Yesterday night turned out better than I thought it might. After calling a few friend at school once 4 o'clock finally ticked around, I dropped past Paone on the way home. Mostly on the off chance of seeing my favourite friendly part time checkout worker than anything else, but I also bought some dinner. Haha. Back home I played some Dawn of War: SoulStorm and began to get a handle on "not losing" with Eldar. Quite hard to use, those little munchkins, but a lot of fun when you don't die.

It slowly ticked around towards 7pm, and my first Japanese class in Ako. Somewhat to my irritation, I found out that AIFA has been running Japanese lessons since at least October last year, if not before. Something that I really would have appreciated knowing (and about AIFA, too), but that nobody cared to mention. That, or they really didn't know, hehe. It all seems a bit stealthy. I suppose there isn't much call for Japanese lessons in a town with 99.9% of the population already knowing the language, hehe.

I was in two minds about the class. I really think that for any type of class, particularly a language class, to be effective, it needs to run often and for a decent amount of time. A couple of hours a day at least 3 or 4 times a week, for example. Perhaps I got that stuck in my head thanks to high school LOTE classes, which were abysmal, haha. Anyway, as this class was only scheduled once every two weeks, and I knew nothing about the format, it was not particularly appealing. I had promised Sekiyama-san I would go though, and thinking about it, I knew it'd be a good chance to just be speaking Japanese. So focusing on the positives, I trundled off quite happily.

And it actually turned out to be really cool. Due to the small number of people (between 4 and 6 or so students each week), it's actually more like a kaiwa (conversation) class. It's run by volunteers from the community, some of whom can speak English and some of whom can't. So it's a good challenge! There were two volunteers there that night, who have been working with individuals/small groups. One student wasn't there that night though, so I was able to have a one on two session with a volunteer and Sekiyama-san.

I felt fairly down at the start, as the other three students were a lot better at Japanese than I was. I cheered up a bit when I found out that they'd been in Japan for over 2 years and had to do an intensive Japanese course before coming here, though. I was also a bit shaky at first with the volunteer and Sekiyama-san, unable to understand a few things they said and unable to put into Japanese what I wanted to say. I kept a positive attitude though and got through it, and with Sekiyama-san's translations, actually had a somewhat roaring conversation going when we had to stop at 8:30pm.

On the way out, I caught up with the other students who had been there. They are Indonesian, and work over at IHI in Aioi. I'd actually seen one of them at a recent badminton tournament in Aioi, although he didn't recognise me and I couldn't tell which of them had been there, hehe. We had a good chat outside the building, though, and I walked with them back to the train station. They were friendly and spoke some English, so between our Japanese and that we were able to have a decent conversation. I was feeling pretty good - Indonesians and an Australian, in Japan, both communicating via a second language. It doesn't get much better than that. We talked a bit about badminton too, and they invited me down to play at IHI's gym on the weekends if I ever had time. I told them about Ako BMC in return, so we might get a few games in at some point. Good times!

The other interesting thing from the night was getting talking about Nick, a previous ALT, with Sekiyama-san and the volunteer. Sekiyama-san and Nick knew each other quite well, and Nick is a legend in Ako. Sekiyama-san implied that he and some other people in Ako wanted me to follow in Nick's footsteps and get married to a girl from Ako, haha. Taking the opportunity, though, I spun it around by telling him that there were no people my age in Ako. As I had expected, Sekiyama-san replied that there were, and that he would introduce me to some, hehe. He said that AIFA events were a good place to meet people. It's finally coming together, woohoo! I've finally made inroads into the local university with my friends Naonori, Aya and Miho, and hopefully I can meet some of the other young ninjas that apparently inhabit Ako. If they are here, I have no idea where they hang out!

Anyway, all good. As I said, a good night, much better than I expected. Back home I admittedly stayed up too late, but there were a couple of old friends online that I had wanted to talk to but hadn't been able to because of Japanese class. I also caught up with a couple of my local friends, some of whom live quite far away and are planning trips down to Kansai and maybe even Ako, woohoo! :) Plenty of good times ahead.