Baba-sensei called me across to her desk today and asked if I could help her with her computer, as she couldn't access the Internet. So I checked out the usual things and found out that the network was 'working' according to Windows, but packets weren't going anywhere. I moved her across onto Nishitani-sensei's network connection and both the network and DNS seemed to start working ok, but no traffic could actually reach those Internet addresses when using IE. The packets would whizz away fine into the Board of Education network, but then get dropped somewhere. I assumed it was a firewall or something similar doing it, so I told Baba-sensei I couldn't fix it and suggested she talk to Tatamiya-sensei, the teacher in charge of the school computers/networks.

Anyway, Tatamiya-sensei turned up a while later and the solution turned out to be ridiculously simple. The BoE runs a proxy which Internet traffic has to go through, and for some unknown reason, Baba-sensei's IE had decided to stop using the proxy settings. I really kicked myself for not checking it, as I've hit the same problem a few times over the years (including twice here at school). Oh well, at least I was mostly right - the problem was Internet packets being dropped by a machine over in the BoE network ;) Just wish I could have gotten that little bit further to the answer being the proxy and fix being the local proxy settings!

Random thoughts - out of the 22 people who are absent from ichi-nensei today to attend the judo and kendo interschool games, 8 of them have a surname ending in the same kanji (moto). Very amusing!! :)

I just found out that some students got blasted for parking their bikes in the wrong place, haha. I know that each class has a certain bike rack to put their bikes in, but I was really surprised that students would get yelled at for putting their bikes somewhere else. I mean, it seems a little trivial to me, as it's not like there isn't enough room - the school was designed for 1,300 students and we only have 950 or so. Sometimes this school is so strict that even I, Mr Anally Retentive, am taken aback, hehe.

It's exactly one year today since I touched down at Narita airport at the beginning of my JET career. Throughout the year I've reflected often about my experiences here, so I'm not going to write a big essay about thoughts from a year in. However, I do have a few words I'd like to say.

My friend Brandon challenged me to think about my goals on the JET Program and why I was staying for another year. Although it wasn't something I had sat down to deliberately spend some decent time thinking about, I do think about it on and off and so it was relatively easy for me to put my thoughts into words. There are many, many reasons, but the main ones I think are that I enjoy life here (much more than life in Perth) and that there is still so much more for me to achieve here. Digging a little deeper, I enjoy teaching and the difference I can make both at school and in the community. I have room to improve as a teacher and I want to take that opportunity and make JET work for me - I have a feeling the skills will come in useful in the future. I also made a promise to myself to become fluent at Japanese before leaving Japan, and that plays a big part in the decision. A lot of Japan is still a mystery to me because of the language barrier, and the challenge to smash through that and understand is something I relish and that is very rewarding for me.

On another front, the end of the JET year brings with it a whole heap of new JETs and the departure of a lot of old JETs. Some good friends are leaving this year and that's something that I am dealing with for the first time. Thankfully none of the people were best friends or people that I saw a lot, but I still feel their absence. I can't call them up any more at random points in time and just head out with them for a random dinner in Kobe. Does it bother me? Well, yes and no. I've become used to this kind of thing over the years so I get over it pretty fast, and with communications the way they are, people are never really that far away if you really put in some effort.

I also spoke to Brandon recently about this yearly cycle of JET. He's going into his third year so he's had two years of changes. The point he made was an interesting one and was brought up in a larger conversation about Japanese vs gaijin friends. We both agreed one of our goals was to make more friends in the local community, and Brandon was quick to point out that they're less likely to leave every year, hehe. So to sum up this rather random yearly reflection, I have absolutely no regrets about coming, I'm excited about the year ahead, I'm keen to learn more Japanese, improve my teaching skills and meet a lot more local people, and I haven't decided exactly how long I'm going to stay. I'll worry about that when the recontracting letter arrives in January :)

The craziness of the past few weeks continued as I barely had time to recover from Tokyo before I was off again to Nagoya. My close friend Junko and I had been pretty stressed out during the school term and as we hadn't seen each other for a while, decided to go on a holiday to a few beautiful places near Nagoya to catch up and relax. I shot up to Nagoya on the shinkansen and met her early Friday evening, and we grabbed a quick dinner at the famous Yamachan in Nagoya city. They do all kinds of interesting foods, including some amazing Nagoya foods. I don't know why Nagoya food is so different, but it is, and most of it is pretty delicious.

