Okay, back on topic.

So here we are in Japan.

Alex and I left the U.S. on August 1st. I spent a three day orientation in Tokyo before heading to my assigned area - Iwataki. Iwataki is actually one-third of a larger town called 'Yosano'. But Iwataki, Nodagawa, and Kaya (the two towns to the south) were all three so incredibly tiny that they merged into Yosano a few years ago.

Lots of interesting things have happened that I wanted to write about but just didn't have the time. Hopefully now I'll be able to keep track of everything more easily, and therefore be able to have this blog to remember upstairs.

This morning I asked the music teacher, Ms. Fujimura, where I could buy a violin. I have a violin at home, but it'd be cheaper to just buy a cheap school-grade violin than have my regular one shipped carefully over to me by air-mail. She got all excited. She asked if I could sing, too. The English teacher informed me that she wants to play a duet, piano/violin, at the Culture Festival coming up next month. When she asked me if I can sing, I said I could, but my range was kind of weird....I'm sure it came out in Japanese as "My singing stovetop is unusual." (The Japanese word for stovetop is ガスレンジ (gasurenji - "Gas Range") and the word for microwave is 電気レンジ (denkirenji - "Electric Range") - of course the word for an electric stovetop is 電気ガスレンジ　(denkigasurenji - "Electric Gas Range" - classic) so when I talked about my singing range and used the word 'renji' I'm sure it wasn't the right choice!

The last couple days have been ...buggy. Even before the bee-eating incident. The previous day, I had to save the brass band from a marauding bee (Not just any bee, but a legendary Japanese suzumebachi - check it out on Wikipedia for the full horror. This is also the kind of bee that I ate) and had the unique opportunity to gently hold a Japanese emerald swallowtail butterfly after it kept smacking against the classroom window and let the gorgeous little moron outside. Those emerald swallowtails are absolutely everywhere. I love it. And they're about the size of my hand.

We also have some pretty massive spiders around. The garden spiders are actually kind of pretty, but the ones that hang out outside our apartment are pretty nasty. I'd freak out if one of them just popped up anywhere, since, they're still spiders and they're still huge. But I'll see if I can't get some pictures.

Alex and I got a gorgeous camera for our wedding - an Olympus SP-510UZ. The problem is, most of our camera memory cards were SD cards and this took an XD card - until recently I had my own little digital camera, and we used the old one usually because it could use SD cards. But after we sold it at the garage sale, we discovered that our awesome new camera only had capacity for 16 pictures without any sort of card.

So last night Toshiko, one of the ladies from the eikaiwa (English Conversation) group - an adult group of friends who gets together at a local izakaya (a sort of restaurant that just brings a bunch of group dishes and alchohol. It's a restaurant perfectly suited for getting together and hanging out) and talks and gossips and laughs in English - took us to an electronics store. Toshiko is absolutely hilarious. The store is called KS-Denki (Denki = 電気 - Electric Power) but when people say it it sounds like they're saying K-Stanky. We bought a 2 gig memory card for the camera and now have capacity for about 1100 pictures. Woowoo!

What else, what else. Alex made a really good dish last night with tofu, egg, and goya (Japanese 'bitter melon' - Wikipedia it, it looks freakish!). It was a great experiment. It was a little...bitter...but goya is always bitter, and next time we'll just cook it for longer. It's really good for you though, so that's fun.

Today I'm ordering a bento lunch. This school doesn't actually have a school lunch, so most of the teachers order one from a nearby restaurant. The restaurant employs mentally handicapped people, so that's pretty cool. I'll try to take a picture of the bento to show everybody. Yesterday's was pretty cool.

I think that's pretty much all for now. One of the students keeps screaming "KAWAIIIIIIII" when she sees me, following up with "SO CUTE" or "SO PRET-TY" in adorable middle-school English. She'll be fun in class when it starts.

I think I'm going to keep track of the stuff I talk about in the tags. Like posts with Japanese words and stuff in them I'll tag 'Japanese vocab' and cooking posts I'll tag as 'Japanese Food' or something. <3