Some pictures

I apologize for not updating more frequently. It's a shame too since I've done and seen some pretty awsome things and people (Neko Case!!) Instead here are some pictures:

This is me and K. enjoying ourselves at the JET Mid-year Conference (the second one!) in Gifu city a couple weeks ago.

This is me on the chairlift at Honoki Ski Jo. Back when we had snow. This year has been the warmest winter on record, or so my JTE claims. Normally at this point in February there's still a meter of snow on the ground. Today it poured rain all day, which it normally doesnt' do until the end of March. I wish my apartment would clue-in and start getting warmer.

The teacher's room at my Jr. High School, minus any teachers or students. My desk is in there somewhere. You can just barely make out the Little House on the Prarie stovepipe up at the front. I'm taking the picture from the kitchen area, which despite the stove and fridge, is really the exclusive coffee and cigarettes area.

This was today's Kyushouku, or School Lunch. It was so gross I had to take a picture. In the upper left-hand corner is a bowl of cold, fried tofu, konyaku (tastes like absolutely nothing feels like hard jello, is purple in colour), and a super hard-boiled egg that was so dry it sucked all the moisture from my mouth. Everything is covered in a brown sauce that tasted like... brown. Next to that is a bowl of white rice, the only thing that saved the meal for me and got me through the rest of the day still breathing. Below the rice is a large serving of cabbage salad covered in purple flakes that tasted... bad. I don't know quite how to describe it. Normally I like cabbage salad, but the purple flakes ruined it completely. Bleh. And finally, the plate of purple squid. If it had come battered and deep-fried, all would have been well - although that's a lot of calamari! - but this one came cold, slimy, and with a long spiney thing inside that everyone had to pull-out.

On days like this I would kill for one of thepeanut-butter and lettuce sandwiches that my brother and I used to get back in elementary school. I hated them at the time (who puts lettuce in a peanut-butter sandwich! Dad!), but anything would be better than today's meal of purple.

A Week in Takayama

On Saturday and Sunday I:

• fell on my ass repeatedly. I went snowboarding both days and tried to learn how to carve. It didn't work out so well for me or my bottom half.

On Monday I:

• ate nothing but apple pie for lunch. On Monday, school lunch consisted of cream soup, udon noodles to eat in the cream soup, apple pie, and whole fish tossed with almonds. Because of my lactose issues I couldn't eat the soup, which meant I couldn't eat the noodles, which left the fish and the pie. You try eating a plateful of silver fish - eyes, tails and fins included - tossed with almond flakes! Hence the meal of pie. Oishii.

On Tuesday I:

• received instructions about what to teach next week at one of my Elementary schools. For the 5th years it said: " Teach dairy activities with gestures". Dairy activities. I imagined myself trying to teach 10 year olds how to milk a cow and separate curds and whey. How was I going to do that in English? And it's not like I have a clue. But then one of my JTE's suggested that perhaps they meant 'daily' activites, like go to bed and brush your teeth. Right.

On Wednesday I:

• helped teach a class where we played a song and had the students arrange the lyrics in the correct order. At the end of the class I had written the following on the blackboard : Doo-wop, sha-la-la-la, bulimia, Karen Carpenter. Not that it was my choice in the first place, but perhaps 'Yesterday Once More' isn't the best song to do in an activity like this.

On Thursday I:

• helped teach a class that was suspiciously like a black mass. At one point the teacher had me reading a story out of the textbook, backwards while holding the book upside down. Doing that for too long can mess with your head.

And today I:

• woke-up to find I had no hot water in my apartment. I ended up washing my hair in ice-cold water, boiling water on the stove to wash my face, and all in an apartment with a temperature that was hovering around 7 degrees C.

Viva Japan!