are, and not just because you're gaijin and/or can teach them English. So there you go, a double edged sword, hehe.

Ever since I first came to Japan way back in March last year, I've been seeing people entering and exiting train station gates using some sort of proximity card. The system that is used down here in Kansai is called ICOCA. It's similar to the Smartrider system in Perth. When I got here, I thought about getting one but found out that they didn't give you any sort of discount, so didn't bother. Nate showed me how to get discount tickets (10% off) which was enough for me. One day though I was racing for a train with my friends and some of them shot ahead through the gates. A couple of us had to buy tickets and we missed the train because of it. So I figured it'd be a good idea to get one.

I ended up buying one in Himeji, on the spare of the moment, just because I had some time to kill. It was really easy, too. I just pressed the ICOCA button, randomly guessed which kanji to press, shoved some money in and hey presto, out came the card :) It's really convenient, too. Unlike the Smartrider system, which was a) buggy and b) required the card to be ridiculously close to it to work, this one a) works and b) has some decent range on it. So you can just throw your wallet on the panel and push it forwards as you walk through the gates. Sweet. No more missing trains while scrambling for tickets or coins, not JR trains anyway.

The only downside I can see is that you don't seem to be able to link your card to your bank account, like you can with the Smartrider system. That was one of the best things about the Smartrider system. It automagically topped the card up every time your funds ran low, so you never had to worry about buying cards/tickets/credit. I'll have to see if it can be done, and if not, I'll suggest it :D Anyway, I feel a bit more like a local now, with my sexy card. I still get funny looks all the time, but I especially get funny looks when I use the ICOCA to go through train station gates, hooray! :)

I got home on the weekend a couple of weeks ago after having been out all afternoon, and found a failed delivery notice for my games delivery. I'd missed it by about an hour, d'oh! I didn't have time to do anything about it as I was in a rush to get to Sannomiya. So naturally, I missed the next delivery too and found another notice in my door on Sunday morning just before I left for lunch with Emerald. I took the notices to school with the intention of getting a teacher to help me out, but figured I'd try to do it myself. I jumped onto the website of Yamato, the delivery company, and tracked the shipment. Turns out that it was on the truck that day already and scheduled for delivery at some mystery time.

Yamato has an English website that is relatively good, and they give a different call centre number on this to the number on the failed delivery slip. So I figured it might even be in English, but it wasn't, haha. The lady could speak a little English, though, which really helped, and I managed to get through it mostly in Japanese! Translating the kanji for "failed delivery slip" before calling really helped - "gofuzai renraku hyou". So all good! I gave them my phone number and address and set up a delivery for after 6pm that night, w00t!

I really must find a way to tell the delivery company never to deliver on weekends or before 6pm on weeknights. It's inane, really. I'm never home during weekdays because I have work and I'm usually only at home on weekends to sleep. I know they can't possibly know that, but it really is silly that they keep trying to deliver at times when I know I'll definitely never be home. I like shops that give you a space to specify a delivery time, like Faith Go. That was really easy to organise and there were no missed deliveries ;) Anyway, until I can learn the Japanese to do that, I guess I'll just have to try to explain to shops I buy things from that they should get the delivery company to only come on weekdays after 6pm :)

In an excellent example of why I love Japan so much, I read an article in the paper today about a 'school boy' cafe in Tokyo. It's based off 'boy-boy' manga, which centres around homosexual relationships, and is apparently very popular with women. The key to most of this manga seems to be that the men are drawn to be extremely feminine, and this is apparently how the waiters in the cafe are supposed to act. Women who go there can pretend to be 'benefactors' of the 'school boys', who are actually school clothes clad waiters. Bizarre? Definitely, but no more so than other side of the equation, where young geeky men go to gawk at beautiful waitresses dressed up in various manga costumes.

The idea of these kinds of cafes are pretty much totally 'out there', and I would never expect to see these things in most Western countries. I do have to admit, it does make me worry a little. I also read in the paper today about a guy who randomly stabbed about nine people, killing two of them. He apparently had two mobile phones and sent messages to himself between the two phones like 'I'm a god' and so on. I wonder how much events like this are linked to the Japanese 'pop' culture. It is often said in the west that Japan seems somewhat unstable. People literally live two lives - subdued and subservient by work/in public, crazy and wild in free time/in private.

Still, I can't really question it, I suppose. People have been like this for ever in Japan, and who am I to say that the Japanese lifestyle is any less stable than the Western one? I'm naturally biased because I grew up in the Western one. The only thing I'll definitely say is that the Japanese people I've met who have lived overseas have come back a lot different to Australians I've met who have lived in Japan.

