I figured when I left school on Friday afternoon that Monday was going to be busy, and it sure was! It was made a little bit heavier too by the fact that I still hadn't quite recovered from the beach party, hehe. I think I would have been fine except for the friendly local who bought me a bottle of beer at Minato-ya on Sunday night (yay random acts of Japanese kindness) and the fact I managed to get burnt on Sunday morning ;/ Still, I ganbarimashita-ed and fought my way through the whole day ok :)

I jumped straight into it on Monday morning, as two ni-nensei classes (in periods 2 and 3) had been sprung on me at the last minute and I needed to prepare a lesson. Thankfully, the textbook chapter, which appeared daunting at first, was surprisingly easy to cook up activities for. I knocked up a crossword from the vocab, pulled out my Kocho-sensei's Monkey worksheet (a word game where the students have to think of words from A-Z on a given topic) and mixed it all up with a little reading and pronunciation practise, and the lesson was ready to go! It went down pretty well with the kids too, who were genki after having finished exams the previous week.

That took me up to lunch time, when I started marking the rest of my tests. I'd just finished one class when my ESS club students rocked up and wanted my help with their cultural festival project. The timing wasn't great but I'm paid to be genki about everything, so I jumped out of my seat and run up to the LL room to set them up. They were relatively genki despite the heat, so once they were happily sitting on the floor scrawling away about how disgusting Vegemite is on their massive sheets of poster paper, I excused myself and got back to my marking. I finally finished it just after 6pm, after checking in on my ESS kids a few times.

It was at this point that I realised I still hadn't gotten around to planning a lesson for my ichi-nensei classes the next day. I had tried, but the teacher I normally plan with was busy when I was free and vice versa, and she'd left in the early afternoon. I felt utterly depressed. It was 6pm, I was dog tired from the stress of the morning and the boredom of marking, not to mention the carry over effects of the beach party, and I just wanted to go home and sleep. Kinda like how I used to feel at work in Australia just before I left, haha. Still, I forced myself to keep on going.

I wasn't entirely sure what to do so in the end pulled a gaijin and just made a lesson plan myself. It was really easy as I just used the music class I'd done with my san-nensei the year before. It's a great, easy, relaxing class to use at the end of term that still has syllabus content (listening skills and world awareness). So I printed off some sheets, set up my ipod and called it a day just before 7pm.

Today was a much more chilled out day, which was very welcome. I had two classes, the first of which was pretty stressful as somebody had stuffed the speakers up in the LL room. Goodness knows how. I'd used it just a few weeks before and it was fine, so perhaps rather naively I assumed that it would be ok. I learnt my lesson though - never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Like changing the settings on a mixer so nothing works, which we later found out was the problem. *sigh*. Anyway, thankfully I had a backup plan which was just going through the answers to the recent test instead. And speaking about the test, I was really impressed with how well my kids went, even the weaker classes. I was really happy about that because I felt I'd made a pretty fair test, and they still performed well. They must have studied after all. I hope that was at least partly because of my influence - makes me feel that I'm valuable here :)

I had another class with Kurioka-sensei later today as well, which the speakers were fixed for, so I got to do my music class after all. Yippee! It's always a lot of fun, and the kids love listening to music. I think they are really interested in what I like to listen to, and all the different types of music I have. They pretty much only seem to listen to American and Japanese music, so Irish, Russian, German, Australian, Taiwanese and so on music really freaks them out, haha. I only wish they looked as interested in what's going on during all my classes :P

Summer has hit Hyogo, like a shovel to the face. Last week it was 25 and refreshingly cool (although somewhat humid), this week it's 30 - 35 and 70%+ humidity. Welcome to summer - it's going to be like this for literally the next 4 months. I continue to be impressed by the Japanese seasons. They truly are clockwork and literally change in the period a week. I happened to glance at the thermometer above my kitchen table last night and noticed it was 31 at 11pm. This is basically exactly what it was like from when I arrived in early August last year all the way through until late October, haha. Ah, good times. It takes a bit of getting used to in the beginning (you get *really* tired) but after a while it becomes at least bearable.

