The culture festival has cast a huge shadow over our day today – and everyone was thinking about preparations. I had three classes today, and everyone’s eyes were glazed over with the thought that soon they would be dancing their hearts out on stage in front of the whole school.

During my seminar in Kobe, I had missed the annual health check up given by our school. Mr. Hayashi tells me that all companies, both public and private, require a health check-up once a year. It is a government subsidized program, and just because I was at a seminar doesn’t mean that I was off the hook. After classes finished at lunchtime, Mr. Hayashi drove me to a clinic in Kakogawa.

The first thing they asked me to do was to go inside a room to change into slippers and a blue robe. I invoked foreigner privilege and skipped the robe, although I did wear the tiny slippers.

I performed the tasks they asked like I was in some kind of medical decathlon. Pee here, stand there, look here, etc, etc. My blood pressure was pretty low, so that’s great news. I weighed in at 82 kg (181 pounds), which is pretty good considering I had a stomach full of sushi. I’m 184.5 centimeters tall (about 6 feet). My vision was measured but it was with some strange system that I cannot relate here, I’m not sure even Mr. Hayashi understood it.

We got out of there early, so we decided to milk the system a little bit and grab some coffee. We sat around and sipped iced coffees until around four o’clock, and then went back to school.

The school was in utter chaos. The students were running the asylum, and some amazing things were happening. It’s a preview of tomorrow’s festival, so I’ll save it for tomorrow’s entry.

My ESS students were working on the display, and it was going pretty well. Unfortunately, one of the students, a part-time member of ESS, was running behind. She was taking frequent breaks to drink Calpis and chat with her friends. Finally, another teacher came to get her, and I think she might have been in a little trouble. She’ll be meeting me at school early tomorrow to wrap things up. Overall the ESS room looks pretty good – I’ll try to take some pictures tomorrow.

I didn’t get out of there until around 7 o’clock, and after a shopping trip in Akashi I stopped in at the yakitori on the way home. I chatted with the master and some of the regulars there, and I swear that I’m getting more comfortable with Japanese. My big challenge, believe it or not, is finding somewhere to speak Japanese. Everybody I bump into during the day wants to speak English. The yakitori is about the only place that I can speak only Japanese and practice new things that I’ve learned.

I’m back home now and getting ready for bed. Tomorrow after the culture festival I’m meeting Antoine in Suma, and then hopefully I’ll be able to see Kuniko on Saturday afternoon.

The countdown to the culture festival continues at school, with students working furiously to finish projects. I have a feeling that homework and study time is suffering because of this. I’ll be very interested to see the final production on Friday.

Today was payday, and what a relief it was to have a fully recharged bank account. I went to the bank in the afternoon. I noticed that I still had some money in there – I didn’t drain it all the way before payday hit. That’s a good sign – things weren’t as bad as I made them out to be, I guess.

After school I met up with Keiko-san, the nice lady that I keep bumping into around town. She had invited me to have another chat in English, so I met with her and four of her friends at the local restaurant near Takasago station. We chatted in English for almost three hours, and everyone enjoyed hearing about my experiences in Japan. Occasionally the conversation lapsed into Japanese, and I struggled to figure out what they were saying. Sometimes they’d ask me things in Japanese without realizing it. I tried not to respond – I wanted to give them the full experience of talking with a foreigner – I didn’t want them using my Japanese as a crutch.

We had dinner, and they even picked up my bill, so I got a free plate of yakisoba – nice! After dinner I went over to the station and made my way home. On the way home a lady pulled over on her bike and chatted with me in Japanese. She was pretty excited to be speaking with a foreigner, and I told her all about my situation here in Japan.

How often do you make somebody’s day? Here in Japan, almost every day I interact with someone, and it makes me happy to see them so excited about it. I’ve gotten a lot of satisfaction from teaching English, but the most satisfying thing is to smile at a total stranger and strike up a conversation. Is there a job where I can just walk around and be nice to people? Goodwill ambassador? I feel like I’ve done more good just walking around Japan for a year than I’ve done over 30 years in America.