After dinner we caught the train up to Inuyama, a fairly unknown little inaka place up in the mountains towards Gifu prefecture. We stayed at the Youth Hostel there, but by the time we got there it was dark and we were so tired that we ended up just going straight to sleep, hehe. On Saturday we headed out to the Inuyama Ayumatsuri, which celebrates the little fish that the locals use trained cormorants to catch. We had to walk along a dangerous road with no footpath to get there, which was quite an adventure. The festival itself was small but interesting. We got to eat one of the famous Ayu, and also checked out the horrible Momotaro shrine that was there. It really was tacky, hehe, with lots of brightly painted demon and Momotaro statues everywhere. Why Momotaro was even in Inuyama I don't know, as he originates from Okayama prefecture.

Anyway, after that we wandered through a park and down to the river for a while, but it was so oppressively hot and humid that we had to retreat to a cafe and have some kakigori (shaved ice dessert), hehe. After that we walked all the way to Inuyama-jou, a beautiful castle high on a cliff overlooking the river. From there we grabbed a late lunch and caught the train to Okazaki, our final destination. I don't know what Okazaki is famous for but on Saturday night it had an enormous firework festival with over 20,000 fireworks over 2 hours. Being a summer festival, there were of course thousands of people around, many dressed in yukata. Junko and I had brought ours with us and so we wore them out. Junko looked amazing in hers and was even able to do her own obi. I, the heathen gaijin I am, hehe, had forgotten how to tie my obi so had to get on the computer in the hotel reception and find some instructions. With Junko's help I was eventually able to get it done ok.

On the way to the festival we grabbed some food and beer at a konbini and then some yakitori from a handy stall just outside the main festival area. The woman at the stall saw me and told Junko I looked very handsome and that she was lucky, haha. It never ceases to amaze me what Japanese people will assume (that I can't speak Japanese and that I'm the boyfriend of any girl I am with) and say. Anyway, I gladly took the compliment :P From there we very enjoyed ridiculous amounts of fireworks until the festival ended around 9pm. After that we went back to the hotel to shower and recover - the yukatas are very warm despite being summer garments, and we were both very tired and probably a bit dehydrated from a day of walking around in the sun. About 10:30 we went down to a yakitori izakaya and grabbed a bit more food before heading back to the hotel and crashing out about midnight.

We were both really tired and didn't wake up until nearly 9:30, just enough time to shower before checking out of the hotel. We were still tired so we decided to head straight back to Nagoya and head home from there. I think I got on the train home at around noon and was back in Ako by 2pm, so not too bad at all! Nagoya is actually quite convenient, by shinkansen anyway hehe. Despite being already tired and the weekend being tiring as well, it was a lot of fun and I had a really good time. Junko is one of the few really good Japanese friends I've made (her nearly perfect English helped a lot here!) so I was very happy to spend some time hanging out with her. Hopefully I can see her again soon :)

Tokyo Orientation was absolutely massive, and a pretty awesome (but extremely tiring) experience. Thanks to being in Banshu Ako and therefore theoretically being unable to make it to Shinjuku for the first meeting on Saturday, I was given an extra night in the amazing Keio Plaza hotel on the Friday. Which made Friday a pretty busy day, hehe. I left Oscar's at around 10am and raced back to Ako, where I packed my bag and quickly jumped on the train to Himeji. My poor friend Amanda had recovered from climbing Fuji only to get struck down with appendicitis, so she had been rushed to hospital on the Tuesday. I promised her I'd visit her so I raced out there on the bus and chatted to her for an hour or so. Some of her teachers had come to see her as well, and one of them offered me a lift back to the station when she found out I needed to go to Tokyo. Japanese kindness never ceases to amaze me :)

At the station I quickly grabbed a ticket to Tokyo on the next Nozomi, grabbing dinner at an amazing vending machine restaurant in the meantime. It was some of the best soba and tempuradon I've ever had, which just goes to show, don't underestimate vending machine restaurants! I finally got onto the train and spent most of the time reading a very interesting book on body language (check it out - Body Language by Julius Fast). I got in to Shinagawa at around 10:30 (it takes almost exactly 3 hours to get there from Himeji ... pretty amazing!) and was in Shinjuku by just before 11. I got a little lost but eventually found my bearings and got to the hotel. I was going to go out and explore but was really tired from being crazy busy lately, so I decided an early night would be a good idea.

I woke up at around 7am when my room mate, a friendly guy called William who is the president of Tottori AJET this year, wandered in from a party, haha. He had some friends who were doing a hotel room party somewhere - talk about the Tokyo lifestyle :P Crazy, action packed and no breaks, not even for sleep, haha. I went down to grab a cheeky late breakfast before the orientation orientation meeting started. It was a pretty good day - really laid back. We packed some welcome bags, found out what our duties were and generally knocked the orientation out of the park :) At night I headed out for dinner with my friend Brandon, and we ended up at a really nice izakaya. It wasn't so nice when the bill came and we were up for $45 each, but we'd been rather overpaid for our travel expenses so we didn't particularly mind.

