Day 83 in Japan - Solo Friday night

Whenever I am riding my bike anywhere, and I am running late or need to be somewhere in a hurry, doors open, cars stop, people pull out from driveways or side roads without looking, pedestrians change course without warning and the whole thing becomes an excercise in testing my brakes. When there is no hurry, I seem to be fine. I don't think this is a Japanese thing, by any means, but it describes my ride to work this morning.

All that is left of last weekend's matsuri at the local shrine.

Today I had a solo class with my favourite kids - Hangman was the most fun, and they actually got that the "make your own conversation" activity was supposed to be fun, and played along to make silly stories (one guy bought a teddy bear for Brad Pitt, and didn't want to spend less than 1000 dollars for it, because he wanted a smart teddy bear. Maybe you had to be there, but that is comedy GOLD in a Japanese classroom.)

Afternoon spent looking up ailments for my next lesson at Akashikita. I realised I only have 2 more lessons with the kids until Christmas, so no Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas lessons allowed. I figured out a teaching schedule, finalised their exams, and started on my huge pile of journals to mark. HA! I sound like a teacher, right?

After school I had more speech practise. It occurred to me that I've probably been writing "I had speech practise" a lot without explaining what that means. I am kind of the boss of my school's ESS (English Speaking Society) club. The point of the club seems to be 1) to practise speaking English, 2) to hang out with the other members of the club and gossip in Japanese or 3) to sit in the classroom and look longingly at the club president who you are obviously in love with (well, that seems to be the point for the two boys, who are absolutely wonderful young men, but not very aware of their chances with the lady in question). One of the club activities is to enter into speech contests, where the students have to choose a topic, write a 5 minutes speech in English, memorise it and perform it to a group of peers and judges. The Akashi City speech contest is this weekend, and two girls from my club have been chosen to enter the competition. And they are brilliant! I know I may be a little biased, but they have written beautiful speeches (one about her experiences dancing Hula with the former ALT at the school, and the other about her grandfather's inspirational lessons in organising a Bonodori festival), have worked really hard to memorise them, and are now starting to put some real emotion into the speeches. I am really awed at what they have achieved in a few weeks, and I have been happy to work a lot of extra hours lately to listen to them practising, and try to help them with as much pronunciation as their patience will allow.

After work, I was too tired to go out to the Naded Fighting Festival in Himeji that Sam and a bunch of the other JETs were attending, so I had a night all to myself! I stayed home, cooked, ate, watch Seth MacFarlane cartoons, drank beer and learned to interpret basic Japanese crotchet patterns. Livin' La Vida Loca, right? I wanted to save energy for Aaron and Corey tomorrow, but once he got home and I  heard Sam's awesome stories about the Nada fighting festival, I think I should have gone. I'm going to have him write a guest post about it when I can, so that the only recorded activity for tonight isn't me starting to make a scarf.

Food Highlight of the Day: I found some salsa, so I made lazy nachos (i.e. put salsa on corn chips, put cheese on top and applied heat until cheese melted). Fitting for today.