One of the interesting holidays in Japan is School Foundation Day.  Each school celebrates the date upon which it was founded, and that means that each school has a holiday every year where pretty much everybody else has to go to work.

Today, Kuniko can enjoy that day off.  I’m getting ready to go to work, and she can relax and sleep in this morning.  I know I just enjoyed ten consecutive days off, but I still feel a little envious.  Lucky girl!

As with every visit from Kuniko’s parents, we received a bunch of homegrown vegetables.  The theme this time was lettuce.  We have about six onions, and two heads of cabbage, but there are four heads of lettuce to kill off.

Last night we killed an entire head by ourselves by cooking beef in a Korean style stir fry, with plenty of yakiniku sauce and spices, then wrapping several pieces of the meat in cold lettuce.  It was the same way that I ate yakiniku when I was visiting Korea, and it brought back good memories.  We also got a container of kimchee, so hopefully I’m not too garlicky today.

Tonight Kuniko has a party, so I’ll be on my own.  I guess it’s salad time…

We had a really nice Golden Week holiday, with lots of time to relax, exercise, eat and drink.  The weather also cooperated perfectly with only one day of bad weather during my ten days off.

Last weekend we had Kuniko’s folks over for dinner, and we caught up with them.  They looked healthy and happy, too.  They are really excited about going to the USA with us for the holidays.

Yesterday we had the whole day to ourselves, and so we worked on killing leftovers, we spent some time on the beach walking in the water, and generally getting ready mentally to get back to work.  I’m not sure how it is going to go today with my students – hopefully everybody else in ready to come back, too.

Last weekend was officially a three day weekend for most people, and we celebrated by having the Fukumis over for dinner.  I thought the dinner was a success, although the steaks were a little more rare than I had hoped they’d be.  The pasta and everything else was delicious and more than made up for the pink steaks.

Although I was back on my feet and moving fast the next day it took Kuniko a couple of days to get back to 100%.  Today she is headed back to work, and hopefully her condition will be better.  I guess it is hard to party like a college student once you hit your 30s and 40s.  At least, that’s just what I’ve heard.

Today I had big plans to do a solo hike until I checked the weather report. Rainy day today, and outside it is falling pretty steadily.  Change of plans – indoor day today, and I’ll work on some projects that I’ve been meaning to get to.

This morning after waking up to my alarm at 4:30 it was with great pleasure that I turned it off, and I’ll leave it off for the next ten mornings.

But before we get to all that time off and sleep, we’ve got one more day to work through.  I’ve got a busy schedule during the day, and an extra class early this morning, so it won’t be easy.  Right now all the students are short-timers, and everybody is looking ahead to the holiday, so I’m sure we’ll have a good time in class.

After work tonight we’ll go catch Iron Man 3 in the local theater, and then tomorrow we are hosting the Fukumis for dinner.  Hopefully I’ll be blogging now and then during the long holiday…  we’ll see.

For some reason Kuniko and I have been counting down the workdays left until the long holiday.  Every morning we drag ourselves out of bed at 4:30 am and say, “X more days…”, like some strange kind of overworked zombies.  Then I move downstairs to get some coffee going while Kuniko hits the shower.

Two days left.

Yesterday after work I shared a train ride with one of my new students.  He originally was so overwhelmed the first few classes, but I’m now seeing lots of improvement as he gets comfortable.  Yesterday he held a conversation with me in English voluntarily after work in front of a train full of people.  Those are monster steps in the right direction, and I was very happy to talk with him and see his confidence grow.

OK, off to the shower to complete the waking process and then head to work.  Two more days…

Yesterday after work we jetted off to Costco and made a surgical strike, picking up only the things we needed and skipping the areas that we knew had nothing of interest.  Right in the middle of our shopping spree we ran into Micchi and Takkun – old friends from a long time ago.  They live in the next town but we almost never see them.  Micchi was eight months pregnant and Takkun looked much older and more mature.  It just goes to show that life is still running along, even if you don’t happen to notice.  It was really good to talk to them, and I’m hoping everything goes well for them next month with their new baby.

Once we got home we ate some Costco ribs while unpacking all the goodies and putting them away.  After almost two years of watching me, Kuniko decided it was the night for her to actually try to play Skyrim on the PS3.  She was afraid of getting hooked, but I think she’ll be OK.  It lead to a few moments of panic during the initial game, too.  Skyrim is such a deep game that it’ll take a while to get used to it.  Still, to watch her play for the first time was kind of a big moment.  Another addict is born (possibly).

Heavy, heavy rain right now so we’re thinking about driving in to work (again).  Al Gore would not be happy with us.

Yesterday Kuniko was a little tired out from our all-you-can-eat weekend, so we drove to work early in the morning.  As it happened she was coming home at the same time I was, so I even caught a ride back.  It will happen much the same way today, as we’re planning a Costco run after work to stock up for the upcoming long holiday.

That also means that I’m on my own for burning calories.   I wonder if I can convince the company to buy me a treadmill for the office.  We can hold the classes while walking in place, thereby improving employee health as well as English pronunciation.  Every time they make a mistake I can turn the speed up one notch.

On second thought maybe that isn’t such a good idea.

OK, off to gather up the Costco list and get ready for work…

This weekend we had the opportunity to eat at two of our favorite restaurants.  On Friday night after work Kuniko and I met in Motomachi for a couple beers at Rokko Beer Diner (they were debuting a new Weizen beer) and then we walked over to Sannomiya to eat dinner at Oliva.  Oliva serves Spanish food, and it had been years since we had been there.  For some reason I thought we ought to go back and give it another try since we’ll be eating the real thing this summer.