From there it was out to a hotel at Narita airport to prepare for the arrival of the JETs the next day. I had to get up ridiculously early as I was meeting the very first plane of JETs (from Australia) that was scheduled to arrive at just before 7am. Thanks to only getting to the hotel after 10pm and then having things to do until after midnight, I didn't get much sleep - maybe 5 hours. Thankfully the excitement of the new JETs arriving and a cheeky coffee snagged from Starbucks at the airport the instant it opened, I was ok though. After a strangely tense wait, we finally got to jump and cavort around as the very first 2008/09 JETs entered the country! Although they were from Australia and hence had no jet lag, they had come up on the night flight so most of them were pretty tired. We tried to genk them up as much as we could, and finally got them all safely onto the buses and on the way to Shinjuku.

I was lucky enough to be a bus leader, so I was in charge of one of the buses. It was really good fun as I got to play tour guide and tell the group all of the things they needed to know about orientation as we travelled to the hotel. And I have to admit, it was awesome to be with a big group Australians - their accents were music to my ears :D Thanks to being so tired they were a bit of a tough crowd, but I didn't take it personally. It was kind of like teaching some of my classes actually, haha. I tried to keep everything short so they could sleep and read their orientation books, and then I wandered up and down talking to everyone and getting their story, where they were going in Japan and taking any questions they had.

We arrived at the hotel just before 10am, and I jumped in to help out with various things throughout the hotel. About 11:30 I went for a Starbucks run and in the afternoon I managed to sneak in a bit of time for a nap. I didn't manage to sleep but just lying down and taking it easy really helped. I had a Hospitality Centre shift from 6 - 8 which wasn't ideal, but it could have been much worse. After that I went out for dinner with a couple of the new JETs, introducing them to their first izakaya and Japanese cultural experiences. It was funny to watch their awestruck faces as I explained to them about taking their shoes off etc, and as I ordered in Japanese and helped them to order in Japanese too.

After dinner I went out with Brandon to check out Kabuki-cho, the 'dodgiest' place in Japan. It was good fun as naturally, we're not dumb tourists wandering around just waiting to be dragged into a yakuza snack bar trap. We kept to clean places (like the crazy izakaya very appropriately called 'Mysterious') before calling it a night just after midnight. Back at the hotel, Brandon pulled out his DS so we ended up playing multiplayer games until much later than we should have, haha. It was awesome fun, beating the crap out of each other in New Super Mario Brothers.

Monday was the real start of orientation, at the lovely hour of 8:30am. Brandon and I ran the prefectural meeting for Hyogo, which basically consisted of shouting over the top of everyone else to try to make sure everyone was there, give them their school information and then tell them what they needed to do at orientation. After that we were free for the day, so we wandered around Shinjuku for lunch and then did some printing for the Hyogo AJET Welcome Packs at a convenient Fedex Kinkos. The staff bordered on assholes, surprisingly, but we got there in the end.

Back at the hotel I had another hospitality centre shift from 4 to 6 and then the Welcome Reception from 6:30pm. That went really well and I got to chat to some of the new Hyogo JETs in more depth. We continued this on to the Hyogo AJET Night Out at the Watami izakaya closest to the hotel. Hokkaido was there too, and between us, we booked out nearly an entire floor, haha. I also bumped into Vanessa, one of the few Perth JETs who didn't get placed in Hyogo. I hadn't seen her for almost a year so it was great to catch up. Unfortunately I had to call it a night very early as I had a 6am shift on the hospitality centre the next day.

Getting up at 5am after another relatively late night and a couple of nights of bad sleep wasn't particularly enjoyable, but I fought through it and got through my shift in genki style. I was on with interesting people, too, which made the time fly by. After we'd finished our shift, I went for breakfast with them and we had a good chat. I wasn't required until the early afternoon, so I went to sleep again and woke up feeling marginally better. We had our prefectural meeting where I met Oouchi-sensei again, and he let us hand out our Hyogo AJET Welcome Packs. He's really pro-HAJET for some reason, which really helps a lot.

After that I played games with Brandon until it was time for the final helpers meeting at around 5pm. Many of us were heading to embassies, so we went downstairs to prepare for that. There wasn't a bad turnout for the Australian embassy event, which was encouraging. The event was identical to last year, featuring boring speeches, a plea to help sell Australian education and then some mediocre food :P Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? When we came out of the embassy, to our surprise there was an enormous storm going on outside. As we ran to the subway a giant flash of lightning actually blinded me and from the fact the thunder came almost at the same time, I realised it was far too close for comfort - probably about 300 metres away. Needless to say we ran like hell underground, haha.

