Admittedly I kind of isolated myself from early September, after the 'incident', but I did manage to get out a few times. On the first Saturday I caught up with my old friend Portia and we had a pretty crazy night out partying in Osaka. We didn't know too many places to go, but through chance we bumped into an ex-JET we both knew who took us to a cool little bar called Karma Sutra. We got talking to some of the people in there and by chance a couple of them spoke fluent English, so we had a great night chatting away. I made a new friend, too, a great girl called Chika. Unlike most Japanese girls I meet, she was both confident and really down to earth, which made for really refreshingly open, interesting conversation.

The next weekend it was my birthday, which for some reason I spent doing a 42km bike race in Nagano prefecture with Minato-san :D We prepared our bikes on Friday night and then zoomed off to Nagano in Minato-san's car - nearly 7 hours drive one way! The place we raced at is called Otaki, a real backwater rural town that I couldn't find on the map. I did found the rough area, though - if you're interested, check out this map. The race was really good fun as it had some punishing climbs and awesome descents. I finished in a time of about 3 hours 30 minutes, getting me 203rd place out of a field of about 450. You can see my lone gaijin name in the results listings here. It certainly wasn't a professional race, but still, I don't think 203rd is too bad given I'd done no training for it! Minato-san came in 97th, just under half an hour faster than me.

The week after the bike race we had a typhoon come through the Kansai area, which was an interesting experience. There weren't any last year, so I was quite excited. It turned out to be not particularly impressive, however, as it slipped under the Ako area and, at any rate, was moving quite fast so it soon cleared. Still, it was fun, riding to school in driving rain. Thank god I'd bought myself a new rain pants/jacket set the week before!

On the 20th I had a late birthday party, which pretty much consisted of a night out in Osaka. Somewhat amusingly, my friends decided to have a BBQ in Ako partially for my birthday, even though they knew I wouldn't be there. Yoko even brought along a cake, hehe. It's gone down in history now, as the birthday that I wasn't there for :D Anyway, I decided to head to Osaka for my birthday because my favourite DJs, the Dex Pistols, were playing at a club there and I really wanted to see them. Not that many people could make it, so we just went for dinner at an izakaya first before rather foolishly heading to the club when it opened at 9pm. Haha. The Dex Pistols didn't come on until just after 1am, but when they did it was awesome. We left at around 4am and after swinging past Karma Sutra to chat to Chika, I caught the first train home.

The last big thing from September was the annual Hyogo AJET white water rafting trip down in Shikoku. It was totally awesome fun! About 15 of us went down on a Friday night and stayed at the Happy Raft lodge in Tokushima prefecture, I think it is, before doing a day of rafting on Saturday and half a day of canyoning on Sunday morning. We had a BBQ party on the Saturday night, too, which was fantastic. It was a really good trip and I met some great JETs.

I'm back! :)

As you may have noticed, I haven't written any entries in this journal since early September last year - which is quite a while! I'm not going to write a big explanation as to why, but I do think it deserves a quick summary. Basically, around that time somebody badly insulted my Japanese ability and I rather foolishly took it much harder than I should have. Thankfully, though, I recently found out that it was all just a really unlucky case of bad timing / misunderstanding. What was said wasn't meant as an insult (the person was just very honest and more than a little tactless), and at the time I was overly sensitive to things like that because I had been finding life in Ako pretty tough.

But, all is good now :) I didn't want to write about all of the above at the time, and unfortunately that led to me not writing about anything else either. Recently I decided that I wanted to keep writing in this journal, though. Aside from telling my story about life in Japan to anyone who wants to read it, it's also a record for me for the future. I want to be able to look back in 5 or 10 (or more! ;D) years and be able to use it to remember everything I did and experienced while I was here.

So! Now, I don't really want to overload you with massive amounts of posts (judging from the stats from previous months, there should have been about 110 posts in these 5 or so months I haven't been writing, hahaha), so I've decided to write a summary for each month from September 2008 to now and then continue as before (albeit probably with fewer posts and less detail). So without further ado...

One of the interesting things I've noticed recently is how variable my ability to understand someone's Japanese is. It's always been this way, but now I'm conversational I seem to notice it even more. For example, when I'm in the classroom with Kurioka-sensei, I can understand almost everything she says even though I don't have the skills to actually say what she is. On the other hand, I can barely understand Kyoto-sensei when he talks to me. I thought about exactly what this is, and I think I've narrowed it down to a few things.

Perhaps the most major of which are the speed at which someone speaks and how clearly they speak. Kurioka-sensei speaks slowly and clearly, while Kyoto-sensei is the opposite. The nature of the vocabularly they use is also a big one - I think older people use a larger and somewhat different vocabularly to the younger people I have more experience speaking with. Again, Kurioka-sensei uses very plain language (perhaps because she's speaking to the students?) whereas I'm reliably informed by Mitsumoto-sensei that Kyoto-sensei likes to speak using complicated language.