The new teachers are an interesting bunch! I've been having some fun getting to know them. In ichi-nensai we have Ito-sensei and Yamaga-sensei (sp?), both of whom are very quiet and hard to speak to. I think they're a bit afraid of the gaijin who spouts random Japanese at them :) There are two new office ladies, one of whom, Juuta-sensei splits her time between the office and the admin position in the staff room. She's nice, and fun to talk to. There are quite a few new English teachers too - Touda-sensei, another Hashimoto-sensei, Nishitani-sensei and a part time teacher whose name I can't remember.

I haven't spoken to Touda-sensei much yet, but he strikes me as quite similar to Kotani-sensei. It was very amusing when I rode into school today amongst the students and surprised him. I was wearing black so blended in, and rode right past him. He saw me and looked quite surprised when he saw the mountain bike and a gaijin shaped face smiling back at him, and almost involuntarily muttered 'kakkoi!' (handsome/cool). Muahahaha. Ego boost for the day. Nishitani-sensei is a similar story, I haven't spoken to her. She seems quiet. The new part time teacher is also very quite and seemed nervous to be speaking to me, even though we spoke in Japanese. Hashimoto-sensei is very cool, he's confident and speaks great English. We had a good conversation yesterday and he's offered to help me with my Japanese. We'll see.

So all good. There are a few others around too, including an info science teacher who moved from the infamous Himeji Besshou, one of the worst behaved schools in Hyogo-ken. I asked her about it and she was rather quiet, so I gathered from that that she didn't want to be seen to be saying anything bad so didn't say anything :) Finally, there's a new part time science teacher (whose name was just impossible to hear when he told me) who lives in the same block of apartments as me. He has a "super-nice" mountain bike, as Minato-san would say, so I had something to talk to him about. He seemed a little nervous when I approached him too, but opened up a bit when I spoke to him in Japanese. I invited him out to ride up in the trails above Takayama at some point, and he seemed quite eager. Maybe I'll invite him this Sunday, we'll see.

It seems that the teacher postings for the new school year are finally out. Japan has a rather unique system of allocating teachers to schools. Teachers work for a prefectural board of education, which can send them anywhere within the prefecture. They do this seemingly completely at random, so teachers never know when they will be moving or where they will be going. This time around, Ako SHS is losing a lot of great teachers, and perhaps worst of all, they are almost all teachers that I know and like. Amongst others, we are losing Watanabe-sensei, Tajiri-sensei, Ishino-sensei, Okuto-sensei, Kotani-sensei, Igaki-sensei, Kono-sensei, Kuroda-sensei and Seiki-sensei.

I never really got to know some of these teachers very well, like Watanabe-sensei, Tajiri-sensei and Kono-sensei. This was mainly because of the language barrier, but despite that, I spent quite a bit of time sitting with them in ichi-nensai and they became friendly faces to me. We chatted a little bit now and then too. Although I don't expect Tajiri-sensei, who was my neighbour, will miss the sounds of gunfire coming from my apartment at 10pm at night though, hehe.

Some of the others I knew quite well, like Okuto-sensei and Kotani-sensei. They were two of my favourite teachers. I'd just started to get to know Kotani-sensei a little better, and I was always grateful to him for teaching me useful Japanese words and manners. Okuto-sensei was my OC class partner, so I'm really sad to see him go.

And I guess I'm pretty disappointed about the fact I never got to know some of the senseis that I thought were interesting people. Ishino-sensei and Kuroda-sensei, for example. I never really got to know Ishino-sensei, despite the fact she speaks fairly good English. She was very hard to approach because she seemed so nervous all the time. I did manage to suggest a few times that we hang out like I did with some of the other teachers, and never got a negative response, but she never initiated anything either. Perhaps I just needed to take more initiative, hehe. Kuroda-sensei is pretty much the same story, although he can't speak English, hehe. He's a kendo master (7th dan) instead. Such is life, though, I suppose. You can't win 'em all, or perhaps more accurately, you can't get to know 'em all.

