It was a day of many somewhat strange things yesterday. It started with riding to school in the morning, when I wound up next to a student I didn't recognise. I started chatting to her, only to find that she was the daughter of one of the women I'd met at the Ako badminton club New Year enkai. Amusingly, the student said that her mother had said I was 'strong'. I can only imagine that this referred to the fact that we all drank a lot and had a good time. Very funny indeed. I knew a link like that would form eventually but it was still a little strange to actually have it happen!

Once at school, I was hit with an absolute influx of work - joy!! :) Two days of nenkyu makes for three hours of accumulated work, yipee! Kurioka-sensei was first off the block, and gave me a small pile of notebooks from some of her san-nensai students. They were doing exam preparation and she wanted me to correct their English. While I was doing this, Okuto-sensei came and got me to do some corrections with him, and shortly after, Kotani-sensei also dropped in to with some work. So that filled up the morning, thankfully.

The afternoon was a little slower, the highlight being when Kyoto-sensei suddenly appeared behind my desk calling out 'Carter-san!'. He sat down and gave me a card he'd received from the Rotary club, which had some pictures of me in it. There were a couple of good ones and Kyoto-sensei seemed to think it was all rather amusing. There was a photo of me up on stage and I wanted to tell him the story about that, but couldn't find the words. Ahhh well, such is life. I'm getting there with my Japanese.

After school I wandered up to Kappa Sushi for an early dinner. The people there know me pretty well now, and although they're too busy (and ironically, polite - their keigo, very polite speech, is insane) to really talk to, they do grin like idiots at me when they see me - and me at them :) It's nice, like that. After that I decided to go see Miyuki, whom I hadn't seen since last year. Her shop was pretty quiet, so I was able to talk to her for a while. Her English and my Japanese had improved since last year, so we were able to talk quite well. Just before I left, she handed me a small pack of Ferrero Rocher and a mikan, for Valentine's Day, hehe. Rather than go straight home, I then decided to drop in to see the crew at Rengaya. Only the master and his wife were there though, and they were strangely quiet, so I didn't stay all that long.

At night I thought about going to badminton, but decided not to when I found I didn't have the right clothes (and was still freaking tired from Hokkaido). So I just did some washing, watched a bit of TV and chilled out. The one thing about the rest of the night that is worth commenting on was a new 'community' website I found, called My Happy Planet. I'm not normally that big on these kinds of things, but this one is a little different. Normally, community websites don't really have a focus and they have so many members that it's hard to actually meet new people on them. It just becomes a pissing contest for how many of your existing friends and acquaintances you can find and rabidly add to your friend list. The premise of My Happy Planet, however, is language, giving it some much needed focus. The idea is that you write down the languages you know and those you want to learn, and then you can search for people who 'match'. Meaning people who can teach you a language you want to know, and you can teach a language they want to know.

For me, this really clicked. Due to the language barrier, it's really hard to meet people here in Japan. My Japanese is getting better, but it's going to be many months before I'm conversational. In the meantime, I'd really like to improve my Japanese by practising it. This only really works with people who can speak English, unfortunately, so I need to be able to explain what I want to say/don't understand and they need to be able to explain back grammar/vocab/sentences back. So I signed up for the site some time last week. I wasn't expecting a whole lot, given my past community site experiences, so just left it to see what happened. To my surprise, I have been bombarded with friend requests and messages since then. Best of all, these have been mostly from Japanese people, but I've also had a few Chinese, a German and a South Korean contact me too. It's really kind of cool. I'd forgotten how much I liked meeting random people from around the world and learning about them.

Some of these people seriously crack me up, haha. I got a message from a Chinese guy that simply said "nice to meet you pretty boy". The amusing part is that I can't tell whether he's hitting on me or not understanding what he's saying. That's what you get with intercultural communication though, I suppose, hahaha. At least I know someone I can learn Chinese from now, if I'm ever masochistic enough to do so.

I've spent most of my time talking to two Japanese people. They're very far from me (Gifu and Kanagawa, near Tokyo) so it's not like they're going to be 'in person' friends, but that's ok. At least I'm using some Japanese socially! One of them, a girl called Minori, is a snowboarder and happens to live near some snow fields. Good times! If I get to know her well enough, I might be able to tee up a boarding trip with her before the winter is out. Now that's what I'm talking about! Now if only I could meet some people closer to me...come on Hyogo prefecture people, I'm waiting for you! :D