Another Monday morning, another day of boredom sets in before the clock strikes 9:30am, haha. A bit of excitement though, as heaps of junior high school students arrived to take a second entrance test, get some information about starting school at Ako SHS and buy their books, shoes and clothes for the year. What stuck in my mind is how short they are, hehe.

I'm hoping some other 'exciting' things will happen this week too, but I doubt it, haha. Thankfully I'm taking three days of leave over the spring holidays, so I will only have to be at school for 4 days this week and 3 next week. I may even use another day or two, depending on how I feel. I still have 9 days left for the remaining 4 months, and am unlikely to be able to really use them once school starts again. So long as I have a few days in case of emergencies, it should be all good as I'll have another 20 days to spend once September rolls around. It'll be good to have some carry over days, though. I don't plan on leaving Japan during the summer holidays, but I would like to travel quite a bit. I want to go to Okinawa for a week or so, and if I don't get a position as a TOA in the Tokyo Orientation, I might just go up to Tokyo anyway. A few friends up there I want to visit. When winter rolls around I want to head out snowboarding quite a bit and out to a few onsen towns like Beppu in Kyushu and the place I can never remember the name of up near Tajima.

In other news, my weekend was pretty good overall. Friday night was nice and quiet, I just played some Half Life 2 and chilled out for a change. Saturday I caught up with Yusaku for lunch and then we tried to play Ultimate Frisbee. Unfortuntately the two main organisers were sick and nobody else in the small group that did show up had brought a frisbee, hehe. Just as we were leaving we ran into a guy who had brought one, but he was 75 minutes late and we were no longer in the mood to play.

From there I headed back to Ako and grabbed a quick shower before shooting out to Sannomiya for Dan's and Cassie's birthday party. It was at an interesting little bar called Delphinus, quite near the station. It was great to catch up with everyone and hear their news, and get in some really good, fluent English, hehe. We did a nomihoudai which ended at 10pm, and as I was extremely tired (I slept on the train for most of the way to Sannomiya) I decided to head back to Ako rather than party on and stay at Goran's. I slept on the train on the way back too, and back in Ako I didn't feel so tired any more, so went to Sai-on for a bit. Naonori and Kazu were there so we talked crap until about 1:30am then headed home. Actually, while I think of it, I got two 2,000 yen notes in my change at Sai-on! I've been here for 8 months but haven't seen one of these, so I was very pleased. Japanese money is quite frustrating in that it has 1 yen coins which are useless, but doesn't have 20 yen or 200 yen coins, and the 2,000 yen note is extremely rare. So you end up carrying around a whole heap more coins and notes than you should have to. Bah! :D

On Sunday I went to lunch with my new friend Emerald, in Kakogawa. I'd never been to The Kak before, but it's surprisingly big and actually really nice. Emerald's apartment was pretty funky and she cooked us up a great lunch. I contributed a bottle of wine (a 2004 Australian cab sav I just chanced across in Jusco, of all places) which turned out to be very tasty, and we watched a movie called Himalaya as we ate. It's a French film made in Tibet, about a tribe crossing through the mountains in winter, with salt to trade for grains on the other side. As with most films like that, it was pretty interesting and some great culture.

Around 3:30pm we headed back to the train station where I bought the seishin ju hachi kippu (special discount train ticket for Nagoya) off Emerald and then headed into Himeji to look for Aoyama. I managed to find it quite quickly, on the south side of the station. I finally managed to attract the attention of a storeperson and eventually managed to find a suit that fitted, haha. In Australia I can simply buy off the rack, which is great, but not so in Japan. While this store did have a section of 'World Sized' suits, they didn't seem to fit me either! The arms and shoulders would be right, but the jacket would be almost to my knees, lol. Very strange.

Anyway, as I said, he finally found me a suit that fitted well and met all my anally retentive requirements (3 buttons, no pattern, a single colour). It was a 'Gainer' suit, a brand I'd never heard of before. As far as I can tell, it's a sort of 'young person's jack of all trades' Japanese brand. The sales guy assured me that it's a relatively good brand and quite fashionable. As it was only around 30,000 yen, I wasn't too fussed, hehe. While I normally don't mind forking out a bit on suits to make sure I get a good quality, at least decently fashionable one, I realised there was no point this time around. I just need to look good enough at ceremonies, because I'm only going to be beating the crap out of it at other times (riding to school, playing in the playground and so on).

Back in Ako I grabbed a quick dinner at Minato-ya (there were no customers so Minato-san let me cook my food myself, w00t!) and we talked about 80s music. Minato-san has an awesome collection of this type of music, and as it's a favourite of mine there was lots to talk about. I really must go through his collection and write some bands down! I left at around 9pm and went past Paone on the way home to pick up some bread and other random junk.

Tonight I'm going to do all the chores I didn't have time to do on the weekend and probably just chill out playing games. Monday night is my gaming night, assuming I have nothing else on. Tomorrow I'm catching up with Junko for the last time before she leaves for Canada, then Wednesday should be badminton. I go up to Nagoya on Thursday for the night before the Toyota seminar on Friday, then it's a weekend in Nagoya with Emerald, Minori and Junko, hooray! Should be a lot of fun.