So yes, it's kind of sad to see these people go. Looking on the bright side, though, there are still some great teachers still here and a whole lot of new ones will be coming in. Which is exciting. I was told that one of them is 'young', but that actually meant that she's mid 30s, hehe. I suppose everything is relative to the speaker, hehe. Thanks, Yoshida-sensei, I really had my hopes up of meeting someone my own age there :P Still, I am looking forward to meeting all the new teachers. Regardless of age, in my limited experience the teachers tend to be pretty cool people. And the way I see it, they're on my turf now, instead of the other way around, so hopefully I can leverage that to my advantage :)

I was talking to Hashimoto-sensei today in Japanese and we started saying stupid, funny things. Mostly tautologies but also some silly sentences like "okashii Akashi hashi", which means "crazy Akashi bridge". Then we combined for a team effort to make one of the funniest sentences I've ever heard - "niwa niwa niwa niwatori iru". Say it out loud and maybe you'll understand, hehe. It means "there are two chickens in the garden", hehe. Far too amusing :)

Yesterday night turned out better than I thought it might. After calling a few friend at school once 4 o'clock finally ticked around, I dropped past Paone on the way home. Mostly on the off chance of seeing my favourite friendly part time checkout worker than anything else, but I also bought some dinner. Haha. Back home I played some Dawn of War: SoulStorm and began to get a handle on "not losing" with Eldar. Quite hard to use, those little munchkins, but a lot of fun when you don't die.

It slowly ticked around towards 7pm, and my first Japanese class in Ako. Somewhat to my irritation, I found out that AIFA has been running Japanese lessons since at least October last year, if not before. Something that I really would have appreciated knowing (and about AIFA, too), but that nobody cared to mention. That, or they really didn't know, hehe. It all seems a bit stealthy. I suppose there isn't much call for Japanese lessons in a town with 99.9% of the population already knowing the language, hehe.

I was in two minds about the class. I really think that for any type of class, particularly a language class, to be effective, it needs to run often and for a decent amount of time. A couple of hours a day at least 3 or 4 times a week, for example. Perhaps I got that stuck in my head thanks to high school LOTE classes, which were abysmal, haha. Anyway, as this class was only scheduled once every two weeks, and I knew nothing about the format, it was not particularly appealing. I had promised Sekiyama-san I would go though, and thinking about it, I knew it'd be a good chance to just be speaking Japanese. So focusing on the positives, I trundled off quite happily.

And it actually turned out to be really cool. Due to the small number of people (between 4 and 6 or so students each week), it's actually more like a kaiwa (conversation) class. It's run by volunteers from the community, some of whom can speak English and some of whom can't. So it's a good challenge! There were two volunteers there that night, who have been working with individuals/small groups. One student wasn't there that night though, so I was able to have a one on two session with a volunteer and Sekiyama-san.

I felt fairly down at the start, as the other three students were a lot better at Japanese than I was. I cheered up a bit when I found out that they'd been in Japan for over 2 years and had to do an intensive Japanese course before coming here, though. I was also a bit shaky at first with the volunteer and Sekiyama-san, unable to understand a few things they said and unable to put into Japanese what I wanted to say. I kept a positive attitude though and got through it, and with Sekiyama-san's translations, actually had a somewhat roaring conversation going when we had to stop at 8:30pm.

On the way out, I caught up with the other students who had been there. They are Indonesian, and work over at IHI in Aioi. I'd actually seen one of them at a recent badminton tournament in Aioi, although he didn't recognise me and I couldn't tell which of them had been there, hehe. We had a good chat outside the building, though, and I walked with them back to the train station. They were friendly and spoke some English, so between our Japanese and that we were able to have a decent conversation. I was feeling pretty good - Indonesians and an Australian, in Japan, both communicating via a second language. It doesn't get much better than that. We talked a bit about badminton too, and they invited me down to play at IHI's gym on the weekends if I ever had time. I told them about Ako BMC in return, so we might get a few games in at some point. Good times!

The other interesting thing from the night was getting talking about Nick, a previous ALT, with Sekiyama-san and the volunteer. Sekiyama-san and Nick knew each other quite well, and Nick is a legend in Ako. Sekiyama-san implied that he and some other people in Ako wanted me to follow in Nick's footsteps and get married to a girl from Ako, haha. Taking the opportunity, though, I spun it around by telling him that there were no people my age in Ako. As I had expected, Sekiyama-san replied that there were, and that he would introduce me to some, hehe. He said that AIFA events were a good place to meet people. It's finally coming together, woohoo! I've finally made inroads into the local university with my friends Naonori, Aya and Miho, and hopefully I can meet some of the other young ninjas that apparently inhabit Ako. If they are here, I have no idea where they hang out!

Anyway, all good. As I said, a good night, much better than I expected. Back home I admittedly stayed up too late, but there were a couple of old friends online that I had wanted to talk to but hadn't been able to because of Japanese class. I also caught up with a couple of my local friends, some of whom live quite far away and are planning trips down to Kansai and maybe even Ako, woohoo! :) Plenty of good times ahead.

