New Icon

Yay! Thanks to hils for fixing my icon. This is a photo, with a lot of manipulation, of a disused pachinko parlour in town. I see it everyday and I think it's about the gayest thing I've seen in Japan. Apart from two guys on TV on Thursday night, but that's another story.

Photos

You can see some of my photos from New Year at Flickr. A little late, but it has taken me that long to get the film developed.

( In addition, here are some of the photos from the party we had a few weeks ago: )

High Calorie Weekend

This weekend, so far, has been a particularly productive one.

Saturday night saw us go out with a group of students for what they called the "High Calorie Party". This involved going to one of the more expensive yaki-niku restaurants in town, eating meat and drinking beer. Well, I ate, vegetables, salad, tofu and kimchi, and drank beer. Afterwards we went to a huge snack bar where I avoided being the first one to sing karaoke for once (the night's songs included: S.O.S -ABBA, Angel - Eurythmics, and Stay - Lisa Loeb). During my rendition of Angel I was brought to near hysterics by the sight of one of the my students and the other NET grooving along to the song in an Austin Powers stylee.

On Sunday morning I got up at 9am, made tea and toast for Saori, who had stayed over, and then staggered back to bed until 1pm. Then, after waking myself up and eating, I sat down and wrote a short story. It's been popping into my head repeatedly recently and I started making further notes on it last week. Yesterday it wanted to come out, so down I sat and it wrote itself. I have the final section to work on today and then that's the first draft done. It's quite an interesting story for me as it is written in the present tense, not something I usually do, and it's written backwards, so the start is at the end, again, not something I usually do. I found that I automatically slip into writing in the past tense so I very often had to stop myself and change sentences. It gives the story much more sense of immediacy, which is what I want for this one - a sense of confusion, that you don't understand what is happening until the very end. Then to work on the next draft and type it up.

After that I watched the "Devil's Rejects" and started downloading "Pan's Labyrinth".

[On an aside, I blasted my way through all 18 episodes of "Heroes" and and now can't wait to see the next ones. Why, oh why didn't I pace myself, as I was warned about the season break! Next to download is the second series of "Life on Mars" which is about the only show I've been missing from England.]

So far today I've been swimming, after having to shake off dreams about flying around England in a Mini Cooper (which was excellent fun) and watching motorcycle races across the Arctic. I now need to do some shopping, work on the story, do some Japanese practice and head out to meet my private student. And may I add that my student and I meet in family restaurants and cafes, NOT his apartment, and that he was passed on to me by his previous teacher who vouched for his sanity. So don't worry.

Tremors

I forgot to mention that we had an earthquake last Sunday. Forgot, in that I didn't really notice it. I only found out about it two days later.

Anyway, this was the earthquake itself, and it was felt over here by a lot of people. I, however, was in bed watching "Heroes" and felt only a small tremor. Being so close to the road, I thought it was the vibration from passing traffic and didn't think anymore of it, though I do remember noticing my free-standing mirror quivering and thinking: "That's a big truck".

Further to the post earlier about writing a story, and on the theme of last weekend, I wrote a poem for the first time in about 3 years last Monday. I might post it here when I get the guts.