Well, I’m off to bed – no more philosophy for this evening. Tomorrow after school I’m probably going to run to Akashi to do some shopping for the weekend.

Tuesdays are usually a busy day for me – I’ve got four classes, and most of the time I have to plan three of them on the fly, because I never seem to get around to it the rest of the week.

I had talked to Mr. Yamamoto about my plans, and he suggested doing a class outdoors. There is a park right next to our school, so he made arrangements for the students to meet up in front of the school, and then we walked over there. The students were really curious about what we might be doing, and they kept trying to ask me about it in English. I kept it a secret until we got there.

Once we arrived I announced that we were doing a scavenger hunt. I let the students form teams, and then gave them a list of things to look for. The interesting thing about the Japanese students was that once they formed the group, they didn’t break it up. They moved as a unit searching for each thing as a group, and then moved to the next thing. I pointed out the observation to Mr. Yamamoto, and he agreed that it was a very Japanese approach.

There are tons of pigeons that frequent the park, and one of the things I had on the list was a feather. I made a disclaimer early on that the students shouldn’t pluck the feathers from a pigeon, but find them laying on the ground. One group couldn’t find any feathers so they nominated one poor guy to chase the pigeons until a feather fell off. It was funny to see the guy chasing around the pigeons while the others searched desperately for feathers.

The students were encouraged to ask me what each item was if they didn’t understand, so I’d try to give out other words – and if they still couldn’t figure it out a pantomime. Then if they STILL didn’t know, I’d tell them the word in Japanese. Most of them did just fine.

I had three outdoor lessons in a row, and it was pretty tiring. Once I got back to the office, I relaxed a little and then went to watch some of the preparations for the culture festival. I observed the kendo club for a little while. They were doing some really cool drills where they tried to stick the bamboo sword right into their opponent’s protected throat. It looked painful – maybe it was.

After school I returned home, and just had some leftovers for dinner. Everyone needs a leftover night now and then. The doorbell rang, and it was a guy with a package from my folks!

Inside there was loads of great stuff – two DVDs (Miracle, and Return of the King), a salami, some spices for tacos, a slim jim, a strange box that made weird noises when you pressed a button, some comics, and even two bottles of Fat Tire Ale. Wow! Fat Tire in Japan! I don’t know what to do with them – I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in Japan who would appreciate them – so maybe I should drink them both. But then, drinking them alone isn’t much fun – maybe I should let someone else try something from so far away. Mmmmmm…. Fat Tire Ale.

As I was putting away the box I noticed the customs declaration form – my folks had declared the two bottles as “Marinade”. Excellent!

I called Antoine also, and we ended up swapping stories for almost two hours. We are planning to get together this Friday. Tomorrow is payday, and I’ll be back in the money. We’re going to meet up on the beach in Suma on Friday night – grab some chow at a local izakaya and then have a couple of beers on the beach. Soon it will be mosquito weather, so we’ve got to enjoy it while we can.

The second beautiful day in row… it was pretty difficult to go to school today. The weather has been hovering at about 77 degrees Fahrenheit, with very low humidity. I get a lot of pleasure out of telling people at school that this is common weather for California.

I had four classes today, and a Japanese class from Mr. Hayashi. My classes went fairly well, and the students were pretty enthusiastic. My last class was taught by the student teacher, and this time there were a bunch of English teachers in the back observing. She had me stand up in front of the class with her, but only asked me to do one or two pronunciations the whole time. I did my best to look eager and ready to do anything, but later one of the teachers watching said that I looked bored. I hope that didn’t reflect poorly on our student teacher.

