The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

The heater in one of my morning classes is broken, so it's below zero in the classroom. The students and I practiced Ninja English to keep warm, karate-chopping the air as we practiced sentences.

I think we spent a grand total of 2 hours awake and in our apartment this weekend.

On Saturday at 11 am, Kevin and Saori arrived from Tokyo on the bullet train. We spent the morning making sure the place was acceptably tidy and the spare bedding was clean and dry, then rushed out to Sendai to meet them. As quickly as we could, we headed back to Natori and stopped in at the best soba restaurant in all Japan for some noodles and tempura. The weather was crisp and sunny, with only a little wind; after lunch, we headed home and rigged up all four of our bikes to go for a long ride around Natori.

First, Jen took us out to the Kumano shrine in the Northern end of Natori, the same place we went to sometime around October to see Kagura dancing, and where Jen once took Mom. I've only been there for Kagura, and it was nice to see the shrine and have free reign to explore! It turns out that the back area of the shrine is:
1) accessible, and
2) untended.

When we last left off, I was stopping for a coffee before showing up late to the midyear ALT conference. Once we did arrive, I attended my seminar normally. At lunch, Jen and I met up with another group of ALTs and went out to the same place we'd stopped for coffee earlier, the Sendai Mediatech cafe.

It turns out that most of our friends are vegetarian, particularly in that lunch group. Being a vegetarian in Japan is a hard job: Japanese culture does not really allow for the idea that some people have specific strong eating preferences. In Japan, "can't eat" means "don't like to eat". I have no idea how they cope with allergies.

Yesterday more than made up for the relatively low quality of my first 26th Erkday. I am going to just call it my 26th birthday and be done with it.

In the morning, I realised a bit late that the second day of the mid-year conference started at 9:45, not at 10:30 like the previous day. I still got out of the house with plenty of time to make it, and walked through the dusting of snow and gentle chilly breeze left over from last night's storm. It was beautiful, and the sun was shining down and warming my black jacket, and all was well.

It turns out that for some reason (the best we can come up with is ice on the tracks) the morning trains were delayed over 20 minutes. I caught the 8:55 train, but it didn't come to Natori until about 9:20. That means, of course, that it had all the passengers trying to catch the 8:55, 9:05, 9:15, and others. This is a rush hour level train already.

Yesterday was a hell of a day, so I've decided to consider today my "real" birthday, as today's the 24th in Canada anyway. Yesterday, right on my Japan-time birthday, was the first day of the ALT mid-year conference. I've been preparing since November to present at this conference, with my JTE (Japanese teacher of English) coworker Rie. We were both pretty nervous about our presentation, and we were assigned the very first time block. I actually consider that a small blessing, since we got it over with right away, and didn't have to deal with being compared to the class before, although we also got a classful of people who were tired from a heavy lunch, while second period was warmed up from the exciting games played in 1st. Oh well. The presentation was all right, with a few glitches. I wanted to play a segment from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, but that was scuttled by my laptop: it's running xubuntu linux, and I forgot to install video player support. My bad!