Back at the hotel I changed and headed out with Brandon to Kabukicho again. We grabbed some beer and yakitori at a great little place we'd seen the night before, and Brandon insisted on ordering raw horse heart. I tried some, but it didn't do much for me hehe. We were eventually joined by one of the new JETs who had spotted me as he walked by, and he tagged along for the rest of the night. We grabbed one more beer in a club called Tokyo Loose, but it was empty except for a few very skanky looking gaijin, so we left very quickly. Back at the hotel it was another night of DS before finally getting some more inadequate sleep in preparation for the long trip home.

The departure meeting was at 8:45am and we rolled into the buses around 9:30am. At Tokyo station we jumped on the Nozomi and shot down to Shin-Osaka. Brandon and I played more DS on the way - hooray for bluetooth, as we were sitting far apart. The guy behind me on the train must have thought I was insane as I kept turning around to make signs at him whenever I killed him or vice versa. Around noon we cruised into Shin-Osaka and had a little bit of time to do some shopping before getting on the final buses to take us to the Yashiro Training Centre. Here the same whirlwind that hit me last year happened again this year, with the kids being rushed to the meeting room and almost immediately spirited away by their teachers.

I was a bit stuck once I got to Yashiro, as I didn't have a teacher coming to pick me up and there were no Ako JETs. Thankfully, Oouchi-sensei had my back and sent me packing with a Himeji JET. It was a slightly awkward situation as I didn't want to intrude on the JET getting to know his teachers, so I just stayed quiet. We finally got to Himeji and they very kindly dropped me off at the train station, and I jetted home to collapse into a sleep of much exhaustion :P

Overall, I felt kinda proud of the new group, I have to say. Sounds a bit silly, but as a helper, they were absolutely awesome to help. The Hyogo bunch was extremely impressive, in particular - they struck me as really enthusiastic, intelligent and mature. I'm looking forward to seeing more of them at HAJET events this year and continuing to help them out.

I caught up with my good friend Oscar on Thursday night for the last time before he heads back to England. We started as JETs together last year, although he was lucky enough to be placed in Nishinomiya, just east of Kobe. I didn't manage to hang out a whole lot with him during the year, mainly because of the distance, but it was always good times when we did catch up. It's kind of ... ironic? ... strange? ... interesting? ... that such a good friendship developed from simply seeing each other every time we went to the toilet at Yashiro Orientation last year :D Definitely one of the more interesting memories I will take with me!

Anyway, we caught up for dinner in Sannomiya along with our good friend Becky and her boyfriend Ben. The first place we tried to go had shut down, but we found a decent Thai place up towards Kitano. Afterwards we did a bit of a bar hop back towards the station, until I realised I'd missed my last train. I wasn't at all worried as I had nenkyuu the next day, and Oscar kindly offered to let me crash at his place. It was good fun, and we talked about what we wanted to do in the future and various other things I guess you talk about with people you know but may never see again.

It was a strange experience, actually, knowing that a good friend was leaving and that I truly may never see him again. I've mostly gotten used to this kind of thing over the years but you can never really avoid all the effects. I suppose the thing to remember is that it's so easy to stay in touch with people these days, and hey, if I ever go to England, I'll have a good friend there to call in on. Having friends all over the world is one of my goals, after all!

