things have been pretty busy.
The weekend before last I went to tokyo (I’ll try and upload photos tonight) for the TGS, with a slightly sore throat. I went to the doc on Monday as I had a temp the night before, so I took the day off. I appear to be recovered now.

On Saturday I successfully graded to Ikkyu (one grading from Shodan) in Iaido

Now this weekend is going to be really busy, especially Sunday. I’ll be heading to Suzuka for the F1, but I just found out Bathurst is on at the same time!! AAHHH!! Maybe I should just go to suzuka on the Saturday and watch Bathurst at home.. somehow…

We also have to finish watching the AFL Grand Final. The other day Nilesh, Steve and I went to Tsurumai park (at night) to kick the footy around (Steve’s parent’s brought one over ). Last night Cody and I picked up a Pizza Hut pizza. Yum.

nuts I just lost the post I just wrote… time to rewrite:

Well SIX months have come and gone. I managed to send off at least one (at the moment, still only one) postcard before six months… hopefully I get around to sending more of the ones I’ve bought. Time has gone waaay too quickly.

This last month has been rather hectic, having to travel an hour both ways to work in Seto city on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s. The train journey there is pretty boring, with just houses and houses and houses littering the scenery.

At Nova I had a 6 month check (observation) sheduled for last Thursday. I forgot about this the night before and went out with Cody to the Red Rock bar and grill, where I proceeded having 5 beers (one was on the hour-long train journey from work at Seto city), and having to accept two white russians and two tequilas from other people (no is not an answer here :P). Naturally I wasn’t feeling 100% the day after, especially when I remembered the observation was that day! Fortunately it had been rescheduled to the 28th before I got to work, and my first few classes had students with really low listening abilities (hard to teach).

Last Saturday night myself and Vladimir (the third newest guy downstairs) went to a salsa dance club. Unfortunately we got there after the lessons had finished, but Vlad was brimming with confidence and danced with everyone. One area in life I definitely need more confidence in is dancing. I was wanting to go this Saturday night again, but I forgot that early on Saturday morning I’m taking the Nozomi Shinkansen (the fastest bullet train, 300+kmph) to Chiba city, Tokyo (1hr 45min) for the Tokyo Games Show (the electronic entertainment exbo of Japan), and I’ll be taking the second last or so train back to Nagoya to work on Sunday morning.

I just went out to get a haircut before work, but it’s closed for some reason written in Japanese… oh well. Still having lotsa fun
I’m heading to Aikido tonight

On Saturday I travelled to Suzuka for the D1 professional drifting event. They hadn’t forecast rain and there was nice and sunny weather on the way there, but as soon as I got there, it started pouring down :(. I got another umbrella (might’ve bought 4 now [cheap]) and the slippery road surface made for some interesting spectating, with at least five cars spinning out into the gravel. Of the nearly 600 or so photos I took, maybe 50 are good (kept the finger down for 2x shots per second many times). After the event finished, they started playing Enya along pit lane (!). There’s also quite a theme park at Suzuka circuit, and a gokarting place! (the closest one to Nagoya as far as I know) I raced twice, doing first 3 laps and then 10 laps. I managed to get under 3 seconds behind the track record :).

Offtopic thought: I think my spoken vocabulary is getting smaller after having to simplify my language for work…

More photos (will be a gallery sometime in the not-too-distant future)

Yesterday I was given a (slight) promotion to Voice Coordinator at the Hoshigaoka Nova branch. This means no pay rise but I basically choose which teachers to teach special voice lessons.

Last night I went to Aikido training with my workmate Evan (from Melbourne). It was great to do it after six months of no Aikido. It took a while to remember the basics (because they techniques are so complex), and I sweated about a litre in the warm humidity. There seems to be quite a lot of thundery weather in Nagoya - we’ve had at least four thunderstorms this summer :). After I got home the guys (Steve, Nilesh, Cody and the newest guy downstairs Jeff) were watching Hero on the TV through my comp :). Love that movie.

Linky

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Steve’s uploaded some photos with myself included at his flickr site.

I have soo many photos to upload… gotta do that sometime

RIP Irwin