Rest is for the weak!!!! XD

I really need to start writing these things before I have to compile a long list of recaps for you all. ^^;; That and it would make remembering details far easier. Not to mention that this might be the longest post I have, but I’ll cross my fingers for your sake that it isn’t! XD

September 11th (Friday): Today was a day spent at Koshino Jr. High. I enjoy the kids there, and although sometimes the teacher I work with doesn’t quite do it for me when it comes to the expectations of the children in our class he is an overall nice guy. However a day at this school or any of my schools is always a tiring one, and though I planned to go home and simply relax I was coaxed (with little effort) to head out later in the evening for dinner at Peyote’s (Mexican restaurant). The idea of heavier types of food is always an appealing thought while in this country so I jumped on it. Once picked up Rosa and then we went to Peyote’s where we were eventually joined by eight or so more people. There isn’t too much to tell about the night other then the random trash talking of Twilight with the girls and a heated discussion over the Harry Potter series. I must admit I love engaging in conversation about Harry Potter. I simply adore that series, probably one of the only if not the only book series I went out of my way or wanted to pursue. It was great catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while and it was fun watching two of my friends tying their legs together with table towels to run a three legged race against two guys outside the restaurant. I didn’t go personally see it myself but I’m sure it was to die for. After a little while and some frustrating personal traits of a certain someone I decided to head home.

September 12th (Saturday):Today was supposed to be Sports day for my elementary school, but it was cancel due to rain. With this I slept in and was wakened around 11:30 by Matt who asked for me to come and join him in Takaoka( an hour or so by train) to enjoy the festival. Takaoka was celebrating it’s 400th birthday so he invited me for the festivities. I agreed to come so I took a slightly nerve racking train ride (cause I don’t know where the heck I was going) I arrived in Takaoka station. This was where I was confronted with my first Mc Donald’s since Tokyo. Now I know this seems like a rather trivial thing, but when you are used to eating a certain type of way things of the norm look really good to you when you don’t have them. Nevertheless I resisted the temptation and met up with Matt. We then proceeded to head to someone’s house where they were practicing “ A Yellow Submarine” to the crowd at the festival area. They were all wearing hippy 70’s gear and matt ended up looking like a hippy Harry Potter. It was rather amusing. Finally we made our way back to the Festival area where they went in front and sung. The audience was rather slim do to the poor weather but they received and applause and a dancing Brazilian to boot. After this it was all about walking up and down looking at all the food vendors. The major festival activities were to happen on the following day, but that was ok. I ended up buying a rather handsome amount of festival food, including this meat on a stick thing which undoubting had been the best meat I had, had since arriving in Japan. Nevertheless we found our way to an area where a pair of people was playing piano and violin on stage. We sat and chatted and listened to the music until they were off stage. Once that was done we met up with Kelly and proceeded to locate a place for dinner. With a rather long discussion on options and then a brief stop in a non-satisfactory dinner we ended up at this traditional food place. It was cool and there was lots of fun chatter to be had. One topic in which we discussed the vileness of Kelly’s food choice and watched others mutilate the “food” that was on her plate. I of course ordered something that I didn’t really end up liking and just pawned it off onto other people. At this stage we decided to break up the group and me, Matt, Kelly and Chris ( a brit) went to another bar where we all ordered wonderful food and GOOD drinks. Needless to say this ended me with staying in Takaoka for the night. It was my choice and it was worth it to spend time with them. At this point however we (Kelly, Matt, and me) were rather exhausted and walked back to Matt’s place for the night. They kindly offered me their spare room and I slept in a bed for the first time since Tokyo Orientation. Needless to say considering that I was over and hour by train from my house I wished for rain the following morning, so I didn’t have to rush back home. Though I wasn’t as lucky and I received a call from a friend telling me that sports day was on for Sunday.

September 13th Sunday: With a more then tiring fast walk to the station I said farewell to my friends and hopped on the train back to Kurobe. I made it in about an hour. Ran to my parked car and drove home. There I simply put on a hat, grabbed my camcorder and jumped back in the car and drove to the school. Granted this school is in walking distance, but I was trying to make up lost time seeing as I was already an hour and a half late for the start of sports day. Once I got there I found Brett and the rest of the senior staff (principle and so on) and sat with them under the tent. The children were wonderfully cute and still pretty awesome despite how young most of them were. I recorded what I could before the battery died and then during lunch, ran home and ate and charged my battery for an hour. Then I rushed back to the school and watched the remainder of sports day. I brought my jacket along because it was on and off light raining (which the children played through) and it was rather windy. When the sports day was over I said hello to a few kids, confirmed that I would attending the enkai that night and returned home for a short intermission of my rather busy weekend.

