The new teachers are an interesting bunch! I've been having some fun getting to know them. In ichi-nensai we have Ito-sensei and Yamaga-sensei (sp?), both of whom are very quiet and hard to speak to. I think they're a bit afraid of the gaijin who spouts random Japanese at them :) There are two new office ladies, one of whom, Juuta-sensei splits her time between the office and the admin position in the staff room. She's nice, and fun to talk to. There are quite a few new English teachers too - Touda-sensei, another Hashimoto-sensei, Nishitani-sensei and a part time teacher whose name I can't remember.

I haven't spoken to Touda-sensei much yet, but he strikes me as quite similar to Kotani-sensei. It was very amusing when I rode into school today amongst the students and surprised him. I was wearing black so blended in, and rode right past him. He saw me and looked quite surprised when he saw the mountain bike and a gaijin shaped face smiling back at him, and almost involuntarily muttered 'kakkoi!' (handsome/cool). Muahahaha. Ego boost for the day. Nishitani-sensei is a similar story, I haven't spoken to her. She seems quiet. The new part time teacher is also very quite and seemed nervous to be speaking to me, even though we spoke in Japanese. Hashimoto-sensei is very cool, he's confident and speaks great English. We had a good conversation yesterday and he's offered to help me with my Japanese. We'll see.

So all good. There are a few others around too, including an info science teacher who moved from the infamous Himeji Besshou, one of the worst behaved schools in Hyogo-ken. I asked her about it and she was rather quiet, so I gathered from that that she didn't want to be seen to be saying anything bad so didn't say anything :) Finally, there's a new part time science teacher (whose name was just impossible to hear when he told me) who lives in the same block of apartments as me. He has a "super-nice" mountain bike, as Minato-san would say, so I had something to talk to him about. He seemed a little nervous when I approached him too, but opened up a bit when I spoke to him in Japanese. I invited him out to ride up in the trails above Takayama at some point, and he seemed quite eager. Maybe I'll invite him this Sunday, we'll see.