It's been a fairly average week so far thanks to having a cold, which while better, is still holding on. On Monday I used my daikyuu to rest and pretty much spent it playing games and watching TV. Tuesday I had to go to school, but I was in a sick fuzz all day and can't actually remember what I did! On Tuesday night I caught up with Yoko which was great, but I was nearly asleep at the table at the restaurant by 9pm :D Wednesday I spent the entire day filling out business trip forms and never endingly correcting them with little pieces of extra or changed information from Kyoto-sensei (who looked very apologetic after calling me back for the 5th time!). At night I did my conversation class with Kometani-san where we had lots of fun talking about our holidays in a good mix of English and Japanese and grabbed dinner at Kappa-sushi. I was supposed to go to badminton but I didn't feel good enough, so had an early night instead.

Today I'm doing some lesson planning and generally keeping very quiet in an effort to stave off the cold before school starts again next week. I'll wander down to Minato-ya tonight to see what's going on there, then tomorrow night I'm off out to catch up with my good friend Amanda in Himeji. The weekend looks to be pretty good, assuming I'm not still sick, as I'm going bowling in Osaka with my new friend Kyoukou. We had planned to go partying at night, too, but we mixed up the dates and the party we wanted to go to was actually last week, haha. So I think I will head to the Hyogo AJET Back 2 Skool beer garden in Sannomiya instead, to catch up with the newbies and help with membership sign ups. W00t! Sunday is chores and resting as usual as another long school term kicks off on September 1 :) All is good ... looking forward to being useful again :)

I got home at around 3pm on Saturday, pretty tired out after my big night out and only around 4 hours sleep. To my dismay, I also found that I had caught a cold, probably off poor Sylvia, who had one when she arrived ;/ The cigarette smoke from the club definitely didn't help things either. I felt ok once I'd had a shower though, and raced off to the Welcome Beer Garden in Himeji. That turned out to be pretty good, too, despite the weather threatening rain all day. There were about 40 people there which wasn't bad given that it was in Himeji rather than Sannomiya. I caught up with a few familiar faces both new and old but only had the one beer as I had to work the next day.

The work was the secret business trip that I mentioned a while back, which really is a secret. All I can say is that it was 8-5 and that I had to be up at 5:30am to get there on time so it was a very long day. My cold had decided to kick into full swing by early morning, so I was headachey and coughing ;/ Thankfully, I was able to get some medicine at lunchtime, although to my amusement it was one that makes you drowsy. Not particularly useful given the type of work I was doing. Anyway, I got through it all ok and the day finally came to an end. I headed straight home afterwards and got some good rest, and also used my day in lieu on Monday to rest some more. It didn't kick the cold completely, but it helped :)

The business trip was definitely an interesting experience, albeit a long and somewhat frustrating one. I expect I'll be called upon to do it again next year if I stay, and I expect that I'll probably agree again if I do. Come to think of it, business trips seem to have been a very serious part of my summer holiday this year. I spent 5 days at Tokyo orientation, 3 days at Yashiro orientation, a day on my secret trip and two half days in preparation meetings. Doing all of this was exhausting and it messed my holiday plans around quite significantly, but I don't regret helping out. As I mentioned before, if it provides me the opportunity to stay a 3rd and maybe even a 4th or 5th year, it's a good thing in my book and I don't mind the short term sacrifice. I'm used to it from EY :D

I had meant to head up to Tokyo on Saturday but after feeling so exhausted after Yashiro, I changed my plans and went up on Sunday instead. Somewhat begrudging the $750 it was going to cost in travel and accommodation expenses alone (yikes, hehe) I managed to jump on a shinkansen late on Sunday afternoon. Which was when I realised just how bad a time I had chosen to travel, haha. It was the end of the O-bon festival so a lot of people were returning home to the city. As a result there were no reserved seats left on the shinkansen and it was jam packed in the unreserved sections. And when I say jam-packed, I mean it - there were people at Shin-Kobe station who simply couldn't get onto the train! :/

So after an incredibly uncomfortable 3 hour train ride spent standing up near the train's toilet, I finally arrived in Shinagawa a little worse for wear :) Haha, I've probably made it sound like the trip from hell, but it wasn't really actually all that bad. Jumping onto the handy Yamanote line, I zipped across to Shinjuku and eventually managed to find my hotel in Kabuki-cho. Yes, I stayed in the most 'dangerous' place in Japan, haha. I always have to laugh about this, especially when teachers seem shocked and worried when I say I'm going to Akihabara, Suskino, or Kabuki-cho. Japan is so ridiculously safe that Kabuki-cho, the most 'dangerous' place in Japan, is about as dangerous at night as a normal inner Perth suburb during the day. I really love how safe Japan is.

