Day 10 in Japan - Working' 9 to 5 (or rather 8:15 to 4:15)

Today I got quite a bit done at work. I went to see my new classroom now that it is no longer being used for parent interviews, and realised that the board that I get to fill with my English stuff is a little bigger than expected. It’s a whole wall! Hmmm, will have to break out the poster paper and marker pens, I think. I wrote up some scripts for an English listening test that I get to be the voice on (these poor Japanese students who are used to an American accent will have a bit of a shock in their test, I think), and started to actually organise some of the materials that I want to prepare for lessons. I spent a while making up some name cards for the students to use for speaking exercise, which meant a lot of enjoyable Wikipedia time (did you know that Johnny Depp is 1.79 m tall?). After work, I took the bike and explored some new areas of Akashi and Okubo – I found a UNIQLO (the gaijin’s friend when clothes shopping, apparently), a CD/DVD rental place that any of my anime friends would be insanely jealous of (manga rentals, anyone?), and a lot of new restaurants that I can’t really tell apart. I saw a bit more of the area east of Okubo station along the road to Himeji, and said “konnichiwa” to a lot of surprised looking people. One guy was so surprised to see a gaijin riding a bike that he ran his own bike into the gutter from staring at me a little too long. He he he. I tried not to laugh directly at him (but failed). Cooked some spaghetti for dinner Japanese-style (which mean that you mix the spaghetti noodles all in with the tomato sauce in the pan before eating it with parmesan cheese – not that different, really), and have been playing with recording my listening test in Garage Band. I sound weird when I’m trying to enunciate slowly. Sam is going to help me now to record a conversation between Brad and Angelina – they are going to decide whether to go skiing in France, or to the beach in Australia.

Food highlight of the day: Today’s highlight is my first dislike – Sam bought what he thought were cheesesticks from the supermarket today, and we eagerly tore them open to find that they were not actually cheesesticks, as advertised. No, they were crabsticks with bits of orange cheese through the gross processed crabby protein stuff. Not my cup of tea, but Sam happily polished them off. Sams highlight was a pizza he picked up for lunch – quite expensive at 960 yen, but he got a spicy chicken pizza that he was very happy with.