Hope you enjoyed the photos below. I had a great weekend exploring my surroundings here in Monzennaka-cho (the area I live in). It was a beautiful weekend weather-wise, which made wandering even more wonderful (sorry, I got started with the W's and just couldn't stop). I found a terrific park near me on Saturday- now I have two choices for great running destinations: I can either head to the river and watch lit up buildings and bridges or I can jog in to, around, and from the park and graze on the grass and trees while I'm there.

My job has gotten substantially crazier in the last week- Ben, the Algerian (a.k.a the Other Foreigner) who is my psuedo mentor- was gone from the office for an afternoon last week. That was unfortunately all it took for me to be assigned the random English speaking customer who called out of the blue. Of course, I can speak English, so regardless of my ability to actually *serve* the customer... I got the call. Make that calls- the client, let's call him Herb, spent that first day calling to check on the status of his tickets no less often then every twenty minutes. This being the first time I'd ever booked tickets from start to finish on my own- it was really stressful. On top of that- he wanted tickets for three people going from Johannesburg (that's South Africa folks) to two cities in Europe. Since my company focuses on tickets originating in Tokyo (since that's where we ARE)... it threw everyone for a loop. Oh- and his passengers wanted to depart the-next-day, thankyouverymuch. Long story short, I have now booked tickets for 14 of his clients/coworkers (yet to be determined), all originating in Johannesburg and flying to Europe and Asia within the next week. Not a one has a thing to do with Japan. Added to the info that Herb seems to only have one phone/fax number that is answered by a machine and three credit cards whose names match neither his nor the passengers... I'm starting to worry that I may be aiding and abetting something... very, very bad.

I'm sure Herb is fine. It's just so appropriate that this is my first real customer. Every time I get freaked out because I have NO idea what I'm supposed to do to book his tickets I want to whine "I'm not even supposed to HAVE this guy!!". But then I look around me at the others grinding away and I sigh..whimper... and plug away. So far, Herb seems to be satisfied enough with my work that he keeps sending me more names. Since we're making a bundle of money from his business, who am I to complain?!

makes me shake my head though. Ben leaves for a 2 week vacation tomorrow. Things could get really interesting.