Around six that evening I changed clothes and walked back to Chuo to be picked up by a fellow teacher. There I met up with them a few minutes later and we were off to the enaki which was surprisingly close to where we work/ I live. We walked in, I took a few pictures, the opening speech was said and then dinner was up. Now I had expected food to be much like the pervious enaki, but I was thankfully mistaken. There was perhaps one plate of uncooked articles of food, and the rest was lovely. They had yakatori, barbecued beef, lasagna, friend chicken, orange chicken, salad, fresh fruits, tea, wine, sake, beer etc.. I ate rather happily and with some amazing conversation to boot. I was asked many questions and I was given a lot of laughs and responses. It even got to a point where I was speaking to a large group of five or six of my fellow coworkers in a circle where we talked about anime, music, sports, nick-names, zodiac signs, singing, favorite foods and so on. They were wonderful people!!! We all have nicknames and we carried these throughout the remainder of the night. Mine was Ah-chan. The others had some shortened variation of their first name. We laughed and joked and just couldn’t get enough of each other. Then I decided to say hi to the rest of the table because that’s only the polite thing to do, and it’s the Japanese enkai thing to do. So bringing a bottle of beer with me to fill their glasses I walked over to the other side of the table and began talking to a fellow English teacher (Who’s English isn’t that great lol) and I suppose the gym coach. Well I hope he was the gym coach because the man is around 6ft 3in and about 240 pounds. We ended up talking about ages and siblings. I told him that he was very tall and he said in response that this was normal size. I died laughing. I also told him that my brother was around his height and bigger in weight, and he asked if we ever fought. I told him sometimes, but more in a playful manner. He then asked if I could win and told him that sometimes I do. With a look of surprise he asked me how and I told him I just go for the knees. He nodded at this and took a long swig of his beer. Then after stating the fact (at least to him) that I was cute he stood to his feet and said that he was leaving. However before he said his farewells he told me to not take out his knees on his way out, and once again I laughed heartily. Shortly after departing speeches (which spoke very highly of me) it was time to go. However I managed to get friendly with the crowd who wanted the night to continue. So we exited the enaki restaurant and walked five minutes down the road to a bar. It was a cute bar and there we had more drinks, I introduced them to the combination of peach vodka and orange juice, given tests to make sure I remembered all their nick names, and was asked many more questions which I didn’t mind answering in the slightest. Karaoke broke out and I ended up singing some traditional Japanese song with them. I only did the refrain because a 2 year old could have done it and they were very happy I participated. Of course this led them to playing the sailor moon theme for me to sing, which I sung in English. A few more random songs of mine followed and once again it seems I have a amassed a following of people who love to hear me sing. It’s weird XD Needless to say the entire night was wonderful and then we headed home around two where I feel asleep almost immediately.

September 14th Monday: So today is supposed to be a day of daikyuu, which are days you receive when you work on a non work day. Since I attended sports day and the enkai I was allotted this privilege though I think I would have received it any considering the entire school was involved and the school would be inevitably closed. Needless to say I was woken around 9:30 to a call from Chuo. I tried to call back but with no answer. This led to a minor freak out where I got dressed, drove to Chuo in deep worry that I was supposed to be at school. Thankfully I was wrong and I arrive to an empty school. I called my JTE (Japanese teacher of English) anyway to confirm and then decided since I was awake to run a few errands. I managed to finally send things through the post office (Both my Gollyods application and something for my cell phone) and pick up my tickets for my travels during the upcoming silver week holiday. With that I returned home and did some random things that at the moment I don’t truly recall and although I didn’t notice till Wednesday, completely forgot to go to my Eikawa class in Nyuzen that evening.