Yesterday was a really surprising kind of day. Mostly because my assumption that all the students would be back was totally wrong, but also because I actually spent most of the day talking in Japanese. From the student side of things, they actually had one more day of holidays - whoops! I'd even gone to the bother of getting pimped up in my suit and a nice shirt. Oh well, hehe. The speaking in Japanese thing was a surprise even to me. I guess the negative side of my weekend really had an impact on me. I had slept earlier on Sunday night so I wasn't feeling as tired as normal, and perhaps as a result I felt more motivated to study and speak Japanese than before.

Most of the teachers were in and out of meetings all day, but I wandered the staff room and managed to strike up random conversations with unfortunate senseis who just happened to not look too busy at the time. I had quick chats to Hashimoto-sensei, Takeuchi-sensei and Mitsumoto-sensei, and a long chat to one of the new office ladies, Juuta-sensei. It felt really good to have a proper conversation i Japanese and to actually understand and be understood most of the time. I could tell that Mitsumoto-sensei was very surprised by my sudden outpouring, and he commented that my Japanese was really improving :) I was even happier when Juuta-sensei said that the ALT at the school she came from never spoke any Japanese, even after 8 months in Japan. I've still got a long way to go, but I realised that I've come a long way. The level I'm at is far beyond what I had when I first came to Japan, and is even a long way above what I could do even just 4 months or so ago. I guess I'm finally progressing!

One thing I found recently that has helped me out quite a bit in relation to speaking and listening Japanese is JapanesePod101. I signed up a while ago but never really had a good look. They offer various Japanese lessons in audio format, and they're actually pretty damn good. I listened to a few and then just kept on going, and before long, I had filled up nearly 3 hours of the day. Good stuff! There are plenty more lessons, too, so if I'm ever stuck for something to do, I can definitely jump on there and fill up some time. I highly recommend checking the site out if you're trying to learn Japanese. The basic content is free and it helps a lot with your listening and vocab skills, so there's really nothing to lose.

Today has been a little more laid back, in a way. In the morning we had the opening ceremony for the ni and san-nensei students, which was all rather 'normal'. The most exciting part was when a student fainted. I didn't catch exactly what happened, but I heard the word 'souji', so perhaps she'd gotten a rather strong whiff of some of the cleaning gunk they'd been using before the ceremony. Poor thing! She was carried off by Morita-sensei, and seemed to perk up after a while. So all was good.

After lunch, the new ichi-nensei students finally arrived. Although I wasn't officially invited, I did my usual 'I think I need to go to this so I am going to go' thing and went outside to stand with the other ichi-nensei teachers. It was a lot of fun, actually. As I'm now really used to living here and being at school, I was totally comfortable with just standing there with a sea of Japanese kids in front of me. After a while, the students all lined up and filed out in their class groups, heading for the gym and their welcome ceremony. A lot of parents had come too, which was nice to see. The ceremony itself was very 'normal' as well. The new Kouchou-sensei spoke for a while, but I couldn't understand much. I like him, he's very cheerful and seems a little more laid back and open than Doi-sensei. He seems to like speaking for just as long a time as Doi-sensei did, though, hehe. One of the perks of being the top of the food chain, I suppose :)

Now I'm just waiting to leave school, really. I'm off to a Japanese class tonight, for the first time. AIFA has started them again and apparently get a pretty good turnout. I don't know how suitable it's going to be, but at least it'll be a place I can definitely speak Japanese at for an hour and a half or so each week. Some of the Indonesian boys who live in Aioi and work at the ship builders there come down, apparently, which should be interesting. They seem like decent blokes, from what I saw of them at the last badminton tournament. I'll go check it out, anyway.

Saturday was a kind of mixed day. I hadn't slept well the night before and months of not getting enough sleep had finally really caught up with me. I felt very ordinary, but managed to pull through and get to the Hyogo AJET meeting on time. We bagged a great hanami spot and had our quick meeting. The old committee handed over, us newbies introduced ourselves and had a quick chat for HAJET and what we wanted to do this year, and then it was all wrapped up. I wandered down to the Egret building to meet my friends, most of whom were late, and we all finally sat down to hanami at around noon. The AJET bentos came out and everyone was happy :)

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking, drinking, meeting new people and generally having a good time. The crowd swelled from about 20 people to nearly 50, squashed onto a few tarpaulins. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun, and I bumped into a lot of people I hadn't seen in quite a while. I felt a bit out of it though, to be honest! It had been a long time since I'd really worked my gaijin social skills, and being really tired certainly didn't help. I came out ok in the end, though. I didn't get around to speak to some of the people I wanted to, but I saw a lot of them. So no worries.

