The new Harry Potter book seems quite good. I'm a little worried that she'll just write some horrible book for one of the last ones due to pressure to release it by a certain date. Hopefully that won't happen.

This weekend Victoria cut my hair. She did it quite fast too. I think she's destined to become a barber. Now my hair is much shorter (it was down to my nose before), and much cooler in the weather we're having. It hasn't been too hot, but it's been quite humid many times. Today's weather seems like it will be fairly nice and cool.

Yesterday Victoria and I went to a barbeque at Erin's house in Oyama. We all brought a lot of food, so we had way more than we could actually eat. We ate around 4 and I didn't eat anything later on because I was so full. It was quite a nice feeling.

The whole weekend wasn't very exciting, but it was nice. Since last week we had the Charity Show, it was nice to do something relaxing instead of running around everywhere.

I've just received an interesting fax from the Board of Education. I'll retype it for you here:

As you know (note: I didn't know), the delegation of Toyama City will be sent to Durham in September. The members of the delegation are 18 students from every junior high school in Toyama City, and 5 teachers including Togashi Kyoto Sensei of your school, and English teacher Ms. Bando of Yamamuro Junior High School.

And the students have to learn English conversation and study about the way of staying home in Durham before visiting there. We know you are from North Carolina where Durham is in. So Toyama Board of Education would like to ask you to come and have workshop for the students and the teachers of English conversation and something like that.

So please let me know that the next days are convenient for you to come or not. If it's OK to come, please circle the day. If not, make a cross on it. And please get me back this sheet as soon as possible after marking here.

End of fax. There are then 5 dates for me to circle. I am gone for three of them, since they are in July. However I can do the two in August, so I think I will. It will be quite funny. I wonder what they want me to teach them exactly... My kyoto sensei's English is not good at all. Kyoto sensei is like a vice-principal. In fact, the other kyoto sensei's English is way better. I don't know how he's supposed to learn much English in 5 seminars. Anyone have any thoughts about what I should teach them about Durham? It's quite an interesting group if it's students and teachers. The English levels will probably be radically different already.

I think I forgot to mention that I spent last Saturday and Sunday painting the set for the Charity Show. Victoria designed it, and a group of us painted it on Saturday. However, we didn't finish, so Victoria and I went there early on Sunday to finish it up. We did a pretty good job, I think. The set cost about 15,000 yen, about $120. That cost includes paint, paper, brushes, and wood to support it.

I put up some more pictures finally. There are pictures from Tokyo, Erin's birthday party, and a couple pictures of the Charity Show set. I'm going to add commentary to the Tokyo write-up I did if you want to scan for any relevant pictures. I didn't take as many pictures in Tokyo as I intended to, so there won't be that many additions.

As far as Erin's birthday party goes, Erin is a friend of ours that lives out in a small town. She had her birthday get together the night after we did most of the painting for the set. The birthday get together was at a pub / restaurant chain called Tengu. Here's Erin and Victoria posing together and Victoria's impersonation of a walrus.

The Charity Show set consisted of three parts. There were two bars in the play, so the left one was called Slick Rick's, and was supposed to look more Western, so we made it brick-like. The right bar was called Mama San's, and it was more Japanese, so we made it look like a Japanese bar. The middle part was a post office and a hair salon, mostly to fill in space.

Victoria's friends Alex and Will who live in Kyoto (we stayed with them in the fall) came to Kanazawa and then to Toyama to visit Victoria. Unfortunately Victoria was quite busy with the Charity Show (she was the English M.C. for the variety show part), so they decided to come to the Charity Show so they could see her. They said they really liked it. Here are the three of them inside, outside, and here is Victoria by herself, dressed up for her speaking role.

I got the new Harry Potter book today. Yay! It was 50% off the cover price and free shipping. You can't beat that. I think some of my students will be interested in reading parts of it. For my third-year students, I might have us read some of the book as a group.

Also, the Charity Show was this weekend. It was a big success. We were able to pull it off without any major problems. We had a couple of minor lighting blips, but nothing worth mentioning. The variety show acts were quite good too. We had a magic show, a choir, a martial arts demonstration, a latin dance group, an improvisational dance solo, and a jump rope group. The jump rope group is quite good, but they had some trouble during the first show and missed most of their challenging stunts. They did better during the second show, but kept messing up easy parts instead. However, they did manage to complete one trick I had seen them try four times before without any success. I was happy I finally got to see them do it. They also performed at the JET Festival earlier in the year. I was happy the Charity Show went smoothly. Two of my teachers and one of my ex-teachers came to see it. One of my students came too. I want to ask her what she thought of the show. I was busy after the shows, so I couldn't talk with the people I invited to come. I think they enjoyed it though. I might have a tape of it by the time my family comes to visit. It should be interesting to watch.

