It's already Tuesday! How does that happen?!

Friday night was girls night. Danielle, Jaclyn, Sara and I went out for conveyer belt (kaiten) sushi. The sushi itself wasn't great, but watching the little dishes cruise past all the tables is always highly entertaining. We were out celebrating my birthday before the day since everyone is packing up and leaving the country for the summer. Danielle heads home this week and Jaclyn is leaving next week for a Japanese class in Osaka (before going home for a month!). Sara isn't sticking around or another year so she's leaving to travel the world in a few weeks. Omi village just won't be the same... ever again!

Anyway, after dinner and random sushi photos... we went back out to Willy Wonka's bath tub. Who's heard of going to a bath for your birthday?? Definitely a first, and definitely worth the second trip out there. This time the purple bubbly bath was bright turquiose! We spent some time trying to figure out whether we could sneak our cameras into the baths but decided getting busted would be just too humiliating. (Danielle's camera's battery is dying so you have to wait 5 minutes before it takes a picture, my camera is totally dead and wasn't along, Sara's camera is a massive manual zoom which wouldn't have hid in a towel too well, and Jaclyn didn't want her Mt. Fuji film confiscated by accident!!). Next time I'm sure one of us will consider trying to bring in our cell phones ;) (keep watching the photo page,... you never know what you'll see!)

The evening was wrapped up deliciously with a fabulous few pieces of 10 egg angel food cake made from scratch by my dear friend Jaclyn. It was yummy and Danielle and Sara didn't stick around for it, so Jaclyn and I are eating the whole damn thing ourselves!!

Saturday morning I woke up superbly early and figured I might as well see if there was an open seat on the bus to Tokyo. The weather looked stinky so I decided rather then hang around my house bored, I would go hang around at Tom's. Honestly I hadn't even planned on going, but Tom made the random effort of inviting me up... and I figured, what the heck? So I was in sticky steamy Tokyo in time for lunch and a cool drink at Starbucks.

Tom finally broke down and bought himself a TV/VCR and a DVD. I think the first time I accompyanied him to the electronics store was...oh... about two years ago (before I'd even moved here!). He's been putting it off for-ever, and frankly that was just fine. I was just getting a bit tired of all the time spent bumming around in front of all those TVs while he tried to decide! Since we had no real plan for the weekend, we watched a couple of movies to make sure the system was in working order.

Also picked up some new Japanese text books, I'm planning to attempt level 2 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) this year. There are four levels, one being the highest. I passed level 3 with flying colors last year, but the gap between there and level 2 is HUGE. I highly doubt I will pass it the first time around. I should have started studying a long time ago... but it hasn't felt urgent enough. So, I will take it for practice this time. ;) No one has to know my score, right?

So as I started out by saying, this week is already flying. I have several interesting classes this week; I'm interviewing all the 3rd graders, as an add on to their finals of last week. The test had a listening section but no test of speaking, so I decided it would be a good experience for them to spend 2 minutes or so trying to hold up their end of a conversation without notes. Many of them will have to do interviews to enter special English specialization courses for their high schools or for English Proficiency exams. The first class was nervous, but did a pretty good job this morning.

and tonight the adults are waiting for me to enlighten them further... this week we're practicing the phrase "Have you ever ________?". It is an easy lesson for me because I just finished this section with the 3rd graders.

Last but not least, I missed another wedding this weekend. Andi and Stephen are now happily husband & wife forever and ever... sigh. I was really sad not to be able to be there, again. Ah... the drawbacks of life on the other side of the planet.

Miss you all!!