Today I got to experience some of the reasons I made the decision to come here :-)

So on my way to work, if I leave about 5 after 8, I will pass a mother and her 4 or 5 year old son on the way to school. He likes to wave and I'll say good morning. He's pretty cute and fun. So I saw them this morning, and as I was walking up, I said "Hi!" and he ran up towards me saying "HELLLOOOOOO!!!!" and gave me a high five. What a champ. I had a huge grin on my face the entire rest of the way to school. Also, at school today I had a couple of classes, inluding doing baseball twice with the first years. Both first year classes were fun, but the first class was by and large much more fun, minus the little bit where one of the students missed a question and was on the verge of tears for about 5 minutes, poor guy. :(

After that first class, i was assaulted by a group of girls who wanted to know Bethany's name (they thought it was cute), and then went absolutely nuts when I told them that she 1. was an english teacher in korea, and 2. would come visit Iijima and the school. They're pretty fun and energetic! :-D

I also had Kasuga sensei take me to the bank to help me figure out how to use my debit card (turns out they had a button for english, so that was a freakin piece of cake, lol.) I wanted to wait until payday before I took a shot at using it, and so when I asked for my statement, I nearly fell out of my chair (even though I was standing) to see I had over 300k yen in there! (3k$). I almost teared up, I've never had that much money before! YAY!

Cleaning time went well today, I joked with Kubota sensei that there should be a contest to see who can clean the most, so I could win, because I keep shocking people with how dirty I get my rags during cleaning time.

And then we went to get my Gaikokujin card (my alien registration card). Now that I have that, I can work on getting my cell phone! :-) among other things! Woohoo!

So, in the teacher's office here, students come in, and say "excuse me, i'm xxxxx and I need to talk to xxxx" Well, a student came in today and asked for me, and instead of the general chorus of 'hai!' etc. from the teachers, it was more 'EH? Do-wai-to sensei??' lol. I had talked to one of the students and asked her to come get me the next time the choir practiced, so I went and joined them today, and they were fantastic. They asked me for advice and I really didn't have anything to tell them (although next time I might mention blending better or that the tenors are sometimes going flat, but it's no big deal!).

I love hanging out with these kids, they are such a blast! :-D I'm going to the brass-band's concert on monday, and hope to join them for practice here in the future too :-)

I'll get pics up on this post later, although I forgot to take my camera to school today, so I'll get the inside and some of my students on tuesday or monday or something. :-)