The food was excellent as usual, and we really enjoyed the variety of tapas that they had to start off with.  The atmosphere is also very good there, even though it is a tiny restaurant.

Saturday Kuniko had to work most of the day, so I prepared steak fajitas for dinner.  I’m not sure but it might have been Kuniko’s first experience with fajitas.  She loved them, and we killed everything in one sitting.  That and a couple of margaritas made Saturday a fun night.

Then yesterday night we went to a concert put on by some of Kuniko’s students in Kobe.  The mandolin guitar club always does a yearly concert, and Kuniko wanted to see some of her students performing in the club.  We caught the last part of the concert only, and then headed into Akashi for dinner at Chiro.  Dinner there was excellent as usual, and the homemade pasta with pepper sauce and shrimp was the winner of the night for me.  The chef and the manager came out and gave us a warm welcome, so it was almost like VIP treatment.  Nice people there.

Now it is time to get back to work.  This week is my last week of work before Golden Week – I’ll get ten days off in a row starting next Saturday.  It’ll be hard to concentrate on my work with such a big holiday coming up.

Yesterday I taught my first class with the brand new employees at our company.  They have just entered the company at the beginning of this month, and they are undergoing various forms of training for the next six months.  They’ll get on the job training after that, so they’ve got a long road of learning ahead of them.

I had fun talking with the students, and they did very well on the activities in class.  One student is from Bangladesh, which seems to indicate a continuing theme of internationalization at the company, albeit at a very slow pace.

At one point in the lesson the students asked how long I’ve lived in Japan, and I said that now it is getting close to ten years.  Later in the lesson someone asked me if I spoke Japanese, and I gave my standard answer: “Just a little”.  The last thing I want is the students thinking that they could speak Japanese to me and get away with it, so I have to hide my abilities for now.

The student who asked me if I spoke Japanese listened to my response, and shook his head.  “You’ve been here ten years,” he said, “You should be able to speak very well.”  Let’s hope nobody figures it out.

Last night after work I met with Neil Meyer, a guy that has worked with Kawasaki for a long time both here in Kobe and elsewhere.  He is a technical translator, and it was interesting to hear about his job and what kind of challenges he has at work.  But mainly we discussed stuff like travel, living in Japan, and even the train industry.  We ate at an Indian restaurant hidden on a backstreet in Hyogo that I’ve never seen before, and the food was quite good – especially the sag dal.

After dinner we were walking back and saw Gary and Bill drinking at a nearby bar, so we stopped in to say hello.  We didn’t stick around to drink, but just talked a little before moving on.  The place we found them looked pretty interesting, too.  I guess I should explore Hyogo a little more!

Today at the end of my afternoon I’ll be teaching a lesson to the new employees.  It is an introductory lesson, with two follow-up lessons next month, and then I’ll teach all of them again beginning in October of this year in group lessons.  So it’ll be first impression time for everyone this afternoon.  I hope it goes well.

This week we’ve been taking it easy.  Kuniko is working a tough schedule with a lot of late nights, so she comes home, we eat dinner, and then soon after it is off to bed.  Tonight I’ll be breaking the routine a little bit, as somebody from my workplace invited me out to dinner after work ends.  The somebody in question is an American consultant that works as a technical translator and writer for the company, and it’ll be interesting to hear more about him and his background.  Apparently he’s been living in Japan for a long time, and he might have some good insights in long term life in this country.

This week Kuniko will be stuck at school late almost every night, so that means that we’ll have late dinners.    In preparation for that, she made up a huge pot of Japanese curry to have this week, so that gets me off the hook for dinner duty.  I’m going to have to think about what to do with the extra time each evening…

Sometimes something comes up that changes all your plans.  Saturday morning, it was an earthquake.

Friday night I had a nice dinner with an ex-student at a Hawaiian restaurant in Shin-Nagata.  We enjoyed a great meal, drank a few beers, and called it an early night.  By the time I got back home Kuniko was already thinking about hitting the sack so we both crashed out relatively early for a Friday night.

Kuniko was up at 4:30 am on Saturday according to her usual routine, and she kissed me goodbye and left around 5:30.  And then it started shaking.  For the first few seconds I fully expected it to end, so I stayed in bed.  After five seconds I thought I had better get out of bed and head to a doorway.  By the time I made it to the doorway, the earthquake was over.  Kuniko came back to check on me, and then headed back to work.

Turns out the earthquake epicenter was on Awaji island, just a little to the south of us.  All that morning there were aftershocks that shook the house and made me jump a little, but they were small and not nearly as strong as the quake in the morning.

My original plan was to go to hike in Kobe, but a walk to the station showed the trains still hadn’t restarted due to the quake, so it looked like it would be a hassle.  I changed the hike to a walk to the grocery store, a had a low key day at home instead.

On Sunday we both had the day off, so we ended up doing a three hour walk, which scratched my hiking itch.  It actually turned out to be a pretty nice weekend, despite the shaky (ouch) start.

Tonight after work I’m headed to Shin-Nagata to meet a former student for dinner and drinks.  This student was from when I was teaching at Sanyo Electric in the Seishin Minami area, and he got back in touch to find some way to improve his English, as he is starting to go to some international conferences.  I remember him as a highly motivated student, so it’ll be good to talk to him again.

The weather forecast for this weekend is looking good, so I may be able to do some hiking on Saturday.  I’ve got the whole day to myself, since Kuniko has to work and then she has a yakiniku party with Kori in the evening.  It may be time to grill a steak while she is out getting her red meat fix.