Anyway, after chilling out for a bit, I headed out into the craziness to see what was happening. Which turned out to be not a lot, haha. It was Sunday night, after all. I walked around, played a few games in the arcade, grabbed some dinner and then headed back to the hotel to get some much needed sleep.

On Monday I went to Harajuku, which turned out to be a good choice. I found a punk/goth clothes store and chatted away to the owner while he suggested various crazy outfits for me. I ended up finding a pretty sweet pair of trousers and an interesting top though, so look out world ... here comes punk Daniel, muahaha. While I was in there, a young guy came in and started talking to the owner and I too. It turned out that he was a third year student at a high school in Hyogo-ken, ironically enough, and that one of the ALTs I know taught at his school. Small world! So I wandered around with him for a while to look at boots and t-shirts before we parted ways and I headed off to Kiddy Land to try to find another Kusanagi Motoko figurine ;)

They didn't have any, unfortunately, so I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the fantastic market like alleys in Harajuku, checking out the amazing shops there. They're really trendy but a lot are still pretty down to earth in terms of prices. Well, down to earth enough, anyway. I picked up a great t-shirt and found a totally awesome dragon bracelet, but unfortunately it was $600 so it stayed in the glass cabinet :) I also met one of the most unusual looking half-Japanese people I have ever met. Despite having lived here for a year and having seen a lot of half people, I was actually visually taken aback by the way she looked. It wasn't that she wasn't attractive (she was quite pretty), there was just something really ... unsettling? ... about the way she looked. She was cool though, and chatting away to her I found out that she was a uni student nearby and that it was her first day of part time work at the store. What a life :)

At night I had planned to go out clubbing in Shibuya or somewhere nearby, but the short nap I took at around 7pm ended up being a full night of sleep, hehe. I guess I needed it after all the orientations and parties during the summer. From there, I decided that Tuesday would be 'culture' day, so I headed up to central Tokyo to check out the Imperial Palace gardens and Yasukuni-jinja. I wasn't particularly impressed by the gardens as I've seen much better in other parts of Japan, and even Yasukuni-jinja wasn't particularly visually appealing despite its obvious historical interest. I think I may now have reached saturation point for Japanese gardens and shrines now, hehe :) Still, it was nice to walk around and be outside, and the quiet in the gardens was very enjoyable. And, to my surprise, I found I'd walked almost half way across Tokyo by accident before I found a subway station and got back to Central :)

On Tuesday night I had planned to meet up with a friend but she had to work late so I had to find something else to do. I ended up heading to a club in Shibuya called Amrax. It was doing a 'Party Hard Tuesday' reggae & R&B night, which I figured would be more fun than watching the Olympics in my hotel room :) The amusing thing was that the party didn't start until midnight (!!) so it was all or nothing, as the trains stopped at 12:20 or so. After grabbing a quick coffee in the CD store in Shibuya that is open until 3:30am (!!), I headed across to the club and got in at around 1am. Naturally, there was nobody there (it's not cool to be anywhere near on time) but it gradually started filling up and was busy by around 2:30am. The club was actually fairly nice and overall I had a pretty good time. The reggae wasn't bad and the R&B was ok, even though the DJ had an annoying habit of talking over the music half the time.

Around 4:30am things started to get a bit silly as everyone got drunk and tired, so I ended up wandering out at around 5am. To my surprise, I discovered that the trains started at 4:30am, which is actually pretty decent! I managed to catch the 5:45ish train back to Shinjuku and slept through until about 4pm :) From there I went to meet Jono and Sylvia, yay! I wasn't sure what time they would get in, so arranged to meet them at their hotel on the other side of the railway tracks at around 8pm. I had some time to burn so I wandered to the massive Kinokuniya bookshop in the Takashimaya Times Square Annex. They had an entire floor of foreign books but sadly no Raymond E Feist. Still, I did manage to pick up 5 or 6 Japanese textbooks, including books on all my favourite parts of Japanese - particles, verb conjugations and grammar :) Whee!