After school we had a meeting where we all gave our comments to the teacher. It was a strange meeting in that it was held mostly in Japanese, but these odd little phrases in English would pop up. From what I could tell with my limited Japanese ability was that they felt there was a lot of room for improvement. My name came up quite a bit, so I think that they may have wanted her to use me more. It costs a lot of money to fly a foreigner all the way to Japan, put them up in an apartment, and pay them a salary every month. To just use me for a couple of sentences probably isn’t a good use of a resource.

Anyway, I gave my comments, in English, but it was strange. What do I know? I have no formal training, and if I was this poor lady I would be taking what I said with a grain of salt. Some punk from California wants to tell me how to teach?

After the meeting another student teacher invited me to observe her P.E. class. She had a dazed expression, like she had been standing too close to a bomb blast or something. Unfortunately, I had another class so I couldn’t attend.

On the way home I happened to be leaving at the same time as one of the ESS members, Harada-san. We walked to the train station together – normally she rides her bike but because of the rainy season, she’s using the train every day. We spoke lots of English the whole time – it was good practice for her.

Tomorrow is my “Anything” classes, and Mr. Yamamoto said that he’d like to go outside for our classes. I’m trying to come up with some activities right now for things to do while outside. It’ll be nice to take advantage of this great weather!

I got myself out of bed early on Sunday to go catch a train to Osaka. The train ride was not so crowded because of the time, so I was able to sit down and memorize some vocabulary. I arrived about ten minutes early in Osaka, and so I wandered around the station and enjoyed some people watching.

While I was waiting, a college-age guy came up and asked me where I was going, in English. I told him that I was waiting for someone, and he looked a little disappointed that he couldn’t give me directions anywhere. I chatted for a few minutes with him, and we both enjoyed speaking English for a while.

A few minutes later an older foreigner in a tie-dyed shirt and smiley face headrag approached me and introduced himself. His name was Butch, and he was promoting a comedy/magic show in English somewhere in Osaka. He gave me a flyer, and I said thanks. Just as he was starting to stay a little longer than was comfortable, I saw Kuniko come running out of the crowd towards me. I sent Butch on his way and gave her a big hug. Right behind her Miss Tamura and Yuri came over to say hello. Together we jumped on the next train and we were off.

Miss Tamura is a teacher at Kuniko’s old school in Kakogawa. She doesn’t speak much English, but she understands it well. We caught up with each other on the train, and then we went into the park.

The lines were unusually small – and we actually got to walk right up to some of the characters. We even got a chance to see Elmo, Kuniko’s favorite character.

We were able to do almost every ride in the park, and the longest we had to wait was 30 minutes. I was able to do some new rides, like Jaws, Terminator 3D, and Spiderman. Spiderman is a new ride, and was by far the best one. They’ve done 3D shows before, but this is a 3D rollercoaster. There were some things going on in there that were impossible for my brain to figure out. Usually you can see how they do things – this ride was done perfectly. If you ever get the chance, you won’t regret it.

For lunch we ate at Mel’s Diner, and then went on more rides. Kuniko was looking pretty tired, and I was getting tired myself. We decided that the last thing we would do is the Monster’s Rock and Roll Show. Normally it’s a pretty cheesy thing that I would skip, but Yuri actually had a friend of a friend that was performing. It was a lot more interesting when you (kind of) know someone on stage. He was this big black dude with dreadlocks playing a Dracula character. Every character had a song and dance number, and he did “La Vida Loca” which gives you a sense of Universal’s idea of “rock and roll”.

After that we went to do a little bit of omiyage shopping. It was then that Yuri realized that she had lost her wallet somewhere along the way. Yuri is a JET like me, and there are a couple of pretty important documents that we have to carry around – losing those is a major headache. The clerk that was ringing us up flipped a switch on her headset and they checked the central office. The wallet was there, so we picked it up on the way out. She had left it in Mel’s Diner – and everything was still inside, including about 9000 yen. What a relief!

We left the park feeling like we had done everything that we wanted to do, and we rode back to Umeda station together. Kuniko and I decided to have dinner together, and so we said goodbye to Yuri and Miss Tamura. They were really nice to allow me to join their “girl’s day out”.

