Almost the weekend!

So, first and foremost - it's been what, 2 days since I did that Rakugo reading, and my legs are still sore from that stupid seiza position. yowza!

yesterday I had to stick around until nearly 6 because of a teacher's meeting, which I felt obligated to do, even though I didn't understand a lick of it. I did catch the part where they congratulated me about being in the local paper (I gave them an 'interview' I had done previously with Kasuga-sensei), and had an official picture taken as well as the photo op in the classroom teaching.

Thanks again mom for getting me those pictures of Washington, I've been doing slideshows for the classes about Washington as a 'self-introduction' of sorts. They love the pictures, and think the courthouse is beautiful, as well as being shocked at all the corn, and love making the realization that we have a McDonald's too.

I had a great time yesterday finally going over my stupid garbage schedule (I haven't taken out any yet, and i've been here two weeks. Yuck!), but I finally understand it thanks to Kasuga and another funny and nice teacher helping me figure it out. (Kasuga gave me the great hint of just bringing lots of my recyclables to school and putting it in the school recyclables. For example: PET bottles (plastic pop bottles) are only collected once a month, and the same with aluminum or steel cans, LAME).

I've also done some work with reading and stuff in the classroom, but the best part of today was having a class with myself, the teacher, and the one (yes, 1) student. We talked, played uno, showed pictures. I also had class with my class I ate lunch with last week, the 3rd years, so they already knew me, which made the self-introductions more fun. One of the girls even took a shot at (and correctly pronounced) Glinsmann, which was awesome! (I don't think Kawai sensei cought on until the end that myself and the class already knew each other).

I also went down and watched the student choir practice, and I still can't get over just how good these kids are. This is the entire school, divided into 4 parts, and everyone sings, well. Awesome stuff: here's a vid:





Tonight I went out to get some chinese food with some other ALT's, and had a great time. The food was absolutely amazing, and I had a ton of it, although it was a bit expensive (ちょっと高い）. Now I'm back, enjoying my night, and ready for friday.

I now officially have the internet in my name, and supposedly have cable TV too (since my internet is though the cable company) but I don't have it yet. So i'll talk about that tomorrow and see if I can't figure it out.

I've also gotten addicted to doing the crosswords every morning in the paper, but I realize that despite my robust vocabularly, I'm still not so hot at crosswords :-P

This weekend I'm going to a huge fireworks show in Okaya near lake Suwa. It's the biggest in the prefecture and the 24th biggest in Japan. It has a huge showing on August 15th that draws somewhere around 300-400k people, but the one i'm going to saturday is where different companies compete to get to show the fireworks for the following year and always has significantly less people at it. Awesome!