I got to the hotel at around 7pm and finding that Jono & Slyvia hadn't checked in, settled down to wait. I was glad I'd bought some books as they didn't turn up until nearly 8:30pm, having walked from Shinjuku station ... pretty impressive for people who can't speak or read any Japanese! :) After they checked in we wandered out to have dinner at the Watami I'd had dinner in during Tokyo Orientation, and then took a quick wander over to my side of the tracks. I wanted to show them the craziness of Kabuki-cho and then we also squeezed in a few cheeky arcade games at Taito too :) After that they were really tired so I wandered back to their hotel with them and we called it a night.

I had planned to go out clubbing but was surprisingly tired again, so I stayed in my room and played some Nintendo DS instead. As often happens with me, I got less tired as the night went on and only eventually fell asleep at around 4am, rarr! I was up at around 9am so I wasn't a particularly bright bunny, but managed to get going and met J&S at their hotel. We went into central to do the touristy thing of looking at the surprisingly unimpressive Imperial Palace. Akihabara was next on the schedule which made Jono very happy indeed, haha, his eyes lighting up at all the techno goodies around him. We grabbed lunch at a takoyaki place and walked around a bit more before playing some Street Fighter 4 and racing back to Harajuku.

There we went through the crazy market shopping street and out to Kiddy Land. One of Tokyo's famous impromptu storms brewed up while we were in there, so we stepped out onto the street 45 minutes later to find leaves blowing everywhere and the sky as black as coal. Not wanting to tempt fate, we raced back to the station and home to Shinjuku, where we searched for a curry and rice place. I got a bit lost and it started to rain, but after picking up umbrellas at a convenient pharmacy we eventually managed to find a good place. And it was tasty indeed :) We had all planned to go to the Odaiba Oedo onsen at night but thanks to getting wet and the lingering bad weather, we ended up hanging out in the hotel room instead and looking at photos :)

J&S were off to the Ghibli museum on Friday morning so I took the opportunity to sleep in and met up with them at around 4pm. We zoomed out to Odaiba on the Yurikamome line and got ourselves into the awesome Oedo onsen. It was extremely expensive but it was definitely worth it. I hadn't realised it beforehand, but the whole place was themed. Men and women changed into yukata separately but then emerge from their changing rooms into a mock old fashioned Japanese town. It was actually really well done and not too tacky at all :) Jono and I grabbed a beer before hitting the onsen, where Jono had his first onsen experience, haha. He seemed to take it pretty well, thankfully.

After the onsen, we ran into Sylvia by accident in the 'main street' of the town so sat down to have dinner together. Sylvia had been exploring and had found a garden outside, which we went to afterwards. It was really beautiful, especially in the cool of dusk. There were little pools for you to put your legs into, and a little hut that had a pool full of 'doctor fish'. These things eat the dead skin off your feet (bizarre!) and somehow Sylvia managed to convince Jono and I to try it. It was a really weird sensation and I can't say I was sad when my 15 minutes were up :D I did at least get a gasp of surprise as I sat down in the pool and a girl across from me noticed that I was a gaijin, muahaha.

After the onsen, we went straight back to our hotels to change and drop off our shopping before Jono and I met up again to go clubbing in Shibuya ... muahaha. I'd found out that the Dex Pistols, my favourite Japanese DJs who I'd seen playing at the San-in Beach Party earlier in the year, were playing, so I was definitely going to go at all costs! It was at one of the biggest clubs in Tokyo, Club Asia, right on top of Love Hotel Hill. It was an amazing experience, standing in a long line waiting to get into the club, surrounded by the glow of neon lights from other nightclubs and blatant love hotels.

We finally got in at around midnight and again, I was surprised at how nice the club itself was. The DJs were pretty average (maybe I'm just biased, haha) but a few beers helped us get into it. Finally I saw the Dex Pistols go up on stage and got really excited, much to the amusement of two girls nearby who had also recognised them. The other DJs seemed to be running late, so the DPs finally got on stage at around 2:30am and dropped some seriously wicked beats until around 4am. Jono and I were pretty tired by this point so we headed out, grabbed a quick 'breakfast' at Yoshinoya and then caught the 4:30am train back to Shinjuku. I said goodbye to Jono and then raced back to my hotel to squeeze in as much sleep as I could before I had to check out and head back to Ako.

