Today I feel a little sick. I have a nose and throat problem. Luckily, I don't have any classes today. It's a test day, so they are busy testing all day. I've been cleaning out my inbox, and looking for Australian accomodation. My family, Victoria, and I will be headed there for Christmas and New Year's. It should be a lot of fun.

At lunch today, we had shishamo, which I think is some of the worst Japanese food. It's little pregnant fish, with the heads on the them still. We're supposed to eat them whole, but I don't eat them at all. It was on the last first-year English listening test that I don't like shishamo, so all the students who like shishamo in the class I eat lunch in, were waiting by my desk to ask me for my shishamo. It was pretty funny.

Normally I play basketball on Wednesdays, but today I think I will just try to get some rest. It's too bad, because I look forward to playing basketball a lot.

I feel like I am planning so many trips right now. Victoria and I might go somewhere in two weeks (there's a three day weekend), there's the Australia trip, a trip to Okinawa for my birthday, possibly a trip to Tokyo to attend a seminar in March about leaving the JET program, and then we need to start looking at plane tickets for Golden Week. We will probably take a five day vacation to South Korea for Golden Week. Golden Week is a series of holidays that are all in a row at the beginning of May. Last year we only got one day of holiday because most of the holidays fell on the weekend. This year we get 5 days in a row, and more if we took some vacation time. However, since school is in session during some of Golden Week, the schools don't want us to take time off then. Victoria won't have that much vacation time left then, so we'll probably just take the 5 days of holiday for our trip.

It's the most popular time for Japanese people to travel, so we want to make sure we get seats on the one daily flight to Korea from Toyama. Otherwise we'll have to travel to Osaka to get the flight, which would be an additional 3 hours travel, plus more money. The flight itself doesn't even take 3 hours. The flight looks to be about $750 USD, which is not very cheap. But we really want to go, so we'll probably pay it. I think my flight to Malaysia over Christmas was about the same amount. I hope hotels and the like in Korea aren't too expensive during that time, but I bet they will be.