a rather timid week by previous standards.

at Eikaiwa this week we did dates and birthdays and one of the high school kids in the class had the same birthday as me (exactly 10 years younger than me) and she reminded me that we have the same birthday as Mickey Mouse. a tidbit of information that had previously known.. but somehow forgotten, possibly because its not something that would i would be able to squeeze into many conversation pieces =p

but i did sorta have a long weekend, in that i had monday off school. but it wasn't really a long weekend cos i had to go to school on Saturday for school festival. School festival aka bunka festival in Japan is like a big deal.. for the students anyway. It's a day when the students put on this performance, comprising of singing, dancing, skits, short films, bands playing etc.. you get the idea. I went to two of my schools' festivals, and they were both pretty fun, but im still surprised at the poor attendance by parents and families at these sort of events. In Sydney like every kid would have both their parents and their siblings there.. but here it seems like 1 in 10 students has either parent attend. Like at my big school (500+ students) there crowd was barely a couple of rows of parents there with video cameras. weird..

Some cool things at school festival were parody's of tv shows (i didnt know the shows, but it was still hilarious) and science show (this year's involved a demo of how to blow smoke rings, out of a cardboard box) and hand made soba.. which the students made. oishii!

oh and we also had the lamest enkai ever. It was like just a formal presentation ceremony. Barely trashy at all.. relative to other enkais. Also got asked "can you do an introduction speech? you're up next" .. *rolleyes* luckily everyone was pretty drunk so they could understand my very broken japanese mixed with broken english. For some reason when i speak english, i assume that no one can understand me, so i leave out many joining words which seem cluttery. Commonly left out words include "will" and "to", eg. "Tomorrow I go Tokyo".. and "is" e.g. "my brother living in Tokyo" .. and ""

On Saturday i intended to go to Aizu Wakamatsu uni to play frisbee. I was supposed to be on the 7:29 train, so i woke up at 6:30am!! and got ready. To make sure i wasn't late, i drove to the station, only to discover that the car park is closed on Sundays!! gah! by the time id driven around to find another car park id already missed the train *sigh*. I ended up catching a later train an arriving about 2 hours late (blergh). Frisbee was awesome though, i played pretty awful.. my high backhand has desserted me. but im pretty out of shape still. *bloats* hopefully i get better as i start playing more.

Monday i went to obtain a "permission for re-entry" aka reentry permit. So i can leave the country and return without having to deal with some sort of visa red tape. It is annoying theres only one place in Fukushima where I can obtain such a permit.. and its in Koriyama, but no where near the train station.　Its near the shiyakusho(市役所) aka city hall, if you ever need to go there catch a bus from the number 9 bus stand at Koriyama station, it should be 220円.

We walked all the way back.. cos we had nothing better to do. This didnt really include anything interesting, we stopped at "The Mall" but it contained nothing particularly worth mentioning even in a blog which contains many uninteresting things. I ended up buying a bunch of things from that weird clothing store in Ati. Some headphones, some badges and 2 tshirts. I only intended to buy one tshirt.. but the one i wanted was 2 for the price of 1, so i got another random one thrown in.

:: vocabulary words ::
oishii = delicious!
soba = noodles
bunka = culture
Ati = a shopping complex next to Koriyama station.

in other news: a japanese student choked on bread at school and died! one of over 4000 deaths from choking in japan eash year..
http://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/boy-who-choked-on-bread-was-among-more-than-4000-annual-choking-deaths