At around 4pm my friend Yusaku wanted to head to Kyoto. I had tentative plans to head to Kyoto with Goran and my other friends, but the hanami was so good at Himeji that none of them wanted to go. I didn't want to go to Kyoto either, to be honest. Nothing against Yusaku, it was just that heading out with one friend I can see almost any time was not as attractive an option as staying where the party was good and there were a lot of people I couldn't see often. So I almost decided to just tell him I was going to stay in Himeji, but figured that it would be very bad form, not to mention impolite, to do so. So I did my best to be positive about it and just made the sacrifice (very Japanese) and headed to Kyoto. I was very unhappy on the journey over, though, mainly because I was badly sunburnt and extremely sleepy. Note for next time - don't ever make solid plans for after a hanami party :D

Kyoto turned out to be ok, though. Yusaku had bagged some last minute accommodation at the Kyoto campus of the university he went to in Shiga. It was in the student dorms, and was pretty good - only 3,000 yen per night and right next to Fushimi Inari. We got there at around 7pm and walked up Fushimi Inari before checking into our accommodation. The night view over Kyoto was fantastic, which went a small part of the way towards making up for the abysmal journey to get there. Once we checked in we grabbed some dinner and then I crashed out. I don't think I've ever been as sleepy as I was that day, and it finally hit home to me that I need to change my destructive lifestyle, haha. Previously I've always felt just ok enough to shrug off the intelligent choice of getting more sleep, but no longer. Consider me a converted man - sleep is now my priority :)

I still felt pretty tired on Sunday morning, despite getting nearly 9 hours sleep. I was ok after a quick breakfast and a shower though. Yusaku and I rushed off to Heian-jingu, my favourite shrine in Kyoto. The sakura there was almost as good as I remembered it from last year, and I really enjoyed wandering in the garden. There were lots of people about, but not so many that it was uncomfortable. The weather was good, too, which helped. At around 11am we zoomed back to Kyoto station then out to Osaka to meet Yusaku's friend Kit. He was a decent bloke, and can speak nearly perfect Japanese. He had studied in Japan for a while, and got me thinking about studying Japanese formally after finishing up on JET. Interesting thought!

We didn't do a bento-hanami combo for lunch, opting instead to eat at a kaiten-sushi place in central Umeda. After that we tried to find a very famous hanami place and eventually found it, after being given bad directions and walking in the wrong direction for 20 minutes, haha. We only had about 20 minutes there before I had to leave though, hehe. I jumped back on the train at just after 4pm and was back in Himeji by just before 5pm. I didn't feel like going home quite yet so had a quick wander through Himeji, where I met another JET called Charlie and one of his friends. We went up to Himeji-jou to do a bit of late afternoon hanami before I decided to head back to Ako. I got back at just before 7pm and headed down to Minato-ya for dinner.

It was empty, so I had a good chat to Minato-san, who was very cheery. We decided to enter a bike race in September, in Nagano prefecture. It should be a lot of fun - 42km cross country mountain biking, w00t! Looks like I'll have to get training. He also ordered some parts for me (a bike stand, a quick release seat and some chain grease) while I cooked my food - bacon cheese yaki, mmmm, so healthy. I left at around 9:30pm and picked up some bread in Paone before getting home to unpack my new suit ready for today. I realised to my dismay that the shirts I'd bought were about 50% polyester, which is a bit annoying. It's bad enough in Australia, let alone somewhere a lot more humid. Still, they're easy to iron and don't crinkle too easily, plus I have several other pure cotton shirts. So all good.

Overall, it was a fairly average weekend. Perhaps the most important thing I learnt is that I'm not superman and I can't keep going without enough sleep. It's scary how it affects you, usually so slowly that you can't really see it happening. Well, at least I've learnt my lesson. I'll be getting more sleep from now on. It does have a big impact on how you feel, I think. While I'm annoyed that I let myself fall back into the pattern of life I used to have in Perth (which was in fact one of the reasons I left Perth), I'm glad that I've caught it and can (and am) taking positive steps to fix it :)

Thursday was a really slack day, I just tidied up my apartment, played some games and headed out for dinner with Kazu. We were going to go into Himeji but Kazu met Nate and Miho at Ako station and decided to follow them to Minato-ya. We had a good dinner there with one of Nate's friends, Dillon. They all ran off quite early to catch trains back, but I headed up to Sai-on with Kazu. We talked crap with the boys there for a while there until the ever crazy Aya. Kazu had been telling me the truth when he said Aya was normally quite serious. As soon as she'd had one drink though, she was back to 'normal', hehe.

