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I am currently eating the greatest peanut butter and jelly sandwich ever. Seriously. Just thinking about how amazing it is made me lean back in my chair and laugh like an evil maniac. Not that this PBJ is really that different from any other PBJ, it’s just that I haven’t had a real PBJ like this in months. Japanese “peanut butter,” you see, is usually sweet, whipped, and gross. A lot of times they appropriately call it peanut whip or something, but I have been fooled too many times by products wrongfully labeled as “peanut butter” here. You expect the real deal, and end up with this sweet stuff that tastes more like frosting than that classic “stick to the roof of your mouth” goodness*. I have tried a few different brands of Japanese peanut butter/cream/whip, and all of them are awful. Too sweet, too airy, and/or too frosting-like. The only hope I saw before this was back at Costco a few months ago where they indeed had a tub of real American-imported peanut butter. Back then, I didn’t want to spend 2000 yen on a tub of PB the size of my head. If I would have gone this month, I probably would have bought it. Peanut butter withdrawal isn’t something that really nags at you; it’s fairly submissive. You might not even know if you have it. I never thought a PBJ would taste this good. However, if you are a peanut butter-loving American who has been in a foreign country for a few months, I challenge you to sit and think about a good peanut butter sandwich. You’ll probably find yourself in a pile of drool.

Salvation was found Monday afternoon when I was casually shopping at the grocery store in the nearby Ito Yokado. I was looking at the cereal section, which I didn’t even know existed, and bought some Calbee brand frosted flakes and cocoa flakes. I haven’t yet tried these, but I’ll be sure to do so something soon. I looked at an eye-level shelf, and among the standard peanut whip and peanut cream products, I found the diamond in the rough. SKIPPY peanut butter. That’s right. Real American Skippy freaking peanut butter. I read the label to make sure it wasn’t some kind of peanut cream with the Skippy name on it. Nothing of the sort. I brought it home, opened it and smelled it. It looked and smelled like peanut butter. Well, tonight I finally made a sandwich with it and I am in heaven. Thank you Skippy, for importing your product to Japan.

*I realize that line calls for all sorts of sexual references and jokes, but I don’t care. I love peanut butter too much.

Although my job isn’t bad, I would like to take some time to ramble on about how absolutely horrible Saturdays are for me. I suppose not necessarily because of the teaching or working part, but because I have to wake up so freaking early. As a rule of thumb, I generally try to set my alarm clock for 2 hours before I need to be at work. Almost every day, I have to be at work at 1PM, so I set my alarm clock for a healthy 11AM. This usually means I hit the snooze button a few times, and generally wake up “for real” by noon. I then check any AIM messages, e-mail, Facebook, mixi, all in that order. My routine is then to get in the shower by 12:15, out of the shower by 12:25, do post shower things (contacts, deodorant, hair gel) by 12:30, be dressed by 12:40, and out the door shortly after that. It takes approximately 3 minutes for me to get from my apartment to my school, and I am supposed to be at work at least 10 minutes early when students might be waiting, which is almost all the time. As you can see, I have my mornings finely tuned to near-OCD-levels of routine. My body likes this. I like this. I do not like surprises. I go to bed on average at 3AM, meaning I get around 8 hours of sleep every night. So nothing really goes and screws things up quite like…

THE DREADED SATURDAY MORNING WAKE UP ALARM

Since AEON has more students who want to come in on Saturdays, and I guess students are too preoccupied with the Japanese habit of maintaining social relationships (meaning they go out and get plastered) on weekend nights, AEON decided long ago that instead of the comfortable 12-9PM hours they keep every other day of the week, Saturdays are open from 10AM-7. My perfect system of waking up at 11 and snoozing in until almost noon is ruined by this once a week 8AM alarm clock. It seriously feels like death every Saturday morning, especially since after 5 days or more of sleeping at 3AM-ish, it is pretty hard to fall asleep early on Friday nights. And now that the new season of Tadano Hitoshi has started, I’m guaranteed to be up at least until 1ish. It is pretty inevitable that I will get around 5 hours of sleep on Friday nights, then feel like a zombie all Saturday.

I woke up this morning, feeling in pain as usual, but forced myself through my morning routine that is shifted 3 hours earlier than the rest of the week. Instead of the normal news, cooking, or Tamori shows on TV while I’m getting ready, I was greeted by Saturday morning cartoons. There was a crazy Megaman show where his arm talks to him, and then the gayest show I have ever seen, even for Japan. It was called Fairy Musketeers, and had a bunch of little anime kids running around and fighitng with +7 swords and maces and stuff like that. After getting out the door a little bit early, I decided to grab some Matsuya, the gyudon place, for breakfast. They have a 390 yen breakfast set, which has rice, miso soup, seaweed, an egg, a sausage, some cabbage salad, and your choice of a side. Although the natto was tempting because it is so delicious and doesn’t smell like a dead body, I decided to go with a small bowl of pork and onions as my side. Overall, it was a ton of food for way cheap, but I had to scarf it all down in about 5 minutes or so. Then I went to school and taught on a full stomach. I don’t really feel like going much into the actual details of school, but I probably will talk about AEON school in general at some point eventually.