So the next morning we got up and checked out. The hotel guy was nice enough to let us leave our bags there for awhile, because we couldn't check into the Keio Plaza Hotel (where the JET conference was) until noon. We headed over to the Imperial Palace again, hoping to see the gardens this time, since it wasn't raining. Once we got to Tokyo station, we headed towards the palace in an underground shopping area. We stumbled across a wonderful deli / marketplace where we bought lunch. They had a mix of Western deli foods and Japanese foods, so it was great. I had a bagel, a pretzel, and a sandwich. It was all really delicious, and I haven't been able to find bagels or pretzels since I came to Japan. Nearby was a pharmacy with A&W Cream Soda and Root Beer. Having a root beer with my meal made things pretty perfect in my book.

We walked towards the palace and came to a park area with many fountains (pictures: 1 2 3 4 5 6). We had seen it on the rainy day, but now it looked much better (as you might imagine). We stopped to eat lunch by the fountains, which was a very popular thing to do, judging from the number of people there. Lunch was great. Then we headed to the gardens, only to discover that they are closed twice a week. I think the days were Monday and Friday. So we decided we would have to save that for our next trip to Tokyo. We headed back to the hotel and changed into our dress clothes. Then we hurried over to the hotel, which was located in the government district of Shinjuku. Shinjuku has the nicest hotels in Tokyo.

The hotel is nice, but a bit older than some. They let us register for the conference and drop off our luggage in a big room. However, they refused to give us our keys because they were afraid everyone would skip the first part of the conference that afternoon. We had an opening ceremony which was a couple of speeches, followed by an hour and a half key note address. The key note speaker was a woman who has done a lot of experiential education work. She is something like President of Outward Bound Japan. I found her speech interesting, but a little too long. Also, I'm not sure she knew that much about the sort of teaching a lot of us JETs do. She had a lot of views on education, but I'm not sure how many of them could be applied to our jobs. It's possible they could be, but she didn't explain how at all. The speaker also had a tendency to use language that was perceived by many people as a bit simple, even condescending. I know Victoria didn't like it, and she said a lot of other Brits were probably put off by it too.

Once the speech ended, things turned a bit chaotic. In the big ballroom there were about 1000 people. However, none of us had our room keys, so they wanted us to all go to a room to collect them. However, their plan didn't seem to deal well with the fact that we all had to get to this room and wait in line. So they decided to start at one end of the ballroom and have the others remain seated until the first group had left. Anyway, the first people left and went up the escalator into the room above the ballroom. They probably got their keys and luggage quickly and left. However, the elevators in the hotel don't work efficiently, so they quickly ended up in a line waiting for the elevators. Then the next group started up the escalator and ran into the first group, causing a pile-up on the escalator. I was still waiting in the ballroom, on the very opposite side of the room from where people were being allowed to leave. They made an announcement that there was a huge back-up and that we'd have to wait for a long time. Now, call me crazy, but it should've been obvious that something like this would happen. In fact, the best way of doing it would have been to give us our keys ahead of time. Barring that, why not have each prefecture meet in the big ballroom and pass out keys to us there. It would've been a lot simpler. Apparently the same back-up happened the year before too!

Anyway, about an hour later I finally made it out of the big ballroom and got my key. After waiting in line for the elevator I finally made it to my room. It turns out that Victoria was rooming with Natalie, a JET who is also dating another JET at the conference. I basically managed to convince my roommate to room with Natalie's boyfriend, so that he could then switch with Victoria, meaning that the couples could room together. It worked out quite well, but required a little switching and a really nice ex-roommate of mine.

That night a large group of us headed to Shibuya, a really lively entertainment district with bright lights everywhere (and six giant Matrix Reloaded advertisements!). It is a lot like the Times Square of Tokyo. We were quite hungry because we got started late and decided to go to an Indian restaurant we found. It was quite nice. Afterwards we wandered around until we found a chain English pub, called The Hub. It wasn't that great, but it served our purpose of finding someplace to drink and talk. Victoria and I got a late train back and fell asleep. However, some people stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, which probably wasn't a good idea considering there were seminars all the next day.

