Whoops! In my haste to create a journal entry about last night that didn't descend into my usual rambling, I left out some of the funniest things! First of all was when I ran into some of my students just after meeting Rachael off the train. As we walked down the stairs from the station to the main rode, I felt someone grab at the strap of my bag. Not particularly worried but a little surprised, I spun around to see who was there and what they were doing. Two of my ni-nensai students were cowering, incredibly amusingly, in a little group some way behind me, staring at us. I couldn't help but laugh, gave them a friendly wave and beckoned them over. They came running up and started jabbering away, of which I caught 'Garufurendo?!'. Haha. Always the first question out of their mouths! You seriously cannot go anywhere in Ako with a girl without someone assuming that she's your girlfriend. I replied that no, she wasn't my girlfriend, she was just a friend visiting from Australia. I grinned when I saw that they couldn't stop staring at her. It's not really all that surprising, as she's basically a model for the stereotypical Japanese love of Westerners - darkish blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin. They started calling out "Kawaii, kawaii" excitedly, much to Rachael's confusion. Hahaha, good times. Only in Japan :)

The other cool thing was that I sang karaoke in Japanese. Or at least, tried to. Kazu The Greatest, who I was sitting next to, started singing a fairly slow, easy to follow song that sounded pretty cool. I picked up the subtitles and started to sing along, much to the surprise of Kazu and everyone else in the room, lol. I could follow about 70% of the hiragana and furigana about the kanji (the song was a little too fast for me to read them all!), so I was fairly happy about that. I even got a couple of the kanji, which got great exclamations of surprise and then cheers from the locals in the room :) A good night!