My friend Kenta (the guy who played the live gig I went to see in late December) very kindly invited me to his house on New Year's Day to have lunch with his entire family. It was a pretty amazing day, as there were 4 generations worth of people at the table :) We had delicious osechiryouri and plenty of beer, and afterwards played some crazy card games before taking a nap in the afternoon and then finishing off the day with crab nabe for an early dinner. I was really grateful to him for inviting me along as it was shaping up to be a very lonely new year before he invited me over! And to be honest, I was pretty surprised that I had been invited as New Year in Japan seems to be a pretty serious family time. I would never have expected to be invited to lunch on New Year's Day :)

The next big thing after that was snowboarding with my friends Aimee and Goran in Nagano. It was a wonderful trip, as we went to a lovely little ski resort called Tsugaike Kogen. It wasn't too crowded, too, as we had used nenkyuu and were there on a Monday and Tuesday. I also went snowboarding the next weekend as well with my friend Minori, but it wasn't so good. We booked late so we couldn't stay anywhere, and the night bus - snowboard - night bus combination was exhausting. Still, it was lovely to catch up with her as I hadn't seen her for a long time.

The middle of January was taken up with the JET Mid Year Conference, at which I was a helper. It was quite enjoyable, despite the inevitable complainers, and being a helper and facilitating the various sessions was useful experience and kept my public speaking skills up. After the conference I finally got around to properly hanging out with the new ALT in Ako, Louise, and her boyfriend Skye. Only 5 months late, hehe. I went to dinner at their place and we had a great time catching up. It was lovely to hang out with some people who, coming from Perth, had similar backgrounds to me, and were also really cheerful :)

Following on from that, the famous Nick John came back to Ako for a visit with his wife Kanako. I caught up with him quite a few times, the first being at one of Okada-san's wine parties. It was a fun night, tasting wine and kicking back with Nick and a bunch of great Ako people. I also met one of the Ako librarians and the manager of Paone, my favourite supermarket - so great success! Aside from that, it was a bunch of random things again - frisbee started up again in Himeji and I saw my friend Yuko for the first time in ages and I went up to Toyooka to hang out with my friend Gareth and watch yukigassen (sports style snowball fighting that is like paintball). So all in all, a pretty good month! I met a lot of new people and finally, finally began to make some Japanese friends around Ako :D

December had about an even number of ups and downs, the downs mainly thanks to it being so cold I really didn't want to leave my apartment, haha. The start of the month was actually quite warm, and the highlight was the school bounenkai. It was another true 'forget the year' party which had plenty of interesting surprises, including me winning a takoyaki maker and seeing a lot of the very serious people I work with get drunk, laugh, tell crazy stories and generally reveal secret English skills. Good times. Before Christmas I also caught up with my good friend Chika from Osaka, made a new friend in Ako, Hiroe, through Mixi and went to the famous Ako Gishi festival (I had to work, though >_<).

Christmas was quite fun, too. No hot dates (Christmas is 'dating' time in Japan, for some reason :D), but Amanda threw a Christmas party in Himeji that was wonderful. We had dinner at a Balinese restaurant (go figure :D) in central Himeji, then hung out at Amanda's place for a nabe lunch on Christmas Day. At night I went to see my friend Kenta play a live show at Beta in Himeji, which was fantastic. He was pretty good, and the bands after him were very amusing too. I bought a couple of CDs and also got the never-fading joy of causing a few of the live house staff to explode when they saw a gaijin come in :D

After that I went very cultural, hehe, thanks to my new conversation partner Kimura-san and his family. Kometani-san, my first conversation partner, introduced us and I started to do conversation with Kimura-san every week too. By chance, he is involved in a lot of cultural things in Ako and insists on taking me along to them, which I really enjoy. We made new year decorations (omamori) by hand at the local volunteer fire station and whacked the crap out of some rice and made delicious mochi, and although I couldn't actually go he also invited me to his house to make osechiryouri, the famous and delicious Japanese new year food.

My New Year was pretty quiet as I decided to stay cultural as well. Some of my 3rd year students were playing a live gig at Beta in Himeji on the 31st, so I went along to that, much to their delight. Afterwards I went to Oishi-jinja here in Ako to do hatsumoude (first shrine visit of the year, often done at midnight) and then I met Minato-san to watch the first sunrise from the top of a hill out near Sakoshi. It was a great experience, and a nice start to the year.

November was a bit of a tough month as the Japanese winter started to dig its heels in, which made me not particularly want to leave my house :D I'm really not a big fan of the cold! The month did have its interesting moments though, hehe, the most amusing of which was Minato-san trying to set me up with another girl in Ako. In conjunction with her mother, no less, haha. Crazy times. It was pretty bizarre, actually. It all started when the lady came into Minato-ya when I was there and she got talking to Minato-san about how her daughter. Before I knew it I was over the road and in her daughter's room, being introduced to her and two of her friends. It really made for a rather unusual experience! We agreed to catch up for coffee some time, although how this changed from a lovely little coffee shop into her aunt's house, I'll never know. It was the most brutal coffee I've ever had, too, because this poor girl was hardly given the chance to speak - her mother and her aunt grilled me with questions all afternoon and into the night, when we all went for dinner at a great Okinawan restaurant in Sakoshi. Very, very crazy :D

Aside from those escapades, I also took a trip to Mount Shosha with my friend Yusaku, played frisbee in Himeji and started ikebana with my students. And the highlight of the month was catching up with my friends Jacinda and Luke, who came over for a holiday from Perth. I hadn't seen them for over a year, so it was wonderful to catch up. We went running around various places like Arima-onsen and izakayas in Sannomiya, so plenty of fun.

October was a pretty random month which consisted of a whole bunch of totally different things. There were a couple of birthday part-ays (my good friends Suzie and Matt), I helped my friend Deyi move house (very interesting experience!) and I also went to a bunch of festivals. The most interesting of these was the Hiroshima Sake festival held in Saijou, where sake from all over Japan is collected together in one place for a night of mayhem. I'm not a big fan of sake, but it was a good night with lots of laughs. I met a couple of great people from Germany who were just travelling around Japan, too, and we went out in Hiroshima after the festival. It was Fun, with a capital F!

I also took the opportunity to explore Hiroshima a bit more too, as it's one of my favourite places in Japan. One of the other assistants I met at Tokyo Orientation last year lives in Hiroshima, so I arranged to meet up with her for an afternoon as well. We had a lovely time visiting the beautiful garden in Hiroshima and wandering around the cafes and shops in the CBD.

Other than that, I played some judo at school, attended a frisbee tournament in Akashi and made a very genki new friend, Yuko, and partied hard at the Himeji Hallow'een Party. So very random, yes, but overall a good month.

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.