Climbing Mount Fuji is definitely an experience I'll never forget. It pretty much combines every emotion humanly possible into a 10 hour period, making for an incredible ride. My epic Fuji experience started on Friday night, when I crashed at Dan's place thanks to having to catch a ridiculously early train from Shin-Osaka station on Saturday morning :P It was a really awesome night as I got there in time for dinner, and we ordered these ridiculously delicious pizzas from the local pizza store. One of which had whole cloves of garlic on it - devestating, haha. As Dan is leaving this year it was one of the last chances I had to catch up with him, so we talked about all kinds of crap until probably a little bit late in the night, haha. Saturday morning was painful thanks to the late night and ridiculously early start. We had to be up around 5am to catch the subway to Sannomiya and then the train out to Shin-Osaka to meet everyone else. There were 16 of us in total, which was amazing, and before we knew it we were on the Shinkansen and off to Mishima! Emma, our wonderful organising queen, had bought us all discount tickets for a totally awesome price. The catch was that we had to use the Kodama, the slowest shinkansen, which took nearly 3 hours to trundle its way from Shin-Osaka to Mishima. That was fine though, as it'd been a while since we'd all caught up and we had a lot to talk about. In Mishima we caught a bus to Kawaguchi-ko, a beautiful little town at the base of Mount Fuji on the north side. The bus was rather dreadful, taking nearly 3 hours to get there, haha. After seven hours of transport in one day, I was going a bit stir crazy, so was grateful when we finally arrived and settled down for a dericious konbini lunch in the guch. After that we explored the beautiful lake nearby, which had heaps of volcanic rock in and around it. Finally, as the sun started to set, we picked up some BBQ food at a local supermarket and jumped on the bus to our ryokan, out in the sticks. It was a quaint little place, from where we could see Fuji-san looming in the distance. After a dericious BBQ and a trip to the local sento, we were all massively tired so headed to bed around midnight. Heading to bed being the operative word, unfortunately - I didn't actually get any sleep thanks to one of the people in my room snoring all night. Anyway, haha, I tried my best to genk it up and after a quick breakfast of bananas and Snickers bars, ended up feeling fairly ok. Unfortunately, our morning plans from there didn't go quite according to plan, hehe. We'd looked at the wrong bus schedule when planning our escape from Kawaguchi-ko, and realised we were stuck at the ryokan for over an hour until the next bus! Thankfully, Emma worked her magic again and got the ryokan owner to drive us into central Kawaguchi-ko for something ridiculous like 200 yen each, hehe. W00t! Back in the guch we grabbed some food for the trip and prepared to jump onto the bus to head to Fuji Yoshida, the nearby town from where we would start climbing Fuji on the Yoshida Track. Things got a little crazy here as I'd organised to meet my friend, Mariko, at the Fujisengenjijna shrine at the bottom of the Yoshia track. We were already running late and she had arrived, so I didn't want to keep her waiting any longer. I decided to go ahead to Kawaguchi-ko so jumped on a convenient train and was there in 5 minutes. Ironically, though, it turned out that my plans with Mariko had come unstuck in comically enormous proportions. There are many Fujisengenjinjas and 5th stations scattered around Fuji, and although I thought I'd been specific about being on the Fuji-Yoshida side of the mountain, our lines had obviously crossed over somewhere. It turned out that she was actually on the east side of the mountain, having come down from Hakone, where she lives. Whoops! It was going to take her two hours to get around the mountain to Fuji-Yoshida, so we rather amusingly organised to meet on top of the mountain, haha. My friends finally arrived on the bus and we got going, getting to the start of the track at around 10:30am. So finally, we began our climb :) It was easy to begin with, and thanks to having done it before, the trail didn't feel all that long. My bag felt really heavy and I was worried about it, but strangely enough I stopped noticing the weight after a while. We climbed for several hours before arriving at the area where horses used to be stabled when pilgrims climbed the mountain. Here there were some wonderful obaachan volunteers handing out (or rather, forcing us to take) food and water, hehe. We chatted to them for a while before starting up towards 5th station to meet the 5 or so of our group who had bused up instead of climbing. As we climbed through 3rd station, the clouds rolled in and created a really surreal scene. I'd never been in a cloud before and it was a really cool experience - literally and figuratively! :) We finally arrived at 5th station, only to find it was tiny and there was no bus station in sight. Confused, we asked around and found out that the 5th station bus station was actually nearly 2km away, on a different track. Hahaha. Just goes to show that no matter how well you plan, there can always be surprises. It wasn't a big problem though as we had mobile reception so organised to meet our friends at the 7th station hut we were staying at. We hung out at 5th for a while and grabbed some food before continuing up to 7th. As we arrived at 6th station, the tree line very suddenly disappeared and opened up to a post apocalyptic landscape of bare, jagged volcanic rocks. The change was so drastic and immediate that it was almost a shock. The big clouds rolling across the area gave it a really haunting and even spiritual feeling, and I could sense why the ancients held the mountain in such awe and in such a religious light. We took a brief moment here to rest before dodging a few tour groups and continuing on up the mountain. Despite the steep slopes, we really flew up the gap between 6th and 7th station, moving quickly past all of the Japanese people. I was a bit concerned about altitude sickness but I think we'd adjusted as we came up and it was a little too low still to be really affected. And so, we finally arrived at our 7th station hut at around 6pm. It'd taken us about 7.5 hours to climb from Fuji Yoshida to 7th station, which included several long breaks. So not too bad :) The hut itself was pretty classic, a long structure packed with a surprisingly large number of rooms. We had booked out one of the biggest, as we had 16 people. We all managed to squeeze