So overall, a pretty awesome trip. It was interesting to go back to Tokyo, and to do so alone, at least for the first bit. It reminded me of the time I spent there on holiday last year. I had the same lonely feeling again, surprisingly enough. I still don't really know anyone in Tokyo, so once my friend had to cancel our dinner, I pretty much had nobody to do anything with until Jono arrived. It was only for a few days so not a major problem, but it does provide a pretty good metaphor for how Japan in general can be, especially if you don't speak the language fluently.

Also interesting was how Tokyo itself made me feel. This ranged from ecstatic to hateful. When I was clubbing, shopping in Harajuku and Akihabara and at the onsen in Odaiba, I felt the addictive tingle of excitement and joy that only Tokyo/a really big city can bring. On the other hand, I came to hate Kabuki-cho, mainly because every time I wanted to go somewhere, I had to continuously run a gauntlet of people trying to get me to go to their clubs, each with varying levels of sordiness. I was only staying there because it was very central, near Jono's hotel and there was a Toyoko Inn, a cheap business hotel chain, there. Moreover, I swayed between both emotions about the size of the city and how crowded it was.

Perhaps more interesting though, was how I felt when I returned to Ako. I felt like I'd returned home, and in many ways, I knew that I am probably happier here than I would be living in Tokyo. Tokyo is so impersonal. People in Tokyo really aren't friendly. They're afraid to make eye contact with you, let alone smile. I don't know whether it's an inverse gaijin-effect or whether they're always like that. Regardless, Kansai is definitely a much more friendly place in my opinion.

Tokyo also got me thinking about a lot of other things too, so I suppose it served more than its original purpose as just a holiday. I like things like that, that make you think about who you are and/or what you're doing and where you're heading. Going to Tokyo helped me 'keep it real' and I feel grateful about that. I find that happens often when I travel, which probably explains why I like travelling and try to do it as often as I can. For me, it's all life experiences. The more I can get, the better, and if travelling is how I can best do that, count me in :) That said, I don't know when I'll be in Tokyo again. A couple of friends who wanted to head up with me who couldn't still want to go, so I might end up there sooner rather than later. Otherwise, it'll probably be next summer holidays :)

Yashiro finished at around 2:30pm on Friday, after which a big group of us caught the bus back to Himeji. I was exhausted after Yashiro but had made plans to catch up with my badminton friend Daichi back in Ako, so I dragged myself out of my apartment and down to meet him. He was running very late and I got pounced on by the new missionaries in town while I was waiting, somewhat to my annoyance. They rode past me and noticed that I was a gaijin, so naturally they came back. I was polite about it though, and they seemed like decent people once I'd carefully warned them away from trying to preach at me. Usually the way :) While I was talking to the missionaries, Daichi and badminton Minato-san eventually rocked up and we zipped off to Daichi's house to pick up his PS2 for a night of crazy gaming action!

On the way we saw the aftermath of an accident where a car had hit a bike. It wasn't too serious, but we stopped and lent a hand. The biker was still on the ground, trapped under his bike, so Daichi and untangled him and helped him get off the road and sit down safely. As we drove away, Daichi and Minato-san were laughing and joking about exactly what I was thinking about - all the man would remember was that a gaijin had appeared out of nowhere to help him, spoke with him in semi-fluent Japanese, and then disappeared again just as quickly, haha. We laughed so much because we figured he'd probably wake up in the hospital later and think he was losing his mind, or that his doctors surely would when they heard his story :D

After rescuing the dude, we raced off to 47 Liquors to buy food and, surprisingly enough, liquor! Then it was back to Daichi's grandfather's house to party. His house was totally awesome, seriously. It's just off the main street in what is basically the perfect place to live, right in the centre of Ako. Most buildings there are quite new already, but this apartment was recently renovated and while small, is very attractive. While Minato-san went out to get more food and drink for some reason, Daichi showed me his family's shrine, which was on the top floor of the apartment. He also showed me how Japanese people pray at this type of shrine, and as I'd never seen a family shrine before, I was really grateful to have the experience.

