My week

Well, one week down, 15 more to go before winter vacation. Being away for as long as I was over the summer vacation was more than just not teaching, I also wasn't speaking (or reading) any Japanese. So re-adjusting to that has been fun. There are a bunch of area farmers tending to our sports field in advance of the sports festival scheduled for next Saturday (an odd feature of the Japanese school system that Sam and I will try to explain sometime, I'm sure). I had a chat with one of the grandfatherly-looking guys who was pulling weeds and it went OK. I remembered more than I thought I would.

Teaching has actually been pretty good too. After a week of giving slideshows and telling stories about back home, I taught my first real lesson today (I was teaching the fifth and sixth graders how to talk on the phone). At the end of each day, the kids have a meeting where, among other things, they tell everyone what their favorite part of the day was. I caught three (it's a class of six) of them saying "eigo!" (english), so that made me feel good. Now we get a weekend of... not relaxing. Tomorrow is the last day of campaigning before the election Sunday, so Sam and I will be in Tokyo helping Kazuo Inoue of the Democratic Party of Japan. Should be fun.