New Car, New Snowboard, and Elementary School

After about a month of tearing through Nakano City on a bicycle at top speeds, I decided to upgrade to an AWD, super charged, drifting machine. I have named it 白い刀, Shiroi Katana, because it cuts through the wind with the force and swiftness of a katana and shiroi is "white" in Japanese. Here is a picture of the beast.

Men, keep your women close, because when I come rollin' by in this earthshaking land cruiser, you may find yourselves a bit more lonely than you remember being.

The next new addition to my life came in the mail the other day.  I found myself purchasing my dream snowboard, which I have been thinking about since I was in high school.  I was able to purchase a new snowboard for when I am faced with intense powder and snow that is notorious here in Nagano. 

 The difficulty lied in dodging the ridiculous Japanese prices.  After searching for a while, I found a company that shipped to Japan and could be purchased with the US dollar.  Instead of paying the equivalent to 700 US dollars I only payed around $400.  Here is a picture of the board.

This is an Arbor Roundhouse RX mid-wide board.  This is an all mountain, rocker board.  It is made with bamboo and also recycled materials.  I can not wait for winter.

I finally visited two of my elementary schools the previous week and I now know why kids have so much energy!  It is because they are latching on to all the adults and sucking it out of us. They are stealing our energy!  

Outside of being extremely tired after elementary schools, I have to say it is a lot of fun and the kids are extremely interested in you.  I had to sign autographs for about 15 minutes. I was signing kids sports towels, notebooks, and arms.  I'm kind of a big deal now with elementary school.  

I also had the privilege of being told by a six year old girl to go wash my hands before eating.  Everyone then proceeded to freak out when I told them I did not have a pocket towel.  I have since purchased one.

The first year students all take care of two sheep which is really cute and quite amazing that such young kids are given that responsibility.  The best part is that they take care of the sheep and they do it well.  

My ending piece of advice for dealing with children, and this is a well known fact, is bring an arsenal of stickers.  When you break those bad boys out, everyone's eyes grows two sizes and you will gain instant control.

This up coming weekend is a 3 day weekend and I plan on going to Tokyo so you can look forward to some pics of that.

Back in Japan 日本に戻った

It has been a while but I am back in Japan and finally connected to the internet after a month of suffering with only my cellphone connection...I realized, just as in America, towards the central part of the country things tend to move a bit slower.

I was foolish to think it would be easy to re-acclimate to the Japanese culture just because I have been here before.  Life in Kyoto as a student differs greatly from life in northern Nagano as a full time employee of the city.  I have a much greater concern for how I act and what the people around me think because it will seriously affect my reputation.  When in a more rural area, everyone seems to know each other and information tends to spread like wild fire.  I have students who know what kind of groceries I like to buy or who I hung out with the previous weekend.  My girlfriend visited Nagano this past weekend and I am sure I am going to hear all about it at school tomorrow.

When I first arrived to Nagano I had a lot of help from my supervisor and the other JET's in the area.  They helped me with some shopping and setting up my cellphone.  I ended up going on a very difficult, dangerous, but fun hike.  So you can understand the magnitude of this hike, someone had already died this year on it.  If you looked to your left or right it was a straight drop down.  Regardless, I kicked the poop(Mother edit) out of the hike.

I had the opportunity one weekend to visit my friend in Shiga.  I stayed with him a couple of days and we went to lake Biwako and played some ground golf.  Ground golf was like mini golf with clubs and bocce balls.  Hot but fun.  I also got to experience the Penny board which is an old school skateboard that rides so smooth it is as if you were gliding on ice with butter skates.  We went to Kyoto to watch the opening lacrosse game. I got to see all my old lacrosse friends.  They all were happy to see me.  I bet most of them expected to never see me again in their life.  I then went to Osaka and practiced lacrosse with the Gold Zealers with my friend from Shiga.  I thought I was going to die from a combination of my lack of stamina and the insane heat in southern Japan.  Afterwards I got to enjoy some amazing Yaki Niku and had a blast.

That is all for now and I will try to keep up with this Blog.  The next post you can expect to see my new car, new snowboard, and my apartment.  For now I am off to the super market to get discounted Bento! When reading my blog be aware you may run into spelling errors or grammatical errors, you would be insane if you think I am going to proof read a blog post so deal with it.