On Sunday morning I was up and off early, back to Ako. For some reason I really wanted to get back there - it's a feeling I've been getting more and more often recently, which I think is a good thing :) As I was heading back so early I decided to see if anyone in Ako was free to hang out in the afternoon for a beach BBQ or something, so I sent everyone a message while I was on the train. Ewan messaged me back to let me know that he was already at a BBQ that he'd organised with his surfing friends after they had to cancel their surfing trip, and as it was at a local beach, he invited me along too. I was really grateful as I hadn't had many opportunities to meet his friends and I'm perpetually excited about any prospect of meeting some young people in Ako :P

So as soon as I got home I packed up my bag and jumped on my bike for the long ride up to Outsuka beach. It's about a 30 minute ride from home at a decent pace, including several fairly stiff hill climbs, so it was great exercise! It was even better exercise this time because I missed the turnoff to the beach and ended up riding nearly to the next town before realising. That was fun though as I needed the training for my bike race later this month, and I got some seriously decent speed up on the downhills. The long winding roads up on the cape are beautiful to ride down and I easily pushed 40km/h just coasting. I think I scared the crap out of a couple of drivers who were catching up to me on the uphills but then found themselves unable to overtake me once I hit the downhills, muahaha >:)

I eventually found the beach and the BBQ at around 2:30pm. It was a little intimidating just walking up to a BBQ full of people I didn't really know, but Ewan introduced me to everyone and it was actually really chilled out and relaxed. Just what I needed after the past few super-busy weeks. Ewan's friends were cool people, too, and I was really glad that I finally had the opportunity to meet his best friend Ken properly too. We'd met a few times over the past year but never had the chance to exchange words. Ai, Ewan's girlfriend, was also there and she introduced me to her friend, Junko. Yes, yet another Junko, hehe. Her nickname is Junko 3 :D

Kazu and Yoko also turned up eventually and we all generally hung out doing beach BBQ things - swimming, fishing, diving, eating, playing frisbee and soccer and talking about many random things. We called it a night just before 10pm, which was good because I still had some chores to do before starting school on Monday :P Kazu joined me for the long ride home, but thankfully he showed me the flat route that avoided a pretty serious hill climb :) From there it was back home to the chores and then sleep for the start of Term 2!

I thought about the day while I was doing my chores and I realised just how much fun it had been to hang out in Ako with some great local people and to be communicating with them almost entirely in Japanese. I honestly can't express how happy I was, and I really hope that I can do it more often!

Saturday was a pretty unusual day! I'd arranged to meet my new friend Kyouko in Osaka for lunch and bowling, and she'd invited some of her other gaijin friends along too. I was a little unsure about it all, to be honest, as it was only the second time I was going to meet her and having to meet the friends of someone I barely knew anyway wasn't my idea of a relaxing day out :P Still, it turned out to be much better than I expected, partially because her friends were pretty much in the same boat as me. Only one of them, Remy, was actually a friend of Kyouko's, and he'd only met her once too. The other guy, Olivier, was a friend of Remy's and had never met Kyouko.

Thankfully that made for a good starting point and when I found out that the guys were both working as programmers in Nara, it was all good, haha. The only difficult part of the day was trying to balance the conversation between everyone. Kyouko is hard of hearing and her spoken English isn't as strong as her writing/reading, so it was a real challenge to keep her in the conversation. I also had trouble understanding Remy a lot of the time, as although he spoke decent English, he had a strong French accent. Still, having lived in Japan for a year has made me pretty good at dealing with situations where I can't understand what's going on around me (hehe), so it ended up being fairly ok.

So we grabbed lunch at an okonomiyaki place in Umeda before heading to our afternoon entertainment of 3 games of bowling at a massive bowling alley in Nanba. Bowling is not really my thing, like karaoke, but they're both necessities in Japan so I deal with it and am slowly beginning to enjoy them more and more. Much to my surprise I actually bowled pretty well, too, winning the second game with the somewhta decent score of 120 or so. Good times. By the time the last game finished we had just enough time to have coffee before I needed to shoot off to Sannomiya to catch up with my friends for the beer garden at night.

As Remy and Olivier were good guys and we'd all had a fun time bowling, I decided to invite them and Kyouko to come along to the beer garden with me. They seemed pretty happy to do that so we all went to Sannomiya together and they went off on their own while I caught up with my friends beforehand. The beer garden kicked off at 6:30pm and I had just enough time to eat and grab a beer before starting the HAJET membership run. This took most of the night and went pretty well - with Matt's and Kate's help we got quite a few people paid and signed up for membership :)

The only downside of doing the membership run was that although I met a lot of people, I couldn't spend any decent amount of time with any of them. So I felt a bit bummed out once the beer garden finished and I realised I should be heading to the train to get home. Goran kindly said I could stay at his place if I wanted to stay out though, so I decided to do that instead of going home. From the beer garden the group split up, either heading to Osaka or to Trinity in Sanno, which is where Goran, Misa and I went. We arrived just after a WhyNot!? Japan party had finished and to my surprise I bumped into Yoko, the organiser, at the door. It was kind of strange seeing her in Kobe as I've only ever seen her in Osaka before. The good thing about turning up just after the WhyNot!? party though was that there were still a lot of people around, meaning that Trinity was actually pumping for a change :) So we hung around there until just before midnight when Goran, Misa and I ran to the subway and headed back to Myoudani on the last train.