Back at Kuniko’s place we decided to just order in a pizza and relax. We had some “jelly” made of honey for dessert, and then I got out of there fairly early. I wanted to make sure that Kuniko was able to get some rest before going back to school on Monday. She’s been working hard and under a lot of pressure. I think today was good for her mentally, but physically she’s going to be tired. Me, too, for that matter.

I jumped on the train, and got a seat right away. I fell asleep on the train, something I’ve never done before. Luckily I woke up about ten seconds before my stop and was able to stagger to the door and catch the Sanyo line train back home. What a day!

Kuniko had to leave early for work, so we packed up and I was back on a train early in the morning. The fastest JR train, the shinkaisoku, doesn’t run in my direction that early, so I took the regular kaisoku home, which added about twenty minutes to the trip.

By the time I got home, I was exhausted and took a quick nap. I woke up an hour later feeling refreshed, and since there was a break in the weather I put on my hiking boots and walked east out of Futami towards Takasago.

It was a fairly long walk – I was hoping to go 12 kilometers, but ended up turning around about four kilometers out, since there were some dark clouds on the horizon. As I walked back the last kilometer it started pouring – luckily I had brought my umbrella.

At home I spent some time on laundry, but only a little bit on studying. I watched a movie that I had downloaded Star Trek: First Contact, and I even fired up the grill to cook some beef and grill some onions.

Around 10 p.m. Kuniko called. She had her two houseguests there, and they were planning a trip to Universal Studios Japan tomorrow. They had asked Kuniko to invite me along, and after a bit of checking in my bank book, I said that I would go. It would be a good chance to get out and since I get paid on Wednesday I should be just fine.

Well, I’m off to bed – I’ve got to get up early to meet everyone at the station tomorrow.

Friday has come, and I was definitely eager to put the wrap on this week. I had only three classes, but one of them was new and so I had to organize that. The new class involves spilling the news that we have an interview test coming, and the students’ reaction was typical – what the heck? After I explained what was going on, they seemed to be OK with it.

We had a morning assembly, and during the assembly two kids keeled over during the presentation from exhaustion. These guys are working hard to prepare for the culture festival, and doing regular studies on top of that.

After school people were tuning into TV and radio to monitor the progress of an incoming typhoon. The ESS club elected to cancel our meeting and many of the other clubs did as well. They wanted to get home as soon as possible with the wind starting to blow pretty hard.

Kuniko had emailed me the other day and invited me to dinner in Osaka, since her weekend was going to be busy with work and also a trip to USJ with Yuri and another teacher. I changed clothes at school and Mr. Hayashi gave me a ride to the station. He seemed to sense something was up, but I told him that I was going to see Richard and Naoko off at the airport. Top secret!

As I waited for the JR train I noticed that everyone hadn’t formed the normal orderly lines that I’m used to get on board. I walked right up to the front, but as soon as the train showed up, a big sheet of water and wind got me. Duh. At least I got a seat on the train.

Osaka’s weather was somewhat more calm, with just sprinkles, and almost no wind. Kuniko cooked up some om-rice for dinner, and we had Hagen-Dasz bars for dessert. She talked me into staying the night since the weather was starting to stir up in Osaka. Outside the rain was pounding the buildings, and I wasn’t too thrilled to go back out in it.

Instead we watched Japanese TV for a little while, and I got to see part of the Doraemon show – the show based on the comics that I read to study Japanese. It was interesting to hear their voices – they were nothing like I imagined!

Lately things have been smelling like a campfire in our teacher’s room. This is pretty normal, actually, but the weather has been such that I’ve noticed it more. Why does it smell like a campfire? Because they are burning garbage on the next street.

