My Friday ended up being a surprisingly good day :) Classes went quite smoothly and I also had ESS club after school. This is always fun, and was especially good that week as it meant a break from the exhausting judo club ;) School is holding a cultural festival soon, and ESS club is going to make a big poster in English! We decided to make it about Australian food, so I told the kids I'd bring in some Vegemite and Tim Tams and other nefarious Aussie foods for them to taste and write about ;)

After school, I didn't really have anything planned (surprisingly quiet two weeks, actually!) and was just thinking of heading to badminton. I didn't really feel like it, though, and had half a bottle of wine from Minato-ya's dinner the night before, hehe. So I took a gamble and decided to invite the Minato-ya crew to my house for an impromputu wine and sushi night. I wasn't expecting much because they are usually really busy, but Yoko, Ewan and Kazu all said they could come. So we made it happen and it was very cool.

It was just Yoko and I to begin with, and we ended up talking about music. When Ewan dropped in, he joined in and we jumped onto Youtube to listen to some of his new favourite artists. He has really broad tastes and is always into something interesting. New Zealand reggae, at the moment, it seems. This gradually digressed into crazy videos like Hard Gay Ramen, The World of Golden Eggs and Takeshi's Castle. These were accompanied by some great Australian wines (2003 McWilliams Chardonnay, 2006 Apple Flats Merlot and another red that I can't remember) and plenty of food.

Eventually Ewan had to shoot off to pack for his trip to Australia the next day and Yoko had to head home as she was getting up early the next day, so Kazu and I decided to go check out Sakoshi beach for a while. I guess some part of me is still a kid because I started jumping and climbing around on the rocks there, as I always do, haha. Unfortunately this time, it cost me my mobile phone. I was using the light to see where to step, and lost my balance. I caught it easily, but in doing so had to swing my hand up and lost my grip on my phone, which flew in a perfect curve straight into the shallow ocean near the bottom of the rocks. Needless to say, it didn't work any more, haha. Oh well.

Anyway, aside from the phone, it was a great night. We all agreed we should do more little impromptu things like this, so hopefully in future we will! :)

The week I joined judo club was pretty crazily busy even though I didn't really get up to anything 'exciting'. I played judo from Tuesday to Thursday, and gradually got better at waza and ukemi. Admittedly I got a little annoyed with the injured students who were teaching me, as I felt they were getting very frustrated with me when I couldn't do something. I had to keep reminding them that it was only my 2nd or 3rd lesson, and they seemed to be ok after that. I also got a little frustrated with myself when I couldn't do certain things, but again, I'd barely started so I couldn't really expect to be good. I just tried to keep a positive attitude :)

On Wednesday I went to play badminton after judo, and actually played pretty damn well. For the first few games, anyway, hehe. I played well in the final one too, but the majority of my shots hit the top region of the net, which was extremely frustrating. I suppose at least I'm getting the shuttle in about the right area. I still need to focus on drives, serve return and baseline shots, but I'm really happy that I'm finally getting better, at least in my very critical eyes.

Thursday night was Minato-ya night, although it was quite different to normal. I'd invited my new friend Tomoko, who for some reason decided she was going to pick me up from my house. I wanted to ride my bike so that I had the freedom to leave whenever (I was exhausted from judo/badminton etc.) but as she didn't know where Minato-ya was, I agreed to let her pick me up. So I raced home after judo to take a shower, only to have her turn up 5 minutes early. I know I shouldn't have felt bad because it was her fault for coming early, but I couldn't help it. I'd been delayed the previous time I met her too, thanks to the rain and school. Things out of my control, yes, but I still felt pretty bad.

Anyway, we got there eventually and walked in to find Nate and Miho watching a movie on Minato-san's projector. I has noticed it a while ago and asked about it, but he never really showed much interest in using it. I guess Nate decided it was time to do something with it, haha. So we vaguely watched "Mr Baseball" with Tom Selleck (lol) and chatted away while we ate. Tomoko ordered an umeshiso (sour plum and shiso leaf) okonomiyaki, which was actually surprisingly good. After a while we were joined by Mitsue, Yoko and Ewan, and I broke open the bottle of wine I'd brought. It was Ewan's last Minato-ya for a few weeks as he was off to Australia, so I thought we'd make it a good one.

