Today at school I had loads of classes. There were three in a row with the same teacher, but luckily one of the classes was full of speeches by the students. The students in that class were eager to speak English in front of everyone, and people were competing to see who would go next. It was great to see everyone enthusiastic about speaking English.
For lunch I just had a couple of rice balls from the local convenience mart – I was still full from the big taco party the night before. After school I played several rounds of ping pong with the team. It’s a great way to kill time and warm up on these cold days.
On Sunday afternoon I broke down and ordered a Nintendo Wii over the internet. A Nintendo Wii is a video game machine, but the controllers are wireless and motion sensitive. If you are playing tennis, you just swing the remote like you would swing a racket. It’s really intuitive, and it has gotten a lot of good press since it’s launch.
Anyway, they are pretty hard to find nowadays, and people are selling them on auction sites on the net demanding huge price tags. I ended up buying it from the Amazon Japan marketplace, and paying about a 10,000 yen markup. That’s pretty hefty, but it’s nice to have it and I think it’s worth the extra money not to have to hunt around for it all the time. We bought our Nintendo DS like that seven months ago, and it’s still sold out here in Japan.
So today, surprisingly the Wii arrived, and I showed a lot of patience not to tear it out of the box and hook it up right away. Instead we did a little bit of shopping, and when we came back I hooked it up. We played a few games with it and it is really fun. I found myself really getting into the sports, especially the boxing game. At the end I was breathing hard with a light sheen of sweat on my forehead. Maybe this will be a good thing. I predict sore muscles for tomorrow.