Met up with Mike today, a fellow IES-alum but from the Fall semester after me, since he has recently moved into Goi and will be working at a Nova school up near Chiba somewhere. After work ended at 7, I went with him and Blanchard to JJ Club 100, this arcade/amusement place 2 stations away from Goi that one of my high school students had told me about. It is a pretty big place, with lots of random stuff to do. Kind of like a ghetto arcade/carnival/amusement park all rolled into 1 big building with a character mascot who looks like a cartoon sperm, or the mascot from the old Quisp cereal. You get a membership card, then are charged by the time you are in the facilities. It’s 105 yen per 15 minutes, so about a buck. After that you can pretty much do everything for free. The only things that seemed to cost money were some crane games and vending machines. They had a decent amount of arcade games, although nothing brand new (and some that were right ancient), miniature golf, ping pong, batting cages, billiards, karaoke, darts, slot machines that you don’t win anything on, and other random stuff. It was fun just because you could do a bunch of random activities that you probably wouldn’t do otherwise. For the record, I am the world’s worst batter, possibly equally terrible at DDR, but surprisingly not too bad at the shameful Para-Para Dancing motion sensing game. The horse racing game was also pretty fun, although tiring. I rode that horse hard.

They also had these ropes hooked up to zip lines, and you fly across a little alley into some padding. Although it looks stupid, it was way fun and I laughed like a little kid. JJ’s did provide some pretty good entertainment for the night, and it was good to do anything of entertainment value after waking up early to teach pretty much straight classes from 10-7. Tomorrow I think I am going to hit up the World Hobby Fair, a free games and stuff convention at Makuhari, and will likely blog about that at some point. I will also then fit in the Tokyo Auto Salon, which was a convention I went to at the Messe last week. It’s convenient that all these shows happen only 30 minutes away from me. I suspect there will be much ranting about nerds, because even at a car show there was a seriously high percentage of nerds taking pictures of booth girls.

I can’t really think of any American toys that I have been really impressed with since perhaps the glory days of the double-barreled Nerf Ballzooka or the Lite-Brite. I quickly grew up from those toys and into the realm of Japanese robot toys and video games, a stage from which I have not yet managed to fully grow out of. Regardless, I was in Toys R Us at LaLaPort this past weekend, which brings us to today’s blog topic. I saw an American toy import, which, without even looking at the price, was immediately noticeable as ridiculous. No, wait, that’s being a bit too nice. This “toy” is pure crap, and to buy it would mean that either you or your kid is either a moron or just an asshole. Maybe both of you.

Here you go folks; behold:

I couldn’t believe it either. This play set is pretty much what it looks like. A bunch of (12) plastic cups that you stack into a pyramid really fast. Oh man! You can tell this kid is doing it really fast because you can see the motion lines! But the fun’s not over yet! Then you get to unstack them!

Isn’t this the kind of game that poor kids play when they’re home alone? Or what hobos do with empty cans of Ice House? Well poor kids and hobos won’t be playing this new NEON and X-TREME (asshole) version of stack-the-cups, because it costs 5000 yen*! That’s right, almost 50 dollars for a bunch of plastic cups that you could get at the grocery store for a fraction of the cost. Oh but wait, you also get the STACK MAT, which is a flat surface on which to do your extreme stacking. It has an extreme timer built into it, so you know how long it takes for you to stack these extreme cups. It’s a really good thing they include this extreme mat, because it would be impossible to stack or time your extreme skillzz without it (cough*table and a watch*cough). You also get a DVD, which shows you how to stack the cups. I’m willing to bet most kids with an IQ of over 10 would be able to figure that out on their own. Then again, kids who are playing with this Speed Stacks set might not necessarily meet that prereq.

I was so intrigued by the idiocy that created and marketed this product that I sought them out on the web. They indeed have a website, and unsurprisingly you are greeted by some extreme music and a video with a bunch of kids stacking up plastic cups really fast. This is also apparently “The all-new sport of speed and skill.” I’m looking forward to seeing this on ESPN, aren’t you?

*To be fair, I checked and in the US this game is apparently only $30. That doesn’t make this any less assholish.