The San-in beach party totally rocked! Two days of fun in the sun, pumping music, crazy dancing and interviewing some of the best DJs in Japan. The party kicked off on Friday night so I decided to head up there straight after school, jumping on the big ass diesel Super Hakuto train at Kamigori. While I was waiting for that, I met one of my favourite san-nensei students from last year. We had a great chat - turns out that he's studying to be a chef now! I was pretty proud of him :) It's not university, but at least he's got a good career and future ahead of him. Come to think of it, nothing much had changed about him really, hehe - he still mainly wanted to talk about the genital size o_O Lol. Never a dull moment.

I got up to Kozomi beach, where the party was held, at around 9pm. Not too bad, really! I met up with Dan and Goran at around 9:30pm and we dumped our stuff into our accommodation before hitting the party. The accommodation was pretty funky, actually. Kozomi beach is in the middle of nowhere so the only nearby accommodation is a set of relatively decent minshukus (traditional Japanese accommodation) about 2 minutes walk from the beach. They're run by some old rice farmers, who were really great. I felt a bit sorry for them, as the bass from the party easily carried to the area they lived and was basically going from 3pm to 6am all weekend, hehe.

Anyway, we took some time to relax and settle in, grabbing some food and beers at a nearby konbini, before getting our party on hard just after midnight. The Dex Pistols, one of the big name acts at the party, came on about 1am and we got to interview them after that, at around 3 - the joys of being on the Press Team! ;) They were really cool guys and were very patient with our questions and me snapping away at them with my camera. We finally got to sleep at just before 6am.

We were up early again the next day though, ready to hit the 'adequate' beach! Not a patch on Cottesloe, but it was definitely the best beach I've seen in Japan since arriving. Goran, Dan and I spent most of the day in the ocean and mucking around on a mountain on a small island just off the coast. It was a very beautiful place and I felt truly relaxed for the first time in a long while. Back on the beach, the party had stopped until the early afternoon, replaced instead by lots of beach performances which included capoeira, belly dancing and various other things.

Around 5ish we headed back to the room for a rest, and Goran and Dan headed into the party. I wanted to take a shower but it was incessantly full, thanks to people on the beach finding out about it *grrrr!*. I dozed for a bit and finally managed to shower at around 8pm. From there I headed out with my camera and spent the rest of the night snapping away with it, having a great time :) DJ Jin, another of the big acts, came on around 10pm but didn't really manage to get the crowd going. I think everyone wanted dance music like the first night, and his R&B sets weren't really very danceable. Still, he was pretty good and we got to interview him after, too. He was an interesting guy and had some pretty well thought out answers to our questions, so I was impressed.

I was getting another drink after Jin's performance when I was suddenly jumped on by a Japanese girl who was a little bit drunk. She turned out to be a professional photographer and had noticed me wandering around with my enormous lens, so had somehow worked up the courage (hooray for alcohol!) to come and talk to me. So I let her look through my photos and she picked out a few that she really liked. And then before we knew it, it was time for the biggest act of the party, DJ Kentaro! This guy is the number one DJ in Japan and having seen his performance, I can believe it! His music wasn't the best to dance to, like DJ Jin's, but his sets and mixing were flawless! He played some better stuff as he got into his final set, too, and finally got everyone dancing. Amazing stuff. And to finish everything off nicely, we even got to do an interview with him too, at about 2am. It was fantastic, and while I'm not normally into this kind of thing, it's so cool to be able to say I've met the coolest DJ in Japan :P

After a few more photos and a bit more dancing we finally decided to call it a night at around 4am. We were all massively tired and managed to get some good sleep until almost 11am on Sunday, thankfully :) Goran and Dan hit the beach while I rested a bit more and packed up, then I wandered up to the konbini to get some breakfast. I met up with some of the Hyogo boys and we talked about the party as we walked back, and then it was time to go. I was dreading the long train rides back home, but was lucky enough to bump into Ewan, who had also decided to drop into the party. He offered to give me a lift home, which I gratefully accepted!

Kazu the Gay was lurking around Tottori as well so Ewan called him and we all decided to have lunch at a great little Balinese restaurant Ewan knew of before heading back. Then it was off up the crazy twisting roads through the mountains, stopping half way to jump into a convenient mountain river to cool off. It was good fun hanging out with Ewan and we talked about heaps of things on the way back - music, cameras, Tottori and a heap of other things. Back in Ako I did some washing and headed down to Minato-ya for my Sunday night catch up with him before heading back and getting some long overdue sleep, hehe.