It is very common here for people to burn their trash. Usually they collect it into a big pile, and then burn it. I am supposed to sort my own garbage into burnable and non-burnable piles. Even a drive through the countryside finds smoldering piles of trash – the country is so wet that the threat of the fire spreading is minimal. Do you have a lot of crap to get rid of? Burn it, dude.

Anyway, it has been particularly aromatic lately, but if you try to forget that it’s garbage it’s actually quite pleasant.

Mr. Hayashi came bustling into the teacher’s room and asked me for my website address. I gave him the old address, even though I wasn’t sure what he wanted it for. I guess the people in the office wanted to check it out. They were disappointed that there were no pictures, but impressed nonetheless. I’m really glad that I was able to switch locations – my website is the topic of conversation a couple of times a month, even though I haven’t really updated the other one.

I had another easy day today, but tomorrow is back to work with a couple of tough classes. After school the ESS club got together to work on our project. I really didn’t do much but hang out and proof-read a few paragraphs for them. Harada-san and I practiced kanji together, and I helped her with some English. She’s really good at helping with the kanji – she’s got a good sense of humor about it.

The hallways these days are filled with people dancing. The upcoming cultural festival must be a complete dance marathon – I think every single class and most clubs are dancing. Everyone wants a room to practice in, too. Today they were spilling out into the hallways, and I had to duck around twirling people to get from place to place.

I got out of school around 5:15, and as I was walking down the street towards the station, I heard somebody call my name. I turned around expecting a student, but it was Keiko-san, the nice lady who invited me to chat in English with her friends a while back. She was with someone else who she introduced as Ikuko, a lady that lives across the street from the school. She was actually pretty good at English, and teaches English to junior high school kids. She is teaching Japanese to another ALT from England, who apparently lives in Takasago – I’ve never seen him, though.

Anyway, we chatted for a little while. I knew where this was going to go – Keiko was no doubt trying to either get me to practice English with Ikuko or go out with her, maybe both. Keiko asked me if I was free next week to chat a little bit in English, and I said that I was free in the beginning of the week. Keiko said she’d call me and work out the details. Keiko told me how nice Ikuko was – isn’t she nice looking? Yikes.

I said goodbye, and headed to the station – now I’m back home and cooking up some tonkatsu and rice for dinner. This weekend a typhoon is supposed to hit, but not this area. It’ll just be nice and wet during the weekend.

Today was a pretty easy day as far as classes go. I had only three classes, so I was able to hit the books pretty hard. The history teacher made frequent visits to chat about nothing in particular, so that drove me up to my classroom where I could study in peace.

For lunch I ate in the cafeteria, and they had a new dish – wakame rice. It’s just regular rice but it’s mixed with salted seaweed. It was pretty good, but between the soup that they gave me and that, I had a little too much salt running through me.

After school the teachers had a staff meeting, but I was lucky enough not to be invited. I studied at my desk, and only Ms. Obara, the part time teacher, was there with me. We had the door locked so nobody could come in and steal stuff.

Back home I cooked up breakfast for dinner, bacon and eggs – yum. I decided to take the evening off from studying, and watched Top Secret. Hilarious – I had missed some of the sight gags the last few times I had seen it. Great movie.

It’s getting closer to the weekend, although with no money it won’t be that exciting. Kuniko has a lot of fun stuff lined up – she has the next few days off from school and she’s going to USJ with Yuri and another teacher from her old school in Kakogawa.

I’m off to bed – maybe I’ll just review my kanji for a few minutes before I crash out.

Way back when I first started teaching at my high school I had a problem student in one of my classes. He put almost no effort into the class, and worse, he distracted other students from my lesson. I talked with him in an effort to make him do his work, and a couple of times I was ready to really get pissed off at this guy.

This year he’s my best friend. Now that he’s been promoted to second year, I teach him every week – twice as much as last year. I don’t know where it started, but I talked with him in the hallway in Japanese once, and ever since he’s been really interested in me. He asks me about my diet, he helps me study Japanese, and he’s attentive in class.

