Random

(Around early September)

Pancakes I ate....by myself. They were delicious though!

A typical Japanese food - stir fry...and rice.

Kendo destroying my foot....

some pics of the kids preparing for the Kendo test

After the test, going home.

So it’s been a long last couple of days. We were supposed to have a sort of game night and pancakes for dinner type of thing this weekend, but the typhoon (it’s typhoon season over here…which, by the way, goes for like 4 months), made it so instead of having friends come over, I sat in my house by myself and gorged on some pancakes, which, apart from making me ridiculously sad because I was eating a bunch of pancakes by myself on a Saturday night, were surprisingly good. Monday, was, well, Monday. The only redeeming quality is that I have kendo on Mondays and Thursdays (more on that later). I was feeling in a less than happy mood – I felt like my Japanese sucks, I still hadn’t made any friends, and some of the people at work were getting to me (added to the fact that I literally did NOTHING all day, except give a bad Japanese speech to the entire city hall...definitely a good way to make a first impression). Tuesday, however, turned my week around.  I finally got to go to a school and see some kids! Of course, they decided to tell me literally the night before that I was to give a speech in Japanese to the entire school…awesome. It turned out ok though, I started out speaking English and then did a Japanese version, I immediately became (for once in my life) the coolest kid in school. J I also got to help out with preparation for a speech contest (perk of my job), the kids were really impressive, one of them was writing her own speech in English, more on her later, but I have to say she is the ballerest  kid I have met yet.

                Today also was looking up, while I didn’t do anything at work (again), I did watch some cool YouTube videos on ants (more on those in another post…), and one of my coworkers invited me out to play some basketball (I can only assume that, being American, they thought I was good at basketball…apparently they have never heard of “White men can’t Jump”…oh well). Luckily (and to my surprise), I was definitely not the worst there and it was good to hang out with some (relatively) young people. After that was more Kendo – we did Kata practice (ritualized forms with a wooden sword) and keiko (where we put on protective gear and hit each other with bamboo sticks). I found out (just tonight) that I’ll be taking my Shodan test (black belt) this Saturday. I might note that I’ve been doing Kendo for 8 months, not even close to the 2 years it takes a normal person to get to the Shodan level. I’m more than a little nervous, but I’ll do my best (頑張ります) and hopefully it will be a good learning experience if nothing else.