The rest of my week rolled along fairly smoothly, as I had nothing official to do at school. Hehe. I filled up my time doing Hyogo AJET stuff, which was really good - took a bit of a load off my shoulders! I also got the 'Look Book' (advertisement about Hyogo AJET) printed off and will send it up to the Tokyo Orientation staff at some point. That was a bit of a tough one, but I got there in the end. I wasn't so lucky with getting some Hyogo Times, our Hyogo AJET magazine, printed off for the San-in Beach Party though. After explaining what I wanted over and over again to first a teacher at school and then a printing shop, they still didn't understand what I wanted, and when they finally did it turned out to be hideously expensive. Hahaha. Such is life, I suppose! Thankfully my good friend Dan came up with a great, easy solution so the stress is off there too.

On Wednesday night I finally had enough energy to go back to badminton and have a hit, after three weeks off. Surprisingly, I didn't play too badly, although I had lost my smash technique. There was a really good turnout (including Funamoto-san's baby son, who was very amusing) so we were able to have two courts going the whole time - excellent! I met some new people too, all friends of Ewan's new girlfriend Ai. They're all doctors/dentists/nurses at the central hospital in Ako, where Ai works, and amusingly enough one of them was the really short lady who treated my leg when I fell off my bike a few months back. And although they were quite a bit older than me (30+), they were all really friendly and we had a great time playing together.

On Thursday we had the compulsory annual health teacher check, which was fun. Luckily I'm young so I didn't have to go through the crazy amount of things some of the older teachers had to do (like on the spot blood tests and so on!), although I did have to urinate in a little cup. Nice, haha. Aside from that I only had to hand in my form, do a ridiculously easy eye test (hooray for perfect vision) and talk to an ancient doctor who grinned at how much exercise I did, and that was it. Good times! After that I played badminton with some of the teachers at school, and kicked their butts, haha. At night I went to Minato-ya, which was really great. The full crew turned out, and it was one of the best nights I've had there, chatting away to everyone.

Friday was a really crazy day as I had to supervise my English test in the morning and then get cracking on the marking straight away. I managed to mark two classes by the time 4pm got around, and managed to arrange for Kurioka-sensei and Hashimoto-sensei to mark two provided I marked the remaining two on Monday. I was a little unlucky having such a late exam, as I'd already arranged to go to the San-in Beach Party in Tottori and had to leave school at 4pm. Still, it wasn't just my test, so I think it was only fair that the other teachers marked some too :)

I had a pretty bad day on Tuesday, mainly thanks to having slept very badly the night before. Not really sure why. Perhaps it was the humidity, which has gone through the roof recently. The temperature is still down around 25 during the day so it's not too bad, but I guess I'm still adjusting. Anyway, naturally, I wasn't in a very good mood all day! I managed to keep to myself though, thanks to exams, so no big problems :) And in all fairness, given the plentiful good times recently, I suppose I was overdue for a bad day.

Some good did come from the day, though, as I discovered mostly to my delight that I'd been invited to help out with the upcoming Hyogo Board of Education teacher entrance examinations in August. Best of all, the invite came directly from Oouchi-sensei, one of the Hyogo BOE staff who is in charge of the Hyogo JETs. He seems to know me relatively well and now that I'm Hyogo AJET PR we tend to be in contact fairly regularly, which I think might be why I was invited. It's good to know that I seem to have a good reputation with the BoE. Does that seem a little bit driven for the JET Program? Maybe, haha. But I like helping out and if I do want to stay beyond my 3rd year, this is the kind of thing that will make the difference.

Anyway, the down side of this is that the exam dates aren't particularly convenient. There's an exam 'orientation' I need to attend which falls in the middle of some of my other plans, which is a bit of a bummer. Thankfully I could change my plans though, so it's not all doom and gloom. The date of the test itself isn't much better either, unfortunately, as it too clashes with other plans. Again, it's only one day at the end of an event though, so it could be worse. I should get a day of daikyuu (compensatory holiday) for the actual test day, too, which will come in handy :) In the end I made the call that doing the testing is important for any potential future I might want to have here in Japan, so making the small sacrifice is worth it :)