I have to admit that I found some of the JETs' behavior irresponsible. I'm not trying to sound all high and mighty, but our contracting organizations paid for our hotel, our travel, gave us a lot of extra spending money, and paid our salary during the trip. We essentially got a big bonus for coming to Tokyo. Yet some of the JETs didn't go to a single seminar during the conference. I can understand skipping out on one seminar if you were too tired to get anything from it. Then you could rest and attend the other seminars. However, missing them all isn't fair to the JET Programme.

So Tuesday we had more seminars all day. They were actually a lot better than I expected them to be. I didn't have high hopes, but many of the seminars were quite interesting. I went to one on life as a second-year JET, classroom motivation strategies, elementary school teaching, and using drama in the classroom.

That night I told Victoria that we couldn't do anything with anyone else. We'd spent every other night with other people, so we had a private date instead. We went to a really nice Spanish restaurant that my neighbor Elita had recommended. I guess she went there one time before, and one of her teacher's friends owns the place. The food was pretty good. It was much better than the restaurant in Sendai, which wasn't horrible, but wasn't that authentic. This one was more so.

On Wednesday we went to the rest of the conference. Victoria and I went to the same seminars, one on life as a JET, by two guys who started a company selling English song CDs for elementary schools. The songs are about English topics you can teach. Most nursery rhymes aren't that helpful as far as basic English goes, so these songs focus around grammar points. Generally I've found the songs work best for 1-5 graders. My 6th graders seem to think they are too cool for the songs. They didn't talk about teaching elementary school as much as I would've hoped they would. Instead they talked about how being a JET was important, and about how to we have a great job. Not really a speech I needed to hear.

The second seminar was about finding a job after Japan. The guy seemed to know a lot, but he wasn't the most dynamic of speakers. I think he said some good things though. I probably wouldn't have gone to this seminar, but my other choice was about cross-cultural communication, which sounded really dull. After the seminar the conference was over.

We went in search of another Mexican restaurant, but we didn't find it. Instead we ate at an Italian restaurant, that was quite good. The waiters were quite nice too. Generally I've found that service in Japan is pretty good. There's no tipping in Japan, so I think it proves to me that tipping doesn't really equal good service. However, I have to admit that in Germany the service was really bad, and they don't have much tipping. We took the shinkansen home, which was nice. I'd never been on it before. It is quite fast and got us to Niigata in no time. On the way we got to view a pretty sunset. From Niigata we had to take a limited express back to Toyama, which took longer than the whole shinkansen trip (despite being a much shorter distance). It will be much more convenient in 2010 when they finish the shinkansen to Toyama. Thus ended our trip to Tokyo.

We went to a conference in Tokyo a couple weeks ago. It was lots of fun. The conference was for JETs who are staying two years. It was all paid for by our contracting organizations. Some of the employers demanded receipts for reimbursement, but our CO just gave us lots of money. They gave us enough for a flight to Tokyo ($300). The conference started on a Monday and ended on a Wednesday. Some people went up on Monday, but Victoria and I decided to go up early. We decided to take the overnight bus on Friday night to save money. It only costs about $60 one way. On Wednesday we decided to take the shinkansen (bullet train) back, since it is much faster. The shinkansen takes about 4 hours, compared with 8 on the bus. It costs about $90. If you do the math, you can see that we ended up with about half of the money left over. Even taking the shinkansen twice, we still would've made a profit.

We used this extra money to pay for our hotel room. I found a pretty good hotel that wasn't too expensive on the internet. It was located in Ikebukuro, which was conveniently the district where the bus dropped us off. It was a Chinese-run hotel, Grand House Chiang Tee. It was clean and reasonably priced, but a little small. Still, in Tokyo, everything is small. We brought along, Jen, a friend of ours who was renewing for another year too. She was the only one from her town going to the conference. The bus wasn't nearly as comfortable as the bus to Sendai, which had large seats and many amenities. The seats on the Tokyo bus reclined far enough though, so we were fine, or at least as fine as you can be sleeping on a bus. I didn't get the best sleep ever, but I managed to fit in about 5 hours before we were woken up around 5:30am. We arrived quite early in the morning. We were quite surprised by the number of people we saw awake on a Saturday morning at 5 am. Most of them looked like they never went to bed the night before.