Once the movie finished, Nate put on some Michael Jackson music videos, which were hilarious. He's totally bonkers, but he's got serious talent. At just after 10pm we called it a night and headed home. I'd left my mama-chari at Minato-ya about a month before and felt I should move it, so I rode that home instead of catching a lift back with Tomoko. Ah the joys of having bikes spread over the city ;)

I finally started judo club on Tuesday! :) After working out how to wear my absolutely enormous and inflexible judogi, I managed to robot-walk my way to the judo dojo for my first lesson. Along the way, I surprised a lot of my students and they got very excited at the sight of me in judo clothes :P I heard a few 'kakkoi!'s (handsome/cool!) and laughed my head off. Kakkoi? Yes. Absolutely any idea how to do judo? Definitely not! I guess maybe you don't need to have skillz to be cool after all? :P

When I reached the dojo, the judo club students went nuts as well, which was amusing. One of them got me an obi (belt) to wear, and taught me how to tie it. After that they kicked off the training session with a simple run, although it rapidly progressed into stuff I couldn't do. After the stretching, they started doing insane rolls across the floor, including one where they go into a handstand, hold and then tuck their head up and roll down from that position. Important, yes, but a little beyond my level at the moment :P So I just watched and tried to remember how to ukemi. The kids managed to convince me to try one, although it was more a falling-over-attack than a smooth roll.

They then started sparring, which I definitely couldn't take part in, so some of the injured students took me aside and started to teach me some waza and ukemi. They taught me how to do a simple throw by stepping up to the opponent with my right leg, kicking past them with my left and then whipping my knee back against the back of their knee and pushing them down. They also tried to teach me a simple roll, how to fall over backwards and then the basic 'safe' position. I managed to get the left version of the safe position down ok but the backwards fall and roll I had more trouble with.

I've never really done anything like that before so it's certainly not easy! My problem with the backwards fall is that my legs are extremely long. Even when I squat down before falling over, I'm still a fair way off the ground and it's very hard to land softly. Practise makes perfect, I guess. As for the roll, it happens so fast that it's hard to see exactly how the kids do it. Kyoto-sensei dropped in late in the session and cast his expert eye over my flailings, though, and pointed out that the hand of the rolling arm needs to make a line parallel to the direction you want to go in. I think this might be the key to why my rolls weren't working :) So yes, very exciting, anyway! I'm looking forward to training more.

As I mentioned, the weekend was pretty quiet. I missed out on a beer garden on Friday night and a thing or two during the day on Saturday. Thankfully I escaped school at dead on 4pm though, so my Saturday night wasn't completely ruined. My new friend Tomoko had invited me to a BBQ at her house and had even arranged to pick me up at Paone, as her house is a little way out of Ako. Unfortunately, it started bucketing with rain at just before 4pm and despite my raincoat, I got drenched! I managed to find Tomoko but was feeling pretty crap thanks to the rain, so told her I needed to go home and have a shower first. I felt a bit bad about that as she'd been waiting just for me. She didn't seem to mind though, and arranged to pick me up a little later in the arvo.

The party was pretty fun, overall. My friend Devin, another ALT, was also there, and I remember thinking how rare the situation was. Not only because we had been invited into a Japanese house, but because we were also having a party in one and there were two of us gaijin there at the same time ;) A very rare occurrence in Ako! ;) And on the topic of Japanese houses, I was really glad of the opportunity to finally be able to bust out my full collection of Japanese house culture! The shoes thing is completely natural now (I'll probably still do it when I return to Australia, hehe), but I got to say a few new things - the customary 'ojama shimasu' (excuse me for disturbing you) as you enter the house and 'tsumarani mono desu ga' (it's a trifling thing, but ...) as you give the little gift you're supposed to when you visit someone's house. Very cool!