in and met up with Aimee and co, who'd arrived a few hours earlier. After changing out of our disgusting, sweat ridden clothes, we had dinner and tried to get a little bit of sleep. This turned out to be pointless again thanks to more snoring and the noise from other groups who weren't sleeping. In the end, a few of us gave up, packed our bags, put on our winter clothes, pulled out our torches and headed out to start climbing at around 11pm. I remember asking John, one of Dan's friends, exactly what we were doing climbing a mountain in the middle of the night. He laughed and replied by asking what we were doing *queuing* to climb a mountain in the middle of the night. Which was a fair question, as there was a massive queue waiting to filter into the narrow starting section of the climb from 7th station. Thankfully, the path widened after that and we were able to move quite quickly. John and a few of the others shot ahead while I hung back a bit and climbed with my friend Louis. I didn't want to get altitude sickness so decided on the safer, slower climb. It was probably a good thing we did climb slowly though, as we found ourselves exhausted after every few bends in the zigzag track that wound ponderously up to the summit. We saw a lot of people resting or collapsed on the ground as we climbed, many using little bottles of oxygen. We did ok though and didn't need any, and finally reached 8th station. There were about 4 8th stations though, which was demotivating to say the least! We'd be like, woohoo, we're at 8.5 station, but it'd turn out to be 8.25. And so on. But we finally cleared the last '8th station' and the summit was in sight! Unfortunately, this was the area the track got a lot narrower, so the line here was insane. Thanks to a few other lines and having to rest a lot, it took nearly 4 hours to climb from our 7th station hut to just above the final 8th station. It then took another 1.5 hours to get up the short distance to the summit. This was extremely frustrating, to say the least, especially given that I hadn't slept in nearly 48 hours. I finally got through the line though, just as the sun was rising, and risking altitude sickness I ran across the top of the summit and found a little spot to sit at the highest part of the crater. The view off the top was absolutely stunning, as a carpet of clouds ran out to the horizon in all directions. We were also so high that we could clearly see the curvature of the earth - pretty humbling! I hadn't actually been on the summit for the very beginning of the sun rise, but I saw most of it :) It was definitely a very unique and beautiful view. A little bit overhyped, as it wasn't *that* special, but I'm extremely glad I did it and it's something I can tick off on my list of things to do in Japan. Our group had been separated on the mountain so I think that only about half of us actually made it to the summit for the sunrise. Most people had arrived by around 5:30am, by which time I was feeling very much under the weather. Lack of sleep, altitude, cold temperatures and food poisoning combined to make me very unhappy, and all I wanted to do was get off the mountain. The others were going to wait around for everyone else to arrive at the top, but Louis and I wanted to head straight down and go home, so we said goodbye to everyone and started down. I needed to use the bathroom so ran ahead of Louis and ended up losing him, so in the end I decided to head down myself. Heading down was a lot faster than climbing, but it was also very difficult. The track was comprised of lots of loose volcanic rock that was really hard on the knees to walk down! I had run out of water and my stomach was very unhappy, and at this point everything just swarmed up and overwhelmed me. I can quite safely say that it was one of the most miserable points in my life, hahaha. I was a little happier when I finally got onto some flat ground and I could see the tree line just a little further down. To my great relief, I finally stumbled onto the Fujisubaru track, which led to the bus station. It was quite a walk, but the clouds rolled up and were a beautiful change to the steep rock slopes I'd been descending, which were rapidly heating up in the summer sun. I finally got to the bus station at around 8:30am, about 2.5 hours after I'd started descending. A bus was there waiting and was surprisingly not too full, so I jumped on and rode the hour out talking to a random Australian guy who'd also climbed Fuji. At Kawaguchi-ko station I grabbed some much needed food (I hadn't eaten for over 12 hours and had used a lot of energy climbing and descending) and managed to find a sento to clean up at. I felt much better after that and jumped on the next bus to Mishima station. It was around noon when I got on the bus and we arrived at Mishima at just before 3pm. I was in a pretty bad way during the bus trip, haha. Not really surprising, I suppose, given that I'd had about 7 hours sleep in the past 77 hours. I kept dozing off but it was only an extremely light sleep in which I'd have extremely vivid dreams, most of which were really weird. I expect I was probably talking in my sleep and moving around in my seat as well, hehe, so I must have looked like the village gaijin idiot :P Still, I got there in the end! The shinkansen connection at Mishima was very convenient and before I knew it I was in Shin-Osaka, having done my crazy dream-sleep thing again. It was pushing 6pm and by this point I was in absolutely no condition to stand on a train for 2 hours to get back to Ako. So I bought another Shinkansen ticket to Aioi, hehe. It wasn't too expensive, and it was so much faster and more comfortable that it was worth it. I forgot that I could only use a Kodama to get to Aioi, though, and had jumped on a Hikari. As a result I had to get off at Himeji, but it was only an extra 20 minutes on the train so it could have been worse. I finally, finally got back to Ako at about 8:30pm. I managed to haul myself down to Minato-ya for a quick dinner before heading home and going straight to sleep. All in all, a really good weekend. The pain of descending and the trip home is something I will never forget, but it was definitely worth the experience. The exercise along was worth it, hehe. I would recommend climbing Fuji to anyone, although I would suggest going later in the season and making sure that you set out from 7th station no later than 10pm. And as the saying goes, you're a fool not to climb Fuji but you're a bigger fool if you climb it more than once. I certainly won't be, but it's a major Japanese experience ticked off my list.