We headed to the hotel, and nobody was awake there yet, so we decided to go to a restaurant to get some breakfast. Then we could go drop off our bags later on. We quickly stumbled across a Denny's, which is open twenty-four hours. It looked quite crowded from the outside, but we went in anyway. Inside a large percentage of the customers were soundly asleep at their tables. I think people come to Denny's after partying and fall asleep after eating something. Denny's menu is significantly different than in America. For instance, they don't serve what we would consider breakfast. On the menu, sandwiches, french toast, and caramel covered waffles were the only things that would eat that early in the morning. After a long breakfast, we went back to the hotel and the manager was awake. He was very friendly and agreed to give us one of our rooms right then, so we could put our bags in the room, use the bathroom, etc.

We dropped off our stuff and headed out to explore the beautiful city. Unfortunately, it started raining right around that time. I had brought lots of rain gear, because of the weather forecast, but Jen and Victoria hadn't brought anything. There was a convenience store next to the hotel, so they bought umbrellas there. There were pretty decent ones which folded up. We headed to the Imperial Palace first, since it is in the center of Tokyo, and seemed like a good place to start. We walked to the park, and passed some fountains and flowers, but nothing too impressive. Then we got to the palace. You're not actually allowed in the palace grounds except on two days out of the year (one of them being the emperor's birthday). There are gardens as part of the palace though, and you can enter those during the week. We missed the turn for the garden and went to what looked like the entrance on the map. Instead it turned out to be a security gate for the compound. We couldn't enter through there, obviously. So we walked towards a tour group that was headed to the main castle gates. There wasn't really anything you could see though. There was one place further along where you could see a building from the palace behind a perpendicular bridge. It was the most exciting it got. We were pretty wet, so we hid beneath a nearby overhang and contemplated our next move. The rain had picked up its pace, so we weren't too happy about walking back to the gardens, much less looking at them in the rain.

Instead, we decided to head to Ginza, a nearby shopping and entertainment district. On the way we found a group of wet pigeons sitting on a railing. They looked really funny. We wanted a place to dry off, and we were getting hungry again, so we found a nearby burger restaurant and headed there. The burgers were pretty good. We don't have this chain in Toyama, so it was a different experience. After we ate, we went to leave to discover that someone had stolen Victoria and Jen's umbrellas! I had held on to mine, while they left theirs by the door. They had even joked during lunch that someone would steal their umbrellas. They talked to the manager at the restaurant, and they produced two older umbrellas that customers had previously left in the restaurant. So they ended up with slightly less nice umbrellas, but still enough to stay dry. We wandered around stores since it was raining. We went to a Gap, where I found socks that were a lot closer to my size, but still not that big. We also went to HMV, a British music store. Then we went to Sony Plaza, a showcase building for Sony products. In the basement we found a foreign food store that was expensive, but had a good variety of products. I didn't buy anything though. It was much easier to find all sorts of international products in Tokyo than in Toyama.

It was the robot dog Aibo's birthday that weekend, so we played a little game where we went around the building getting stamps. Then they gave us a prize, an aibo small bag, with some stickers. I gave the bag to one of my teachers as omiyage. Eventually we got bored and tired, so we headed back to the hotel to nap. On the way home, Jen fell asleep on the subway next to some other sleeping guy, so I took two pictures of them.

After our nap, it wasn't raining so much, which was a very good thing, since we were already so wet in the morning. We decided to stay in the area because of the rains, and other factors. So we found a restaurant in our district called "Tapas," which is Spanish for appetizers. It was a lot of different Japanese appetizer-like foods. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, on the way there, Jen's umbrella opened up and the plastic part blew away in the wind, leaving her with a bare frame. It wasn't a good day for umbrellas. We walked around Ikebukuro and wanted to go up a really long escalator, but they switched it to going down right before we got there. So we went up in the elevator and took that down instead. Afterwards, we headed to a karaoke place. Here's a picture of Victoria singing. It was fairly expensive, but I think all karaoke places in big cities must be. It was a lot of fun. Finally we headed to bed.