When Minato-san came back we ate and drank and played PS2, some crazy Japanese train game which in true Japanese fashion punished the loser the most by sticking a 'bombii' (demon) to their train that did bad things every turn. Hahaha. After getting pounded in that, another guy from badminton showed up (whose name I can't remember ;/) and we wandered down to a konbini to get more food and drink. Everyone was a little drunk except for me, and I was glad about that because I met one of my students returning from a study camp. It must have looked rather amusing, with me wandering along chatting in Japanese with 3 drunken Japanese guys, haha. Yet another reminder of why I don't drink so much these days :)

At around midnight I called it a night as I was exhausted, and headed home to sleep. It was really fantastic to hang out with Daichi and Minato-san though, something I don't often have the opportunity to do here in Ako. They're cool guys and it's good to have people like that in Ako that I can randomly call up and hang out with. Friends make the world go around, after all.

The coming of the O-bon festival brought with it the return of the Hyogo JET Orientation for another year! 39 lucky Hyogo SHS ALTs and the 8 BoE staff/experienced ALTs responsible for them all descended upon Prison Camp Yashiro for some mad learning and good times. It was a really interesting experience, going back for the second time around ... lots of memories, hehe. That said, my experience was very different this year thanks to being a helper rather than a particpant :)

Not that everything started smoothly, mind you! Continuing the tradition of business trips interfering with my holiday plans, I realised that I would need to be up at 4:30am on Wednesday morning in order to get to Yashiro on time and therefore had to cancel my dinner plans with Emerald. I tend to take business trips messing up my plans pretty well, but I'd been trying to organise a dinner with Emerald for several months now and we'd settled on this date because neither of us were free for weeks before or after it. Probably partly as a result of that irritation, I slept terribly on Tuesday night and was not a happy chappy when I finally managed to drag myself out of bed on Wednesday morning. Although I did feel quite a bit better when I later found out that all the other ALT helpers had slept terribly too, hehe.

I made the first train out of Ako with time to spare, and met Nate when he jumped on at Aioi station. In Himeji we scouted the bus station and grabbed a great breakfast in a vending machine restaurant near Forus before jumping on the bus with a heap of happy little new ALTs to head up to Prison Camp Yashiro ... w00t! To my initial concern and subsequent amusement (and admittedly, irritation), one of the ALTs on the bus was complaining about how lonely he was and how nobody lived around him. As I said, I initially felt sorry for him ... until he mentioned that he was a 5 minute bike ride from central Himeji. Let's just say that I had to practise considerable self restraint to not say anything I may later have regretted :D Thankfully 'friendly experienced ALT helper' mode kicked in automagically and I heard him out and made some suggestions, for which he seemed grateful :)

We got in to Yashiro itself at around 9:40am, just in time to get to the first meeting. From there, all the newbies started trickling in to check in. Overall it was a good start to the camp, as the only 'incidents' were two people who arrived 10 minutes late and one girl who 'forgot' her business clothes. After we smashed our way through lunch and the afternoon seminars to dinner, us exhausted ALT helpers were finally being to crash out one the ALTs were safely in their rooms at around 11:30pm. And best of all, no major incidents at night either, woohoo!

The next day was a lot more enjoyable as I a) had gotten some sleep and b) was actually facilitating some of the sessions. The first session was really crazy as I had the same speech to do for three separate groups, and only 20 minutes for each. I had to really move through it as I had a lot to cover, but I think they all got something out of it. Hopefully the example lesson plan I printed out for them will be useful, as this was one of the things I found most challenging to deal with when I started. Aside from that session, I also got to run a general Q&A session with Seo-sensei, a new JET co-ordinator, and I then teamed up with Nate to run the Hyogo/Tajima area networking session.

There were no major incidents on the second night either, hooray! Even the man who had come in to the training centre *before* the seminar to say that he would be coming in to complain during the seminar (which I think is extremely ignorant! :/) didn't come in. The infamous Yashiro is no longer quite so infamous, it would seem :) And again, as I've said before, I was really impressed by the new JETs. Most of them were attentive during the seminars and had fun during their free time without taking it too far. And while naturally there are always a few challenging people in every group, all in all they behaved really well. That made my life easy, which was definitely a Good Thing and I really appreciated it. Hooray new JETs, you rock! :)