Yes, those grammar errors are on purpose; I hear that exact sentence at least 3 or 4 times a week from students when I go through the formality of asking how their weekends were. Anyways, after a fairly normal week at work, it is yet again the weekend; the oasis in the desert wasteland of having a regular job. Actually, before I get too far into the weekend reports, I should mention that the one irregularity of this past week was that one of my coworkers caught the Norovirus, which is apparently becoming more and more of a problem here in Japan, and was out of work from Monday through Friday, which included a three day stay in the hospital on an IV. I did a quick search online for the norovirus earlier in the week because I wanted to know exactly what it was; it’s some kind of stomach flu I think, and is likely to outbreak in places where there are high concentrations of people. Cruise ships, for example, seem to be having tons of norovirus outbreaks. Of course, working at an AEON school where you have students coming in sick ALL THE TIME (seriously, I don’t want you coming to class if you’re sick, even if you wear a stupid face mask), I’m not really surprised that someone caught this sickness. I think Matt, the other foreign teacher at my school, might have had a norovirus a few weeks ago also when he was really sick as well. The amazing thing is that no one else at my school caught the norovirus, since when we had the Christmas/year-end party last week we shared a lot of dishes at the Korean restaurant and I’m sure germs were passed around through that. I seem to be perfectly fine, which may very well be helped in part by the fact that I’m conscious of sleeping a lot every night (mainly out of laziness), and also because I keep a bottle of Purel sanitizing alcohol gel in my desk drawer. It doesn’t seem so OCD now, does it!?

Oh, right; weekend. After reading through my Japan guidebook randomly this week to get ideas for the upcoming Kansai trip, I started feeling more adventurous and decided that it would be worth hitting up Tokyo this weekend, something I haven’t really had any desire to do recently. Anyway, for 1910 yen, I can buy a JR Tokunai Pass (都区内パス) from my home station that will take me to and from Tokyo, and also allows for unlimited train travel within the city. Which actually is a pretty good deal as long as you’re going to 2 or 3 places in the city. Woke up insanely early for a Sunday, 10AM, then met up with Blanchard in Chiba, and off to Tokyo we were. Embarrassingly, our first stop was Akihabara, mainly because it is the closest part of Tokyo but also because it was lunch time and I wanted to go to the Oedo kaiten sushi place I used to go to whenever I visited nerd town. The cheap sushi place is in the Akihabara Department Store connected to the station, which is being demolished at the end of the year so they can build a super futuristic new department store. It was probably my last chance to eat at that sushi place, but it was busy so we decided it wasn’t worth the wait and instead got cheap ramen. It was not a bad alternative at all. By the way, if you didn’t know this, I love ramen. And miso ramen is absolutely amazing. And if it’s cheap, even better.

Other reason for Akihabara was that I needed some blank DVD+Rs, which for some reason seem much rarer in stores here. I need the +s because those are the only kind my laptop’s burner will accept, which is a pain. I figured of all places, Akihabara, the famed electronics area of Tokyo, would have mountains of DVD+Rs for my burning pleasure. I was finally able to find some at the super giant mega Yodobashi, although couldn’t really even find a 50 spindle. I asked the worker guy and finally learned why +Rs are so hard to find here. It’s an American standard! That makes sense, and I am slightly less bitter about having to hunt for these rare +Rs to amass my burned DVD collection. It might be worth either having spindles of +Rs send from the US, or maybe even buying a new DVD burner for my laptop. Either way. Oh yeah, and Akihabara has really lost whatever appeal it had a while back. The maids, weirdos, and anime otaku have really warped that place from it’s semi-warped state a few years ago. There are very few stores in the area that I even want to go to, and even less stuff I want to buy. I doubt I’ll be going back there very much; it’s just too nerdy and desolate. The super giant mega Yodobashi, however, is a good electronics store if you ever need one.