Awhile back I fixed my teacher's son's computer. Takao is a student in Tokyo, so he wanted to be a tour guide for us to pay us back. So he agreed to take us around the Akihabara, a discount electronics district. My friend Joanna Jordan, from Raleigh, is also in Tokyo for the summer, so she decided to meet up with us for the day. However, while we were looking in Akihabara, I found that things weren't all that well priced, and were generally the same prices as places in Toyama, so I didn't buy anything. I would've liked to look around there a lot more though, because I hear you have to check out many different stores to find a good deal. Maybe next time I go to Tokyo, I'll head there myself. Victoria and Jen got terribly bored and took off for a shopping mall. We agreed to meet up with them for lunch around 1. Takao helped Joanna figure out her cell phone, since it was all in Japanese. There was something terribly confusing about it. In the phone, you could attach photos to emails. However, you couldn't send them that way through J-phone's system. So basically you couldn't really do anything to get your photos off your phone. It was a little disappointing.

We got to the train station where we were supposed to meet Jen and Victoria and told them where we were. However, this is when I discovered that Jen is not so good at spatial relations and directions. I told her what the closest landmarks to us were, and where things were in a relative sense to our location. However, she didn't figure out where we were, and her and Victoria kept looking for us at the wrong train station exit. While we were waiting, I took a photo of the two of them. Eventually we figured out where they were looking (thanks to Victoria) and went to meet them. This train station was supposed to be near Kanda, a book store district. However, it turned out to be quite a walk. We should've taken the subway. Takao was a good host, and very friendly, but he had never been to Kanda before. In fact, it seemed like he had not travelled much in Tokyo in general. So he didn't really know where he was going, but we (everyone but Joanna, who was quite doubtful) put our faith in him and his map. Eventually he wasn't sure where we were, so we went into a subway to ask the attendant. We were only one block off, so Takao did a good job after all!

Everyone was quite hungry at this point, so we went to an Italian restaurant we found. It was pretty good food, but about 25 minutes after we got our main course, the guy brought the bill and told us we had to leave right then because they were closing. It was quite rude, and not typical of Japan. We were the only ones left in the restaurant and it was closing at 3 for a two hour break before dinner. However, surely they could've let us finish without having to rush. Afterwards we walked along the main street, where about 70% of stores are book stores. It was pretty cool. We found a whole chain of sports stores at the end of the book stores. It was named Victoria, so there were signs all over the street with Victoria's name on them. She was quite happy about it. We turned around and walked back to one of the biggest book stores in search of English language books. They had a large selection of international books, so we were quite happy. We didn't even go in any of the other stores.

We went to Starbucks to take a break and then we decided to go back to the hotel before going to dinner. Yes, all we do is eat. Actually, commuting in Tokyo takes a long time. It was probably 30 minutes from Kanda to where we were staying. Joanna decided to go meet some friends then, so she took off. Takao came back to our hotel and waited patiently as we got ready. Then we headed to Roppongi, a party and bar district, with the specific goal of going to the Hard Rock Cafe. Jen's father apparently collects the shotglasses from Hard Rock Cafes. We didn't actually eat there. Instead we found a nearby Mexican restaurant. It's really hard to get Mexican food in Toyama, so it was a nice treat, and one of the things I wanted to do while in Tokyo. The food was pretty good at the restaurant, too.

It was getting late and we were worried about catching trains home, so we decided to head back to our "home" districts. I think we went to bed at that point.

The next morning the conference started, and I'll write about that more at a later time.

I've gotten pretty bad about updating my weblog, huh? Sorry. I've been really busy helping with the Charity Show recently. Every year the JETs in the prefecture put on a show to raise money for charity. It is also about the only English-language event during the year, so it's a good chance for people to practice. This first half of the show is a variety show, with singing, dancing, a magic show, a martial arts demonstration, and more. The second part is a musical. I agreed to be the stage manager back in the fall, and my workload has really increased recently. I was responsible for making sure painting the set got done, and the creation of the props. Victoria designed the set for the play, and I rounded up a lot of people to help paint it last weekend. It was quite fun, but it took a lot of work. Many props are figured out, but others still need to be done, including a big check and two signs. I'm hoping to do some of them tonight or Thursday night.

We have two performances this year. One is at 1, and the other is at 6 that same night. I think we'll be very tired by the end of the day. I've been selling tickets and so far, I've sold 13 tickets to the evening performance, and 1 to the afternoon show. I think we won't sell out the afternoon show, which is too bad. Maybe I'll be surprised though.

I'll try to post up pictures from my Tokyo trip soon too. It was a lot of fun.