I feel like somehow I’ve gotten through to him. Most of the time he only speaks Japanese, but now he works without distracting other students and he’ll even say something to other students if they start acting up in my class.

I had four classes today – three of which were my “Anything” classes. I tried some new activities out today. One was an activity where I read a story out loud in English, and the students drew what I described on a piece of paper. It actually worked out better than I expected. Once I wrote out the English on the blackboard the students were all comparing pictures and laughing at the differences and the artwork. I got a lot of satisfaction out of that – I’m glad they enjoyed it.

Another new activity I did was invite everyone to the front of the class. I dumped out a big bag of junk on the desk, and told everyone about them. I had a stick of deodorant in the bag, which caused a lot of excitement. I explained what it was and pantomimed putting some on under my arms. On the students opened it up and you should have seen the expression on his face when he smelled it – like someone had just farted. No wonder deodorant isn’t popular here.

I dropped in on a P.E. class playing ping pong in the gym. Their teacher is a new one this year, Mr. Arai. He’s a P.E. teacher and he looks the part. He talks in a booming voice, wears track suits all the time, and is the alpha male of the first year teachers. I chatted with him and found out that he knows quite a bit of English.

The short version of his story is that he went to Croatia for a year to study handball ten years ago. Handball is a completely different sport here in Japan – it looks like a lot more fun than the health club version back home. Anyway, we chatted for a long time and he seemed really nice. My first impression of him was a giant Y-chromosome in gym pants, but as is usually the case, there’s a lot more to the guy than what you see.

The weather in Kansai made a pleasant change and now it’s nice and cool, with almost no humidity. Antoine and I were joking about it on the phone tonight – all these changes in weather are so much more dramatic than what we’re used to in SoCal.

Mr. Hayashi had the urge to leave early today, and I had to do some shopping for ESS, so we decided to split. We are each other’s perfect alibi. If we leave together someone always thinks that there is some kind of menial task that I need help with, and we’re out of there. Mr. Hayashi lives for this kind of stuff.

Tonight I cooked some pork with a Thai chili marinade that came out pretty good – maybe a bit too much peanut butter, so I’ll know for next time. I did about forty minutes of studying, but I almost fell asleep in my chair, so I’m off to bed. It’ll be nice to sleep tonight with the cool weather.

I came back to work today to find my desk covered in piles of homework assignments. Even though I was gone for three days last week, my students were still turning in their assignments diligently.

The history teacher confirmed for me that somebody was killed on the train tracks in Okubo last night. He said that it was a woman in her forties, and she was standing on the tracks. I’m not sure if he got his numbers correct, but he said that every year 30,000 people commit suicide in Japan. He said car accidents only kill about 10,000 people. Wow – scary.

I had four classes today, and between those and marking papers I was plenty busy. The day flew by. I was pretty tired – I started out pretty energetic in the morning, but by my last class in the afternoon I was ready to conk out. The last class was taught by the student teacher, and Mr. Hayashi and I were in the back of the class struggling to remain conscious. She did pretty well with the students, and even had a drawing of an Eskimo to show the students. You could tell that she put a lot of effort into the lesson.

After school I was working with the ESS students – we are getting ready for our culture festival, and the project is underway. I am trying to stay out of their way as much as possible – it’s their club after all. They were very eager to get to work, and I printed up a bunch of photos for them to use, as well as a paragraph about life in the United States. They are going to write a contrasting paragraph about life in Japan, and then translate everything to Japanese for other students to read later on.

I left them hard at work around 5:15, and got home dead on my feet. The heat and humidity are kicking in, and it’s tough walking around in it. I opened up the house and it’s only now just cooling down.

Dinner tonight was a beef bowl with rice and green onions. Not a rice bowl – I think there was more beef than rice, actually. I marinated the beef in a strange marinade that I randomly (and I mean randomly) pulled off the shelf of the local grocery store. The marinade worked pretty well, but I added a little Tabasco and some sesame seeds, and then stir-fried the whole thing up with the green onions. It was lots of food – I’m stuffed.