Friday was the first real day of hanami for me. I'd arranged to meet up with my friend Amanda to go to Okayama and maybe Kurashiki. There was a little bit of confusion about the best way to get to Okayama, so in the end I just told her to come down to Ako and we'd go from there. On the way she messaged me to suggest we go for coffee in Ako first, so I took her down to my favourite little coffee place, Ciel, near the castle. I discovered to my delight that they do an awesome French toast and coffee set. It's a little expensive, but the French toast is amazing.

After 'brunch', we tried to catch a train to Okayama and somehow ended up going the wrong way, haha. So we had to get off at Sakoshi, the next stop, and catch a train back to Banshu Ako. It was only a short wait then for a train to Okayama. While we were standing on the platform waiting, my gaijin sixth sense kicked in and I spun around to see a young woman in the train on the opposite platform lowering her keitai. I realised she'd been taking photos of Amanda and I, haha. I laughed at her, and she and her friend both made love heart symbols with their hands. It was very amusing. I waved my best 'don dake!' ("don't do that!") at them and they laughed before running off out of sight. Crazy, crazy people.

We finally got to Okayama and headed straight up to the magnificent garden, Koraku-en. The sakura grove there was in full bloom and it was fantastic. The sakura this year seems to be bigger and crisper than last year, so it's a real treat. We spent quite a while in the garden, wandering, talking and eating our (very late) lunch. We took a quick wander up to the castle after that, and then back towards the train station. At the train station I discovered a Jupiter, and gleefully ran around buying ridiculous amounts of gaijin food (Cadbury chocolate, Vegemite and so on). We decided against going to Kurashiki as it was already 6pm and getting dark, so just had dinner in Okayama instead at a great little kaiten sushi bar.

It was nearly 9pm by the time we got back to Ako. I just headed home and got some sleep, ready for the big day of hanami in Himeji on Saturday!

School on Monday hit a new low. There was absolutely nothing to do and for the first time since arriving here, I became truly annoyed at having to be at school during the holidays. Previously I'd accepted it simply out of blind respect to the "Japanese way", but I've become more realistic as I've gotten more familiar and comfortable with Japanese culture. And I have to say, "Japanese way" or not, it really is a silly idea. I'd much rather just take half pay for the month and have the two weeks off. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about it any more as it makes me too stressed out, haha. But you get the picture.

Thankfully, Tuesday was a lot better, primarily because I came dressed for sports. I joined the judo club in the morning, watched some volleyball, caught a little bit of table tennis and shot some baskets with the basketball club. They were all happy to see me, and I was happy to be there. Much better than brooding at my desk in the staff room while everyone runs around like mad things, tidying up and moving desks. I got back from my sports adventures at about 1pm, after bumping into Okamoto-sensei and helping him search for a book up in the English room. I found to my dismay that my bento had been eaten (I know I ordered one!), so I ducked out to the konbini to pick up some food.

When I got back, there was much excitement as there were new teachers wandering around and the new principal was about to arrive. I quickly went out to join the crowd waiting for him, a little worried about being in my sports clothes. I was reassured by seeing many other teachers in casuals too, though, haha. We all clapped as the new principal came in, and I was surprised to see that he was quite young - probably around 50? He immediately disappeared into his office with Kyoto-sensei, though, so I just wandered back to the staff room and ate my lunch. I found that the area around my desk had completely changed since the morning, hehe. I'm now sitting mostly with the teachers who used to san-nensei, although there are some new faces too and some teachers from the other year groups. It feels a bit strange, as I'd gotten quite comfortable with my ichi-nensei neighbours and I didn't really have much contact with the san-nensei teachers. I'm sure I'll get used to it though!

After I finished my lunch, Kurioka-sensei came wandering across and asked me to prepare a self introduction for the classes I would be taking with her in the new school year. While I was doing this, Hashimoto-sensei, the new principal, decided to drop by my desk to have a chat. He speaks good English, which is pretty cool. He's pretty cheeky, actually. I found out after I spoke to him that he's an English teacher, haha. We spoke in Japanese initially, and he told me he couldn't speak much English. Haha. Mind you, you come to expect that from the ever humble Japanese :) So we spoke for a little while about where we were from and what sports we liked and the usual stuff like that, which was nice. I'd never been able to do that with Doi-sensei, the previous principal. Also, I realised that Hashimoto-sensei had come especially to talk to me, which got him some extra cool points.

