enkais and schools for lesbians
Still waiting for that modem... Yahoo BB, why must you make me wait?! I am so desperate to play WoW now, I've even downloaded the 1.6Gig bridging patch through my illegally-gained network. I just sit and stare at that new login screen. Well, I would if I had the time to. Busy, busy, busy.

Btw, the Yen has gotten stronger, from £1 to 190Yen when I arrived to £1 to 150Yen right now. That's a massive drop. Now every Yen I spend costs me even more! Despite that I've spent 12000Yen the last few days and will be spending 30000 on a trip to Hakone in a few weeks (that's £200).

I went to my first enkai on Friday! (that's a dinner and drinking party) The traditional Japanese food was delicious, there was all you can drink alcohol and, as most of the teachers weren't English teachers, I got to practice plenty of Japanese. And Japanese people are notoriously weak with alcohol. I got talking with a 24-yr-old PE and social welfare teacher (I dunno...) about baseball, football and then cars. His face was red and for the rest of the night he only spoke to say the name of another 4X4 car that he liked.

The next day I went to two school festivals. If you've watched any anime/J-drama set in a school then you'll probably know what happens at these. Big events with stalls and every classroom filled with fun things. And it's all true! Except not so big, and lacking cute characters involved in fights, explosions and heart-wrenching romantic moments (well, not while I was there). However, we (me and my friend) were very impressed by some classes' haunted houses. Entire classrooms were covered with black bin bags and filled with spooky props. With the lights switched off, each visitor was sent on a route through the classroom pass bloodied beds, students in masks jumping out at you, crawling through tunnels and through corridors of grasping hands.

The second school was also an all-girls school! And if anime has taught me anything, it's that every student at this school is a lesbian. Imagine my shock as I find boyfriends everywhere. Sigh.
However, while in line for a haunted house, my friend huffs and says "well..."
I say, "what's up?"
She says, "You just missed that girl groping the other one."
I stare at the girls in question, "No way."
"Yeah, she just totally grabbed her breast."
"No way. You have got to warn me about these things quicker!"

Later, after watching a volleyball match and waiting for a taiko drumming show, I made a casual joke, "I'm disappointed. I'm at an all-girls school and it's not a hive of lesbianism."
"No," my friend said and added, "not as much. There was more at the all-girls school I went to. About 50% were." She said it so casually, no hint of a joke. I didn't know what to say.

But teaching is good. I finally finished introducing myself after 2 months. Now I'm on with my amazing Hallowe'en/Guy Fawkes lesson, including a fantastic game which needs the entire lesson to work up to, and lasts about 3 minutes. But I'm not always doing the same lesson in each school. Sometimes I have requests from teachers to prepare something different. When I first arrived I was ask to sing a song that is famous in Britain. I eventually chose Always Look on the Bright Side of Life and got the students to sing "life's a piece of shit" - and that's a successful lesson in my books. But there have been plenty of other odd requests:
- Give a lecture about the difference between British and American pronunciation (Wikipedia saved my life)
- Think of an interesting or famous conjunctive sentence (I'm still working this and have the BNL song "If I had a million dollars" so far)
- Locate English apartment-for-rent adverts full of those abbreviations... while I'm in Japan...
- Sing a rap song. ("Oh yeah, that's... an idea" I said, "I'll have to think about it." and avoided the subject ever since.)