After dinner I worked on some plans for tomorrow’s classes. I hope that tomorrow I have more free time. I haven’t had much time to study lately.

We all slept in a bit in the morning, and then I got up and cooked up bacon, eggs, and toast for everyone’s breakfast. The bacon was great – Farmer John’s from Costco.

Richard and Naoko packed up all their gear and took off for Osaka. They wanted to look around a bit more before we all met up at the big “wedding” party in honor of Richard and Naoko that night. I came home to do a little quick clean up, and then I called Kuniko. She was home, so we decided to meet up there and spend part of the afternoon together before we left for the party.

On the train ride to Osaka I was in the first car, and I could watch the driver while we were traveling. I could see all the controls, too, and I was surprised to see that the top speed for the train was around 80 miles per hour. Most of it was automatic, and the train “engineer” constantly checked the schedule to make sure they were on time.

I spent the afternoon in Shin-Osaka with Kuniko. We watched part of The Majestic, with Jim Carrey. It was so-so… a little sappy for me.

Just after five o’clock we got our act together and hit the road to try to find the party. It took two train connections, but then we found the place, just as it was starting to rain. Inside the room was filled with people that we didn’t know.

Naoko’s strategy was for them to hide somewhere, and once everyone had arrived, make a grand entrance. That was cool – very dramatic, but in the meantime we just kind of introduced ourselves to random people.

Somebody started playing some music – they had a three piece band of girls playing the ukelele, the keyboards, and some pots and pans. The song was great – lots of Japanese, and then the chorus was in English – “Hello Men!”

After a couple choruses of “Hello Men!”, Naoko and Richard suddenly appeared at the door. Everyone cheered and welcomed them in, and then people starting chowing down on the food. The food was quite good, centered around a bowl of oden – kind of a cold weather stew full of boiled vegetables and cooked meats. Richard and Naoko made the rounds meeting friends, and Kuniko and I chatted with the people around us.

Finally around 8:30, we had to excuse ourselves to leave. Kuniko has to be up early on Monday and it was a school night for me, too. We walked back to the subway station, and took the train from there to Shin-Osaka. We said our goodbyes there, and I caught the next super rapid train towards Futami.

At Kobe station, when the train stopped, they made an announcement over the loudspeaker. I didn’t quite catch it, but 90% of the people jumped up and ran out of the train to get on another one on the next track. What the heck? I decided to stick with my original train – this has never happened to me before.

After five minutes it became apparent that the train wasn’t going anywhere, so I transferred to another train, and then leapfrogged my way west, taking a grand total of four different trains to get to my station.

At Okubo station, we pulled up in our train and saw that they had the super rapid track closed off. There was a mixture of police and construction workers milling about, and some men were picking up things from the track and putting them in what appeared to be a body bag. Ugh. Some people were staring, trying to see as much as possible, some were looking away, and it was a real bummer to see. It explained all the delays up and down the line – since I can’t read the newspaper I probably will have to ask my teachers what happened tomorrow.

Getting off in Tsuchiyama, I was near Carrefour, so I dropped in to do a little shopping for groceries. I was super thirsty, so I bought lots of juice to drink, and on impulse, a tiny umbrella that I can fit in my man-purse.

As soon as I walked outside, it started raining – perfect. I opened up my little umbrella, and it kept me dry for the short walk home.

Now I’m getting ready to hit the sack. Tomorrow I’m back to work, and it looks like the rainy season is in full swing.

Saturday morning I was up early ready to conquer the world, or at least a small mountain. Unfortunately, Richard was crashed out asleep. I hit the shower, did a little studying, and just kind of hung out until Naoko called around ten o’clock. She asked to speak to Richard, so her called served as a wake up call.

I cooked up some om-rice for breakfast, but I don’t think Richard was too into his – he’s overdosing on rice nowadays. We took off for Kobe to do some hiking and look around a bit more.

