Must Every Week Have a New Name?

Hi,

Another week has come and gone. I had my last day of school teaching for the "year" on Tuesday, and now it is officially spring break. This means I sit at my office studying Japanese and writing emails for about 8 hours each day. I actually like it, because I get to study a lot of Japanese. I break it down as such, 8:30-12 is studying Japanese time, 1-4:30 is do various things (email, check up on the news, write to you wonderful people) time. Hopefully I'll be able to add in some more Japanese time in the second half, but we'll see, I have a lot more to do than I suspected, and, well, I can't help but think I'm operating pretty slowly with all of this stuff. How was I able to get stuff done before I had a huge 4 and a half hour chunk of nothing? It boggles my mind.

I got lunch today with one of my Japanese teachers and a new worker, who both just so happen to work in the passport agency on the 1st floor of my building. We went to my favorite restaurant, a small place about 2 minutes away from the office, nestled in a small, suburban neighborhood. We spoke all in English, which was good practice for them (who both speak it fairly well). Sadly, my teacher is getting lost in the shuffle this year, so as of next week, she's out of the office.

Who else is going out of my office? The cool teacher, Maita-san, and the two young'uns (except for the alien kid, drat and double drat!), Noru-san and Kawamura-san. No good, no good at all. We're having an enkai tomorrow night to say goodbye. Ah, zannen.

There's an interesting thing (can't think of the word, not conspiracy, not event, so "thing" will have to suffice) going on with Japanese email addresses. For some reason, they are all in Roman characters (our beautiful english). Ok, makes sense actually when you think about it. The more interesting part is, they don't write their addresses with the English to make Japanese words, they'll instead find some english instead. Often to hilarious effect. Like, that woman over there, her email is something like "celestial.feelings@docomo..." or that one over there "the_zombies_attack_69@naninaninani" Oh Japan...

This past weekend was pretty good. Friday was a day off (Vernal equinox day), so I met up for lunch with some usual suspects at Lapia, and we got some Indian food, in order to prepare us for the rest of the Bollywood movie we watched at Natalie's house. Afterwards, we went to the St. Patty's day JET event at a bar in Misawa. It was very good, and I helped out the band my playing the keyboard a little bit, and throwing my mic in the rap circle. Whoa, what's that, oh yeah, you never heard "There's whiskey in the Jar" done all rap style. DJ Swanasauras and The Hack-Attack brought it for your listening pleasure.

So there was rap, there was green beer and cider, and then it was time to go home. After a kind drive from Jim, we went back to my place for a good ol' fashioned sleepover. Oh wait! Before that, we were waiting in the train station with Alisa and Ippei. Ippei brought out the recorder (woot) and rocked out, of all things, Mario songs. The underwater levels, the opening Mario anthem, yeah, he rocked it, and we danced to it on the platform. All right.

Anyways, back to my place for a sleepover. Well, we got to my house, "cushioned up" my living room (this involves throwing down all of my many futons and blankets on my floor, hence turning it into a giant cushion) and plopped down for Pan's Labyrinth.

I woke up the next morning to my guests trying to plan a surprise attack on me. After pitifully tried to quietly open the sliding door to my bedroom, they knew they were in for it. One squeak and I was up, pillows in hand. I pushed through the half open door and began to layeth the smack DOWN. To quote some famous British turned Spanish torturers (please tell me you get this), "No one expects the comfy pillow!"

And so began Saturday.

We went for lunch at the buffet place next to Gokuraku onsen. After filling ourselves to excess, we went to the onsen and did the stone spa and onsened. But, our day of gluttony did not end there. No, afterwards, we explored a little park, walked around the mall a bit, and then went to get dinner with Paul at Taka's.

By the end of dinner, the original group that met on Friday had been together for about 36 hours. Afterwards, we went to Yurinoki Bowl and played the Taiko game for awhile, honing our skills.

Ok, we finally finally stopped hanging out around 12:30 that night. I went home and called it quits. On Sunday, I did...ummm, not much I don't think. I barely cleaned, went to the gym, ate dinner, and just relaxed. It was good.

Not much else is happening this week. Like I mentioned before, tomorrow I have an enkai. And...that's about it for now. See you next time

Oh wait, I do have one more thing, there is a new chef at the JET restaurant of choice, the Golden Palki. So far, he hasn't received many good ratings. The butter chicken, meh, the Masala Chicken, too much onion, and the cherry-nan thing, whoa he went too far in changing it. We'll see how long he lasts.

RaNdOm JaPan:

Sometimes, I'll get this feeling that people are looking into my grocery cart in the supermarket, and they are.