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!

The Tajima Ultimate Frisbee tournament was a really interesting experience. There were plenty of good times and some less good ones too, making for a really diverse and challenging weekend. Originally I had planned to head up to Tajima on the Friday night as I couldn't make it to the tournament on time on Saturday morning by train. Thankfully though, my team mate Makoto kindly offered to give me a lift on Saturday morning, which meant I could attend a Sayonara party for some local JETs on Friday night. In hindsight I probably should have gone up to Tajima, haha, as the party was a nomihoudai and although I kept it quiet, I didn't particularly feeling like playing frisbee on Saturday morning :)

I met Makoto at just before 8am in Himeji, only to find that he wasn't feeling great either, hehe. We headed up anyway though, arriving in Tajima at around 10am. We joined up with the rest of the team, some of whom we hadn't seen for a couple of months! My friends Matt and Clay were there, along with Makoto, James and Tisha and three of Tisha's friends - an Australian and two Japanese girls I didn't know. James was team leader, thanks to being an experienced Ultimate player who had played in the national championships in the US. So naturally, he was pretty good, haha. Once we were all together, he did some basic training with us and gave us some much needed tips, especially so given that we'd never practised together :)

Our first game was in the late morning, and we won it easily. Although I was pretty happy about that, I couldn't help but feel a bit frustrated about the game itself. Thanks to being one of the less experienced players, I hardly touched the frisbee and on the few occasions that I had the opportunity to, I made a few mistakes. It was understood that some of us on the team were inexperienced and that we would make mistakes, but I still felt bad about it. I suppose that's why I've always preferred non-team sports - at least if I play badly by myself, I only let myself down :) Silly attitude? Perhaps.

Our next game was in the mid afternoon, and ended up as a very satisfying draw. It was a really fun game, actually, against one of the hardcore Japanese uni teams. So we were pretty happy that our little rag-tag bunch had been able to draw against them! In fact, they were very lucky to even draw against us, as it was only a somewhat tenuous and extremely lucky last second score that saved them from losing. Our draw was made even more incredulous when that team somehow went on to win the tournament, hehe - our almost-victory-ending-in-a-draw became a whole lot more rewarding :)

The final game of the day was another easy win against another Japanese university team which consisted of a heap of very good individual players who just didn't work well as a team. After that game, we all headed to a nearby sento to grab a nice refreshing bath. I was extremely grateful that we didn't have to play any more, as I was absolutely exhausted! I'd been like that all day though, mind you, including being very surprised when I found myself unable to run any more just 10 minutes into the first game. Normally I'm able to play for at least an hour before getting to that point. I suppose it was the combination of heat, humidity and altitude, although the Sayonara party the night before and generally being tired for a couple of months beforehand didn't help either, haha. Still, the sento helped a lot, and hey, that's life I suppose.

At night we had a big barbecue where all the teams cooked up heaps of meat and veges and drank beer. Noice. I spent quite a while chatting to the Japanese girls on my team, Tomi and Ukon, and found that my Japanese has finally become basically conversational - wheeeeee! :) I'd taken some fireworks up so we set them off, went inside to the 'dance floor' for a bit and then finally all headed to sleep in our 'Team Room' (lol) at just after midnight.

We woke up to absolutely oppressive heat on Sunday morning, but still managed to drag ourselves out of bed and down to the field for our first game at just after 9:30am. Although we didn't have James or Tisha, who were running a bit late, we smashed through our first game on our own. It was quite nice, actually, as the frisbee was shared around a little bit more :) James arrived about 2/3 of the way in and shouted tips from the sidelines, mainly the fact that I had my arms too high when defending. Helpful, but hard to take on board in the middle of an intense game, hehe.

Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was pretty good. We lost our second game to a team of really friendly and skilled Japanese uni students who ended up coming third overall, I think. Mid afternoon it actually started to rain and we played our final game in a nice, cool downpour. It was against a team of my friends, including Ewan. We ended up winning the game, mostly because the other team was just playing for fun and had been drinking since Saturday morning, haha. So overall, we ended up coming 5th! :) After that it was the final, the closing ceremony and then the long drive back to Himeji. I was really tired and headed to sleep almost as soon as I got back, hehe. It was a great weekend but the large amount of really tough exercise in the crazy weather conditions hit me really hard, and took several weeks to recover from, haha. That said, I think I'll still do it again next year!

I found out from Baba-sensei that late last week the English teachers had a meeting to discuss how ichi-nensei oral communication was going. This is the first time Ako SHS has run compulsory OC classes in quite a while, hence the review. Putting aside the slight irritation of being excluded from something that I am heavily involved in (I basically plan and run the OC lessons almost by myself), I was surprised to hear Baba-sensei saying that all the English teachers were very pleased with what I was doing. Apparently I'm considered one of the best ALTs Ako SHS has ever had. I was really happy about that, as getting any form of feedback, let alone a compliment, is pretty rare here in Japan. And I was very amused when Baba-sensei added that everyone wanted me to stay for a long time. We'll see. Anyway, I was just happy to know that what I am doing is considered appropriate and is appreciated. It really helps a lot.

I ran a music based lesson for my ichi-nensei students last week, as it was the last class of the term. They'd done really well in their tests so I figured they deserved it, hehe. Also, as I didn't get to teach all of the classes, I didn't want to make a 'real' lesson and have some classes getting ahead of others. The lesson itself was pretty easy to prepare as I had already done a lesson like this with my san-nensei last year. So I whipped out my 'fill in the blanks' and 'world music' worksheets, added another activity and it was done!

The kids seemed to really enjoy it and as they were all ridiculously tired (the weather is exhausting at the moment, they had just finished end of term tests and are preparing like crazy for the upcoming cultural festival) it probably worked out for the better that we didn't do a full (often boring) lesson. Anyway, running a musical lesson itself isn't really worthy of a journal entry, but one of my students recognising 'Australian Crawl - Things Don't Seem' was. I was immensely surprised (it's really old Australian rock music that doesn't seem too well known even in Australia) so I asked him how he knew about it. Amusingly, he said he'd done a homestay in Australia and while he was there he'd been to karaoke. Apparently the people he went with sung that song, hahaha. Crazy times.

For some reason I started thinking about PS3s again last night. They've been on my mind a lot recently, after I saw a really awesome game called Gundam Musou being played in an electronics store in Sannomiya about two weeks ago. It's basically Dynasty Warriors but with robots, hahaha. So basically, the most awesome game ever made :P Really excited, I quickly ran to where the consoles were and found the price list ... and was denied ;/ The cheapest one was about 40,000 yen, and I just couldn't justify that ;/ Especially since I figured I'd basically have to buy a new TV to be able to play it properly, given the ridiculously tiny size of my current one.

So after checking my local recycle store and finding that they didn't have any, I decided to give up again. Until a few days ago, when I was mucking around behind my computer monitor and noticed that it had component video inputs. Consoles can output in component format so I was pretty excited - it meant I could run the PS3 on my computer monitor and therefore wouldn't have to buy a new TV! I knew the PS3 output resolution wouldn't match my monitor resolution so it wouldn't look fantastic, but I figured it'd look good enough and it's a much bigger screen than my TV.

Everything fell into place yesterday when I remembered that GEO, the local "entertainment rental store" in Ako, sold second hand consoles. I zoomed up there on my bike to see if they had any second hand PS3s in stock, and they did! I bagged a 40GB one in great condition for about $320 - nearly 25% off! Good times! I also picked up a component video cable, Gundam Musou and Dynasty Warriors 5. Sweeeeet! After somehow managing to get it all home on my bike (it really sucks not having a car sometimes), I plugged it all in and it worked straight out, woohoo!

The graphics are a little pixelated on my monitor, as I expected, but it's still very playable and looks far better than it would on my tiny TV. The only thing I forgot about was sound. The component sound naturally doesn't plug into my computer speakers so I need to go buy a component to headphone converter and run that either to my speakers or into my computer. I'm thinking the computer is a good idea, that way I can simply run the sound through the microphone/line in and unmute it. All good! :P *happy*

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 :)

Sorry for the huge post dump, haha. I've been saving them up and finally found some time to post. As usual, here is a link to easily view all of the recent posts. Enjoy! ;)