April

Wow, I've become such a crap blogger.

But then again, there's not enough hours in the day as it is.

April weather in Tokyo has been up and down - a promise of summer, a reminder of winter. Quite unsettling.

Had a kid the other day, a five year old - we were doing a quick beachball warmer with 'what's your favourite x?' questions. To help young kids understand things like 'what'syourname' or 'whatsyourfavouritecolour' aren't in fact one word, I'll often get each kid to say one word of the phrase as we pass the ball. After a couple of rounds of favourite sport, drink, etc I allowed the kid to chose a category. She chose BODY PART.... and her answer was LUNG.

And no, I didn't teach her either of those bits of language!

On settling though, the new job is going along well. As far as being senior teacher is concerned, it means I can actually do things instead of just getting annoyed by them. Most of my new classes / students are really nice and a complete change is always good. Although I DO miss teaching big classes of kids.

So that's all been keeping me pretty busy.

The diploma is a mini-nightmare. I'm totally enjoying it but just don't seem to have enough time to do it and catch up on myself and all the reading. I have big breaks at school - in theory - but people want to talk or I need to do something else. But it's Golden Week coming up (a holiday) so that'll give me a chance to get stuck into it.

Quite a few people have left this month, which is always sad. It was the excuse for a good drunken lunch and then some hanami (cherry blossom 'viewing' - ie, drinking in the park) at the start of the month. At one point, a friend and I had gone on a tree hunt (we didn't want to join the massive toilet queues) and got lost on the way back. I'd left my phone with our friends (stupid thing to do) so couldn't call them. Luckily we spotted a man in a Frogger costume (it's REALLY not worth finding an image - 'Frogger' is a cartoon character who is a dog - er, I mean a frog. You can picture man dressed as frog for yourself) - who we'd seen before and he helped us find our friends. Life strange in Tokyo? No, course not.

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Recently there's been a story about Tsuyoshi Kusanagi driving Japan nuts. Kusanagi is a member of a boyband called SMAP who have been very famous for a long time in Japan and who endorses lots of products, etc. The poor lad got drunk, got naked (as is pretty much expected from popstars everywhere else, isn't it?) and got arrested. Since then he's been dropped from campaign after campaign and even debated in parliament here. A load of hysteria over nothing. Of course he has publicly apologised. Ridiculous, eh?

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Another recent story that has caught my eye is that Japan is now paying foreigners to get out and stay out. Racist? Japan? Surely not.

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And my personal annoyance at the moment is why so many things are sold in packets of 3s and 5s here. (Think meet slices, cheese slices, bread slices, etc). It's extremely annoying - yes, FOUR is an unlucky number, bla bla, but then make it six, why can't you?!