Around 3:30 we had a staff meeting and I picked up my timetable for this year. It's looking relatively average compared to most JETs, but certainly much better than last year. The biggest downer for me is that there will be no san-nensei OC class, due to lack of students who want to do it. Thankfully, though, there was a bigger plus to cover that downer with room to spare - the introduction of ichi-nensei oral communication classes. So phew! Anyway, these OC classes mean that I will be teaching at least 7 hours a week, as opposed to the 2 in Term 2 and 0 in Term 3 of last year. I also have a few ni-nensei classes down as well, although they don't do OC. So I imagine it'll be like last year, where I just go when I'm needed (read: once a month if lucky).

So 7 classes a week. It's not so bad, I guess. It leaves me enough time to prepare (especially that free Monday) as well as sneak in some Japanese study. Not to mention the fact I can take nenkyuu that day and bag myself a long weekend whenever I want, wheee. That said, my happiness bubble was a little punctured when I discovered that my evil plans to get involved in kendo and maybe PE classes during term look like they might not pan out. I had coffee in the gym staff room after catching the end of basketball training and ended up talking to the kendo sensei. I asked him if I could join and he came back with a 'chotto matte' and 'muzukashii'. Which in Japanese, is basically an indirect equivalent of 'no' that you're just supposed to be able to magically understand :) We'll see, anyway. Tomiyama-sensei seemed to think it'd be ok, so maybe if approach him about it and have an English teacher around too, I might be able to work something out.

After the staff meeting I finished my self introduction sheets (a guessing game, a fill in the blanks and an ice breaker, hooray!) and then headed out to play some Ultimate Frisbee in the field. There were no students around so the field was empty, so I could throw as I wanted. I ended up throwing into the wind and then running as fast as I could to catch it before it hit the ground - very good exercise and training. I managed to lose my keys out of my jacket pocket while doing this, though, and had to search for them before going home, hehe.

On the way home I stopped in at the Ako International Friendship Association to talk to Sekiyama-san. He gave me a book about the 47 Ronin of Ako, illustrated with black cats. It's in English and Japanese, and he wants to take a recording of me reading the English version. Sounds like fun! So I set that up with him and then had a gander at his photos from his recent trip to Rockingham. I realised how much I missed the Australian scenery - it's so spacious. I don't really miss some things about Australia though - seeing crowds of 'bogans' made me so grateful to be in Japan.

After that it was up to Kappa sushi for dinner, where it seems I got food poisoning. Nice, haha. Nothing too terrible though. Today, school is much quieter than it was yesterday. There are quite a few cars in the carpark but there are less than 10 teachers in the actual staff room. There's nothing on the notice board until much later today, so I guess everyone thought it'd be a good day to sneak in some nenkyuu. I've got two days from tomorrow, so a nice 4 day weekend. Plenty of time to catch up on sleep :)

Hooray, my suit finally arrived, in a beautifully packed box. My irritation with the delivery company for trying to deliver at 9am again (if I'm not in on Monday at 9am, am I likely to be in on Tuesday?) evapourated and turned to a sort of respect when they suddenly rocked up at about 8pm. I guess they figured it out - first company to do so. Anyway, I'm looking forward to starting the new school year with a new suit and couple of new shirts. Always good.

Once we got back to Nagoya station after the Toyota tour, I zoomed back to the hotel with Andrew and Devin to get ready to go out at night. Devin was planning to head up to Tokyo that night, but when he heard that so many people were going to go out for dinner, he decided to stick around. He didn't have accommodation and I had space in my room, seeing as Emerald hadn't made it up, so that worked well. We headed out at around 6:45pm and bagged ourselves a taxi back to Nagoya station. The joys of travelling in a group - taxis are cheap! There we met up with the other JETs who were hanging around, and started to try to find somewhere to eat.

This turned out to be really complicated as it was 7pm on a Friday night, so everywhere was busy. I wanted to eat at a Yama-chan, which did the famous Nagoya-style chicken wings. Unfortunately there were too many of us to do that, so we eventually ended up heading to Sakae, the 'night district' of Nagoya. There we found an izakaya straight away and after a short wait, were herded into a nice tatami room. We starting eating and drinking, and after a while, Watanabe-san and Saito-san turned up to join us. Kayahashi-san hadn't been able to make it, unfortunately. They seemed really happy to be using their English and chatted away with us all night. It was kinda wierd seeing them in casual clothes after their formal uniforms, though, hehe.

I'd also arranged to meet my friend Junko M, who had been out at a welcome party for the company she'll start work at next week. She came back to the izakaya and we all chatted away until it was time to leave at about midnight. Our Toyota tour guides headed home and the rest of us went on into Sakae to Club ID to party on. The club was not particularly nice (think of your average Australian nightclub, with the only difference being that everyone is Japanese instead of Australian), but the music was great so it was fun enough. To my surprise, though, it closed at 1am! Not really sure what to do next, a group of us wandered outside looking for the Hub, a chain pub. We walked around for a bit, but never did manage to find it, haha.

