Day 67 in Japan - I Think I'm Lost

On my bike ride to work, I normally see a few trucks parked along a road that is fairly close to the entrance to the school I had always assumed it was a truck stop, or that there was some construction going on nearby and this was the closest place to park a truck or something. But this morning I found out the much more sordid truth - the truck drivers all come and park there in the morning so they can watch the schoolgirls riding to school in their skirts! CREEPY! They have a regular morning meeting there, with the express purpose of perving on 15-18 year olds. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am a little bit perturbed by this.

Today's classes were great - I LOVE my science class (remind me of this when they all misbehave in a week or two). They are such clever and friendly fun kids. Most of my favourite students are in the science classes at Akashikita. Have I explained how that works? In every year, there is a dedicated "course" class - a class filled with students who are keen on science or maths. It's really competitive to get in, so the class really is filled with a bunch of good kids. And there was some gossip today - one of the first year kids busted a boy and girl from third year "studying" in the dark with the door locked in the 1-9 classroom on Monday. Ha! I think all of the teachers thought it was pretty funny, but had to put on their serious faces when the principal told us.

After school, we had ESS club and we finished watching Up. I think the kids understood about half of what went on, which isn't too bad, right? When the movie finished, I practised pronunciation with two of the girls whose speeches got through to the Hyogo Prefecture Speech Contest finals. I am really proud of them - particularly as one of them is the girl who was crying about not being able to get hers done. They are picking up pronunciation quicker than expected, but I guess we'll have to see how much sticks in the next lesson.

On the ride home, I took a small wrong turn and ended up finding a temple (picture), I think? The architecture looks about right, but I really hope that I didn't just ride my bike up to some poor persons house and start snapping away with my camera. This is exactly why I need to learn Kanji!

Temple? Or some dudes house? 

The last of summer is passing - it was twilight by the time I got to leave work today (no vampire jokes, please). The sunflowers are also dying away (photo), and today it only reached about 23 degrees. It's lovely to not be sweating 20 hours of the day, although I can already feel that the air is getting chilly. I think it's going to go from boiling hot to freezing cold without passing through "pleasant".

Summer is definitely on it's way out.

I just got back from an interesting run. I decided to use Runkeeper for the first time (an iPhone app that keeps tracks of how fast and how long you run, whilst playing you music), and thank god I did, because now I can see the weird route I took when I got lost. I decided to try a bit of exploratory jogging, which was going fine until I decided to explore around one of the dams around here. I ran up the hill along a path and then ran alongside the lake for a while. The path got smaller, and smaller, and then disappeared altogether. I thought I'd just run onwards, because I could see what I thought was an exit. Nope. Ended up falling down a hill, scratching my legs, and then wandering around behind a bunch of people's houses trying to find a way out of the dam reserve without climbing into someone's yard. Eventually, I climbed a fence to get back onto the road, and then resumed my run. I am glad that I have my GPS trail as a record to be able to post something here to show you.

I got lost just after the 1 km mark - where the map
line goes along the water, and the speed line goes up (note: speed
line is min/km - inverted to normal - so up is slower)

Food Highlight of the Day: Stir-fried marinated beef from the Max Value. Even though the Japanese seem to rate the quality of beef by how much fat there is on it, this stir-fry (itame) was really delicious, and complemented our yakisoba nicely.