Tomoko's house was really nice, too. It was an older style house, but very well made and still beautiful. Perhaps the best part was that the large tatami room that we sat in to eat had wonderful bamboo sliding doors that opened up to reveal a small verandah, a beautiful little garden and the greenery of the mountain just beyond. Fantastic! Thanks to the rain streaming down outside the window, we couldn't do a BBQ after all though. Instead, Tomoko's mum cooked up a storm of takoyaki and yakisoba - yum! As we sat and ate, I met Tomoko's family, who were all there. She has a younger brother who studies at the local Welfare University and a younger sister who seems to be either in late elementary or early junior high school. Her brother's girlfriend and some of his friends were also there, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of what people that age are like (again, a very rare opportunity for me). Basically the same as my high school students, haha, but without the strict rules. So they all had died hair, pierced ears, grungey/revealing clothes and so on.

Finally, her parents were pretty cool too. Her mum is very kind and an awesome cook, and her dad was a total riot. He was pretty drunk and would continually call out 'Sensei mo!', grab Devin's or my hand, and ask us all kinds of bizarre questions. I was ok to translate initially but as he got more and more drunk I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, hahaha. So poor Tomoko had to act as drunken speech translator, hehe. The whole party was a really good chance to practise my Japanese, actually. Any situation where you have someone who can't speak English and someone who can is excellent, because you can try your best to understand and communicate with the former while having the latter as backup. You can learn heaps that way, I think. Communicating with people who can't speak English tends to be fruitless from the point of view of learning anything new - it's hard to learn when you can't get an explanation of what has been said if you don't understand it!

At just after 7pm, Devin had to leave and so I decided to head off too. Tomoko seemed disappointed but I didn't want her mum to have to make yet another trip out into Ako later that night just to drop me off. She probably would have (she seems to have infinite patience, as she waited around for Tomoko for over an hour last Tuesday night when we decided to go out for dinner after the Japanese class) but that's beside the point! Back at the ranch I didn't want to call it a night yet, so gave Kazu a call. He wasn't doing anything so we whacked on our raincoats and headed down to an izakaya on the main street of Ako for a later dinner. After that we spent some time searching for a new bar to go to, but lucked out. In the end we wound up at Selfish, a 'safe' snack bar that we know, where thanks to the rain, we were pretty much the only customers. After a few drinks and some karaoke, we called it a night.

My Sunday and Monday were really quiet. I was exhausted after the long week so slept in very late on Sunday. When I got up, I finished Assassin's Creed, went to see Minato-san for dinner and then borrowed some movies from GEO. On Monday I installed my last new game, Bio Shock. It's an incredible game and admittedly I spent most of the day playing it. I did a few chores in the late afternoon and grabbed some dinner at Kappa Sushi. I got a 'hisashiburi!' from one of the staff, which was nice, as I hadn't been there for several weeks. And that was my weekend done. Pretty quiet, but given how busy I'd been, it was great to have a good rest.

The rest of my week was pretty normal. I played tennis with the teachers on Wednesday afternoon, which was fun despite the fact I played pretty badly, haha. I hadn't played for nearly 10 years, and having taken up badminton, found it really hard to control the ball. Not really surprising, I suppose :) I played badminton on Wednesday night and actually played surprisingly well, winning most games. So that was good. Thursday night was Minato-ya, and Friday I had to take it easy thanks to having to go to school on Saturday. It was the very exciting annual general meeting of the Parents and Teachers Assocation (PTA). It was decided that the students should also come, and do their Monday classes. Not sure why, but that's life, hehe. I wasn't involved in the PTA meeting and have no classes on Monday, so it was a little bit of a bummer as it really mucked up my weekend plans and made for a very tiring 6 day week. At least we got the Monday off, though, and then a 4 day week to make up for it :)

The only other exciting thing that happened during the week was that my infinite patience in waiting to get my judogi finally paid off, when it arrived on Thursday! I came back to my desk after a class to find Kurioka-sensei standing there with it, wheee - I was really excited. And at a whopping $300, so I should be! I decided I'd better be hitting the judo club as much as I can, hehe. I wasn't expecting it to be quite so much, but such is life - 'real' gear for Japanese sports/culture/etc is really expensive. Anyway, Yamamoto-sensei, the teacher in charge, said I could start the next week and should just go whenever I could. Which I think meant I should be going every day, but that I had gaijin privileges :)