In Kobe we walked to Nunobiki waterfall, and then had a couple of beers in the little bar overlooking the falls. The weather was perfect… it was a beautiful day.

After spending some time walking around on the mountain, we decided to go back into town and look around a bit. Richard found lots of old books in a bookstore in Motomachi, and we had lunch at a nice little tonkatsu place.

At around five o’clock we headed back to Akashi, and we had time to drop into Donkey and shoot some darts before meeting Naoko. When we got to the station she was already there. It was great to see her. She had cut her hair just like Richard had cut his. We went to get some dinner at an okonomiyaki place that I know, and poor Richard had to pick through his while Naoko and I chowed down.

After dinner we went back to my place and I gave Naoko the grand tour. She got things organized and Richard managed to talk her into running down to the yakitori for a quick beer. We got there just as some of the usual suspects arrived, so we all sat down and Richard did his best with Japanese. He ordered up some food and beer, but I was trying to save money and I ordered water. Naoko did the same.

“One more beer” turned into four drinks, and pretty soon the master was pulling out the Okinawa version of tequila. We had a great time, and it was fun to talk to everyone. The language was Japanese – not much English was spoken that night at the yakitori.

Finally we got going and headed home. We all retired fairly early, and got plenty of rest for the next day.

The final day Antoine and Nel skipped out entirely, to go back and enjoy a day off from school. I was planning to meet Richard, my friend from San Diego, at Sannomiya station at 12:30, so I was going to stick around anyway. The last two seminars were decent – one was from a guy that was one of the original JET’s, and his stories were very interesting. So much different from our experiences.

Once the conference wrapped up I went to pick up my luggage. I was the first person to walk into the huge conference room, and they were ready for a big crowd. Imagine forty people standing in front of a thousand suitcases. Everyone bowed and said “Irrashaimase” when I walked in. I wish my camera was in my hand when it happened. It was so cool.

I went to Sannomiya and bumped into Richard right away. It was good to see him – he had cut his long hair off, and he looked pretty good. We stashed our gear, and then went out for some noodles to catch up.

We walked around Kobe exploring a little of Motomachi, and then we took the train back to Higashi Futami. I showed him around the apartment, and we just relaxed and rested up. Richard’s wife Naoko is organizing his trip, so he’s been busy seeing all kinds of famous sites in Japan.

We went up to Carrefour to do a little shopping and then went to the yakitori for dinner. It was a good opportunity for Richard to use his Japanese, and he did great! The master was a good sport and we had plenty of meat-on-a-stick.

Richard and I came back around 11, and I was so exhausted that I went in to bed and crashed right out. What a day – but it’s nice to put the conference behind me and get back into my normal routine.

The next day was four seminars, and although I attended them all, Antoine and Nel skipped the afternoon ones to go check out the spooky theme park. I enjoyed almost all of the seminars, but was very tired when we met up later to go eat somewhere. We had lots of ideas, including one crazy idea to BBQ at my place, but we ended up going to Suma beach and watching the sunset, and then going to an izakaya that Nel often visits. That worked out great because they took credit cards – I could use some of the money that I had just sent home instead of burning cash. The place was great – the waitress was patient with our terrible Japanese, and there wasn’t a foreigner to be found.

On the way back I saw one of the girls from my yakitori on another train and we waved at each other. I think the guy she was with wasn’t too happy to see us waving madly at each other like giddy schoolkids. I guess I’ll let her handle that one.

Back in Sannomiya it was still early, so we went to Starbucks and just watched all the foreigners come and go, mixed in with the Japanese. Starbucks was next to a building full of hostess bars, so we’d see lots of salarymen go inside and come out later with a hostess to say goodbye. We talked about hostess bars for a while – it’s a concept that is so Japanese that we couldn’t really fathom it. Finally we went back a little early to the hotel and thankfully didn’t have any drunk guys on our train.