I feel pretty cut off from Australia these days. Although I suppose I should feel lucky. If I was a JET 10 years ago, I would only have had the phone as a lifeline home. These days, I can just jump on the Internet at night and it's no different than if I was at home in Australia! Speaking to people on there recently, I've had a really mixed bag of news. One of my best friends told me yesterday that she was on the train platform when a man committed suicide by jumping in front of an express train. She didn't see it, but the man had been standing right in front of her and she saw the resulting mess that it made. Needless to say, she wasn't very happy, and 10,000km away, there wasn't much I could do to help her. Not the most wonderful feeling in the world. On the much brighter side of life, some of my friends and acquaintances have also been having some very good luck recently. Some of them have had the great fortune to come into a good amount of money from a wonderful source. I feel so happy for them because I know how much more secure it's going to make them feel. They get money, while I run around naked with 1,000 other crazy men - you go figure :)

On the Japanese side of life, things are going pretty well. In yet another one of my famous "why didn't I do this earlier?" moments, I headed out for dinner with one of my senseis for the first time last night! It was good fun, I went to a hamburger restaurant with Hashimoto-sensei, who lives two apartments down from me. I thought about why I'd never asked any teachers to go for dinner before and realised it was because I was being really cautious since I arrived. I wasn't sure if it was 'the done thing' or appropriate. I guess I figured recently that I had been here 6 months and didn't really know most of the senseis around me, and decided to change it. I'm glad I did. I've decided to try to be a little more open and direct in future. It often pays off (case in point being the bar on Friday night where I made two new friends), and if it doesn't, I'm satisfied to think that it's the other people who are at fault/missing out.

I've also made a few new friends recently, which has been nice. One is an ALT whom I've seen around since the very beginning of JET at Tokyo Orientation, but never really had the chance to talk to. Also made a couple of new 'online' friends too, a guy called Yusaku in Himeji and a girl in Okayama called Sachiko. I've organised to head to Himeji to catch up with Yusaku for a beer or two one night, which should be cool. It's a good feeling to be pretty much booked out most nights and weekends until the middle of March, and have plenty more people that I want to catch up with. It's so wonderful to be busy and have things to do with great people. There were both in my life in Perth, but nowhere near the extent to which they exist in Japan. Good times :)