Fireflies and genki younguns

Couple memories i want to jot down. I'm loving elementary school kids here, they're super into learning English, and these days are actually using it with each other and me after class. "Do you like red? So-So!" Found out that a shocking number of students dont like the color green. Had some excellent rides down at Koigaura today, the road was closed due to more unnecessary consctruction, so I legged it, and thus got to appreciate tons of views, flower smells, and such that I otherwise would never know. waves were perfect. Got my first ride where i dropped onto a wave with this other awesome surfer dropping next to me at the same time, following me. Had to pull some nice moves to shoot down the face or get a board to the ass. The other day I had round two with the Osaki rotary club, they invited me to a firefly viewing that I was initially skeptical about... (they gave me traditional japanese garb and i knew i'd be the only one wearing it, a little strange). The night was surprisingly good though, and we ended up at an izakaya, had pigs feet and other oddities.

Golden Week

Long time since the last post, been doing a lot of surfing these days- getting better slowly by slowly, definitely an art to the thing and a little difficult due to dumpy waves. Got heckled the other day by a crazy surfer dude with one arm, first incident of surf localism- nobody got hurt, I'm happy to say. My vacation to california was chill, did some standard San Francisco tourism and hung out with my family. Had "Golden Week,'' last week, which is one of the rare times when most people get out of work for a few days (its not actually a week long) and get to see their neglected families (crazy workaholics these folks). So I got out to kyoto again. Mostly did chilling since every temple and what-not was crazy packed. Went out to an izakaya and an incredibly nice italian restaurant for Mr. and Mrs. Fox's anniversary party. Tried gorgonzola ice cream of all things! Believe it baby. Word of warning for people taking 14 hour ferry rides to always check the predicted wave height, cuz damn. This weekend I went out for some food and karaoke with friends and their visiting relatives, best time at karaoke ever, singing old 80's songs. Been fun at school these days since I've been either kept busy with classes and engaging new teachers, or I'll show up and there'll be "Sketch day" (we drew sketches of views around school all day), or "camp day," when we all went down the road to a camp site, made barbq pits and ate yakiniku, and then played sports for the rest of the day. pretty cruisy really. elementary school visits are always great, I'm finding out that the better alternative for a clever game is just to give them interview sheets and have them ask each other simple things like "do you like red?" or "can you juggle?" Holy crap do they completely get into it. It puts the way they have to teach in middle school to shame, where one or two people benefit from overly-advanced but rushed reading practice and they can't even say something like "He watches T.V." So if I come back to japan in the future, I'm considering trying to get a job as an elementary school english teacher. Over and out.

Long time since the last post, been doing a lot of surfing these days- getting better slowly by slowly, definitely an art to the thing and a little difficult due to dumpy waves. Got heckled the other day by a crazy surfer dude with one arm, first incident of surf localism- nobody got hurt, I'm happy to say. My vacation to california was chill, did some standard San Francisco tourism and hung out with my family. Had "Golden Week,'' last week, which is one of the rare times when most people get out of work for a few days (its not actually a week long) and get to see their neglected families (crazy workaholics these folks). So I got out to kyoto again. Mostly did chilling since every temple and what-not was crazy packed. Went out to an izakaya and an incredibly nice italian restaurant for Mr. and Mrs. Fox's anniversary party. Tried gorgonzola ice cream of all things! Believe it baby. Word of warning for people taking 14 hour ferry rides to always check the predicted wave height, cuz damn. This weekend I went out for some food and karaoke with friends and their visiting relatives, best time at karaoke ever, singing old 80's songs. Been fun at school these days since I've been either kept busy with classes and engaging new teachers, or I'll show up and there'll be "Sketch day" (we drew sketches of views around school all day), or "camp day," when we all went down the road to a camp site, made barbq pits and ate yakiniku, and then played sports for the rest of the day. pretty cruisy really. elementary school visits are always great, I'm finding out that the better alternative for a clever game is just to give them interview sheets and have them ask each other simple things like "do you like red?" or "can you juggle?" Holy crap do they completely get into it. It puts the way they have to teach in middle school to shame, where one or two people benefit from overly-advanced but rushed reading practice and they can't even say something like "He watches T.V." So if I come back to japan in the future, I'm considering trying to get a job as an elementary school english teacher. Over and out.