It was getting towards 2am and we were all pretty tired, so we decided to call it a night. Back at the hotel, Devin decided to sleep on the floor, hehe. Thanks to being quite drunk, he actually slept fine though. Which meant that I didn't - I completely forgot that he snored something chronic, haha. So I didn't get much sleep. After waking him up at 6:30 to make sure he got on the shinkansen to Tokyo, I finally got some sleep. At around 1pm, I headed out to do some hanami at Nagoya castle with Junko. We wanted to buy bento to eat under the trees, but it took us over an hour to find a konbini, lol. When we finally found one, we wandered back to a lovely little park where the crowds were comfortable in size, and sat and ate, enjoying the flowers.

After that we headed to the castle itself and had a wander around the grounds and up into the top to look out over Nagoya. It was fairly busy though, and I was really tired thanks to not getting much sleep (*shakes fist at Devin*), so I headed back to the hotel to rest. I just grabbed a quick dinner from the nearby konbini and watched a bit of crazy Japanese TV before going to sleep. I'd arranged to meet my language exchange partner, Minori, on Saturday night, but she had finished work very late and hadn't been able to make it in. Which was good, in a way, as I was so tired it wouldn't have been much fun. I was still tired on Sunday morning, but less so, hehe.

Unfortunately, I misjudged the amount of time needed to get to the station and ended up being about 15 minutes late to meet Minori. I felt really bad about that, but she was forgiving and let me buy her coffee in a vain attempt to make up for it :) I suppose it could have been worse - thankfully we'd arranged to meet at a silver clock and she had to search for it for quite a while, so at least she probably wasn't standing around waiting for all of those 15 minutes.

It was lovely to meet her, and I was really happy to find that she was as friendly in real life as she had been on the net/phone, if not more so. Her English was better in person, too, so we had a great conversation while we searched for a cafe. I feel pretty lucky to have made such a good friend in Aichi-ken - we've already arranged to go snowboarding together next winter, huzzah!

It had been a bit of a weekend of firsts, and this continued as we went to Starbucks for coffee. Perhaps it was because my defences were down due to being tired and desperately wanting something to wake me up, or perhaps I've just become more tolerant :) It actually turned out to be pretty good, though, haha. After the mammothian effort of drinking coffee (and the fact I hadn't had any breakfast, haha), I was hungry, so we started looking for somewhere to eat. Minori took me to a really swanky wanky building near the station and we eventually managed to find a place that wasn't too expensive, and that we both wanted to try. Although the prices were inflated thanks to the decor, it still ended up about the same as you'd pay for a normal meal in Australia, hehe. Gotta love Japan.

I wandered back to the station at just before 2:30pm, said goodbye to Minori and literally turned around to meet Junko. I had realised that I probably wasn't going to be in Nagoya again for quite a while, so I decided to bite the bullet and ride the shinkansen back. I wanted to maximise the time with my friends there, and I was far too tired to worry about rattling along on the 5 hour seishin kippu journey back. So I got Junko to help my buy the ticket (which is fully automated now and can all be done in English, wowz!) and then we went to check out the orchid nursery. I was really glad I got down there, as it was one of the things on my list of places to go. To my dismay, though, it was nowhere near as good as last year. They only had about 1/4 the amount of plants in the atrium as they have previously.Still, the ones they did have were beautiful, so it wasn't a complete loss :) That's life, I suppose.

We headed back to Nagoya station from there at just after 4:30pm and I jumped on the 5:11 shinkansen back to Aioi. It only took about an hour and three quarters to get to Aioi, and then it was a short 15 minute ride home to Ako from there. Not bad, although it did burn a 9,130 yen hole in my pocket, hehe. I suppose it's quite reasonable compared to the ridiculous 5,250 yen which it normally costs to ride standard JR trains from Nagoya to Banshuu Akou, not to mention the fact that the shinkansen is much more comfortable. I suppose it doesn't come up so well against the 2,300 of the seishin kippu though, if you have time and don't mind the fact you might have to stand up for part or all of the way :D Oh well, it was worth it this time :) If I did that every week, I'd definitely be looking out for discount tickets. Apparently you can get discount shinkansen tickets from shops near the train station that will get you about 10% off.

And that's that! It was a really great long weekend so I'm very glad that I went up for the seminar and stayed afterwards. Kudos to Emerald for pointing it out to me. I learnt a lot, met some great people, made some new friends and rode the shinkansen. Sweet deal. Next stop, hanami weekend. Let's see if it can be even better! :D