This entire week has been great, actually. I've been going to school daily, even though I don't really have much work to do. My supervisor said I could go to school flexibly, but I want to make a good impression, so I try to stick as closely to the 9 to 4 schedule that everyone else seems to follow as possible. Because of this, I've been studying a lot of Japanese (thanks to the Japanese for JETs book), and chatting a lot with my coworkers, but not doing a lot of actual work.
Other than work, I have been up to quite a lot, actually!
Firstly, the other ALT that I'd met before invited me out, so I got the chance to go play badminton with her, and a number of Japanese people. Old and young alike, they had one thing in common: they were all WAY better at badminton than me. These people were so intense. We drew straws to see who played who, and I ended up on teams with two Japanese people I'd never met before. Language barrier aside, I had a lot of fun. I found it hilarious that they would whip around their rackets and slam that birdie like it was nobody's business, then in between games, every single one of them would go out for a smoke. Only in Japan. I won one game and lost one game, but the win was no fault of mine. (The loss, however, probably was). Also that night, I met the other ALT in town, and we made plans to go out the next day.
The next day was a Wednesday! I went to school, then called up Jessica after work and we went to a tiny music store to see about buying me a guitar. The place was adorable, and the people were so nice, not caring one bit if we sat there for an hour, trying every guitar. Eventually, I settled on this one:
I love it so much, it's beautiful. I had fun trying to bike home with it, as the case had no backpack straps!
Also, I saw the ostrich driving a carriage statue in one of our parks. I obviously needed to have my picture taken with it.
Then, Thursday, I had a breakthrough with a colleague, when he invited me to his place to set off fireworks, have dinner, and drink beer. Was I interested? Definitely. We made a date for next week, so I'll let you know when it happens. After work, I went to dinner at Jessica's, and we ate some lovely Japanese food that she cooked all on her own (mostly). Then we jammed with our guitars and ukes until the wee hours of the morn (aka 9 pm).
And that brings us to today :) I went to school fully expecting to stay until 3, but my colleague told me that I could go home early, since nobody else was even at the school. Jessica had messaged me and asked if I wanted to go clothing shopping. I obviously did, so I hauled my bike out to MaxValu at around one to go meet her. We spent the day shopping, then returning home with our purchases (by the way, shopping is so great here, even at discount stores in tiny towns!). We then biked back out to Homac to buy me a bike lock, and then we went to Kuriyama Park. It looks something like this:
The next picture is of the little zoo that they have there. When we got there it was closed, but I plan on going back another time!
We ate ice cream together at a tiny little shop (pictured below), and then we went for a little bit of a walk, stopping to play with all the lovely park things.
They had things like a giant train that you can get into and ride! It was so cool! Also, they had this lovely elephant/tree slide. I'm not entirely sure what it was, but it sure was fun!
After this, we went to dinner at a cute little Japanese restaurant right next to the park. This one, to be exact.
The inside was much cuter than the outside. It was lovely though. Everything was in Japanese, but luckily for us, Jessica actually speaks the language! She ordered me a tempura meal without shrimp, cuz that's all they said it had. Little did I know that it was going to look like this when i got it:
For those of you who can't tell, half the tempura is fish. There is raw squid on one of the plates. The miso has fish cake in it. And there is also tuna with daikon (we think) on another plate. So much for understanding vegetarianism. Somehow, Jessica managed to order something for herself that was actually vegetarian, and that was the following:
So she ate my fish, I ate some of her noodles and it all worked out. The bike ride home was beautiful, though. And I think I'll end this post with some photos of the ride home.
That's all for now!
xoxo
Jeri
We're bomb, yo. :)
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