September 15th Tuesday: Today was a day at Koshino. I enjoy the students there and I had a rather good day at work. Once class in particular where I went to assist a regular English class ( I teach in English conversation classes) it was an activity to help them make sentences and to ask a lot of questions. So the kids had to think of as many questions as they could about me and then when it was time to ask me the questions and I’d give answers. In turn they would take these answers and write a short paragraph about me. I received some interesting questions though none of them were shocking or surprising. I was asked if I was in love, and I told them no. I asked the student if he was, and he said yes, but it was a secret. I was asked about anime, and things I like, how much my watch cost, if I liked to read short novels and so on and so on. This class was wonderful because there was a lot of participation and it made the class fun. At the end of class I was given the papers to grade. It was toooooo adorable that after writing about a few things they learned about me, some students added at the bottom that they thought I was very nice, and some thought I was cute/beautiful. This NEARLY made me cry XD. I finished grading them and I took a picture or two of the papers. Once I got home I was very tired. I wanted to go to sleep but I ended up calling Rosa after washing my hair and such and met up with her at Pizza Jambori for dinner. A short while later Lawrence came in as well and we stayed while he ate. It was a pleasant dinner. Once that happened I went home and I think this was the night where I finished Code Geass R2. *SIGH* I actually shed like a tear or two on this one. It’s ridiculous. I won’t say anything about it as to not spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but damn… just damn.

September 16th Wednesday: Today was a day at Chuo, and also a day where I climbed stairs a whole hell of a lot. I’m not sure why I hadn’t experienced this occurrence since I’ve started working here, but I need the exercise so I didn’t complain. Today was a good day with the kids and I made another lunch speech where I told them how much I enjoyed their sports day and also how I was taking a trip to Osaka during the Silver Week holidays. I had great fun teaching country flags where I added dramatic sound effects and noises to make the lesson more interesting. The kids and the teachers loved it. I liked doing it, and for some magical reason unknown to me I can currently roll my R’s to perfection. Why in Japan does this happen? It would have been more effective in Spain XD. EH, well I suppose it’s no different than me finding out that I think Asians are attractive in Italy. I’m weird @.@ XD Never the less I ended up leaving school around one because there was a meeting for the NIikawa Jet’s. So I picked up Rosa and went to Uozu for the meeting. It was nice seeing faces I hadn’t seen in a while, and seeing faces that I have. The meeting was about confusing money matters and issues we may or may not being having with teaching thus far. It was nice to vent a bit. Not that there was much of a problem, but everyone has quirks, some just show more than others. Well once the meeting was over we ended up going to kitokito, the same sushi place I had went to with Jack and the other last week. So I just ordered the thing I like the most, and ate pineapple ice cream which is super strong in flavor. It was good though  Another successful post-meeting meal out of the way, I left so I can head to Brett’s. He had a football game playing and food up for grabs. Couldn’t past that, but on the way I stopped at the book off store and bought seven CD’s for under twenty-five dollars. I consider that a pretty good deal. After grabbing up the CD’s (which happen to be some of the first CD’s I’ve purchased since CD burners were made >.>) I went to Brett’s. There I ended up watching a Green Bay game, even though I would have never watched it otherwise, it was the first bit of football I’ve seen in a while. Pizza, fries, hotdogs, and cheesecake to eat was more than compensation for watching a team I’ve never had an interest in. I even managed to get a few songs of Rock Band in before leaving his place. One more stop before I went back to my apartment (Brett lives across the street) was to stop by Lawrence’s place and look at the two baby kittens he just got. I was up for one of those kittens. They are adorable, but kittens turn into cats, and well the cuteness kinda fades away. So I passed it up for that and other reasons. If I need to I’ll just go play with the cats when I want to. THEN!!!!! I went home, and I wasn’t up for too much longer though I did stuff a leftover piece of pizza in my face. I simply pigged out today, but I suppose everyone has splurge days where they simply can’t stop eating. Then I went to sleep, and to be honest I hope the next couple days are rather quite cause I’m going to rather busy for most of Silver Week break.

September 17th Thursday: Today was Takase Jr. High and the first time since I’ve been coming to this school that I’ve taught classes. I had four classes, and much like every school I did a form of self introduction. That was the basis of the class so there isn’t much to tell on that front. Other than that during breaks I managed to sketch out something I might want to rework later, and get a blog entry out of the way. As far as work goes there isn’t too much more to tell. It was a good day, though I think the kids at this school are bit more shy then the kids at Koshino, but perhaps they’ll get over being shy and speak up. However when I left the school the yelled out to me from the windows and said hello and goodbye. It was really cute. When I got home I changed clothes and then went with Brett and his wife Nana to deal with some car issues. I went and paid my first ever car payment (*pats wallet*) and then after he finished his car business we went to Mc Donald's. I couldn't resist this time, and I got a meal. IT WAS SO FLIPPIN DELICIOUS!!! Judge me if you will but I am one happy camper!!!