After Akihabara we headed to Shinjuku to check out some stores, mainly Takashimaya and Tokyu Hands. Not much to report, although it might be a good time to mention just how many foreigners there are in Tokyo. I think I’ve gotten used to Chiba, and definitely Goi, where you’re more likely to spot a man dressed as a giant stuffed animal than see another foreigner. So speaking of foreigners, we saw the worst group of foreigners ever while waiting in line to get into Tabasa in Harajuku for dinner, the “all-you-can eat pizza, pasta, hip-hop, goodtime, pancakes, and jelly” restaurant that is cheap and delicious. The quickest way to explain them is to use a certain American slang term for white Eminem-type clones. I don’t think I want to offend anyone, so I’m going to call them “wee gars” in this blog post. However that isn’t exactly correct since only 4 of them were white and the other was some kind of Latino. I think you get the picture though. So yeah, like 5 of them, all dressed in the same way – sweat pants, t-shirt or jersey, stupid hat cocked to the side or something angled. They didn’t speak normal English let alone Japanese, spoke really loud, and acted like they were the baddest mofos in Tokyo. We tried to figure out what their deal was and why they are in Japan, but I think the conclusion was that they’re probably military brats, since they didn’t seem to be of working/teacher let alone university student classification. They had cell phones, so they must live here, so I’m going to assume military kids who have nothing better to do but pretend they’re from “da meen streetz.” The worst was this little blond kid who needed a good throttling, but the funniest was this dopey looking kid who was wearing the surefire sign that you are a social outcast and don’t belong in Japan – the shirt that says, in Japanese “I’m looking for a Japanese girlfriend.” Come on. If you wear this shirt, girls aren’t going to be like “oh wow, he’s looking for a Japanese girlfriend. I am a girl, and Japanese. I should have sexual relations with this person right away.” Listen up mister wee gar; when the people in the restaurant, mainly the young couple, were looking at your shirt and laughing, it wasn’t because they thought you were clever.

Finished up the night in Shibuya, where we didn’t really do anything but walk around and look at the fancy lights and jumbotron video screens. It was getting pretty boring just walking around the streets, until there was a bit of an incident outside of Seibu. A Lincoln Navigator was parked outside of the store illegally, and was about a foot and a half into the street. A bus driver decided that he didn’t want to risk scraping this HUGE AWESOME AMERICAN SUV MACHINE so traffic on this road was pretty much at a standstill except for the occasional motorcycle. Lots of car horns were being honked, and finally the police were called. Tonight was a great lesson, or shall I say, reconfirmation, that Japanese police are absolutely useless. At first, after we started watching, two cops on foot showed up after, assumingly, someone in Seibu called them. They called fo
r backup, which brought another cop on foot and two in a squad car. The only sweet thing was that Japanese squad cars have the ability to raise their car-top sirens an extra two feet or so into the air. Other than that, they did nothing impressive. They wrote a ticket, took pictures with their digital camera, and documented the situation in a notebook. One of the cops used the megaphone and speakers built into the squad car to pretty much repeatedly say “Will the owner of a Lincoln Navigator with plate number blah blah blah please come and move your car?” After almost 45 minutes of us sitting around with a growing group of bystanders, I got bored and we went to find a vending machine. We were gone for less than 5 minutes I’d say, and by the time we came back the Navigator was gone and traffic was running normally. I really wanted to see how this situation would be resolved, but since it took so little time I’m guessing the guy showed up, apologized and bowed a lot, and they let him go. I was hoping for a yakuza shoot out! The morale of this story is that the police wasted about 45 minutes and traffic in a very busy part of Tokyo was interrupted by a mis-parked car. Why didn’t they get a tow truck!? If this were the states, a tow truck would have been there to haul the car away. There would have been no need for many cops, there would not have been a spectacle, and it wouldn’t have taken 45 minutes. Ah well, it was at least entertaining for a while. I do wish I would have seen the resolution, no matter how boring it probably was.

1 more day of the weekend; thank goodness. Then it’s a short (4 day) week because the entire country has next Saturday off for the Emperor’s Birthday. The only useful thing the emperor does!

I just returned not too long ago from 7-Eleven, my third trip there today. But it’s probably nothing like what you’re thinking. 7-Eleven here, as are all convenience stores (or conbini/convini for short), is a lot different from the shady, dimly-lit, hippie or foreigner-staffed shacks that we all know and love in the US. Conbinis here really earn the “convenient” part of their name, since they provide a lot of the services that Target, ATMs, grocery stores, and fast food restaurants handle when living in the states. They are also literally everywhere. The 7-Eleven, which is closest to my apartment, take approximately 120 steps to get to from my apartment building. And yes, I actually half-counted those steps because I knew I was going to write it here. For how small these places are, you can get and do a lot there. The first two times I went to 7-Eleven today, for example, was for meals. Lunch and dinner were both at 7-Eleven today, believe it or not. And while this might sound horribly pathetic, and my Mom might be reading this cringing at the thought that I am surviving on slurpees and rotisserie-bred hot dogs, it is not the case at all. Yes, it might be a bit pathetic still, but what I am getting at is that the food available at convenience stores is more comparable to what you can get at a grocery store’s pre-packaged deli section, or perhaps a fast food joint. In addition to a few small aisles of snacks and drinks, the outer walls of most conbinis are full of pre-packaged meals and side dishes, ranging from hamburgers to salads to rice balls to sushi to even stuff like bacon macaroni gratin (which is delicious). Sure it’s still microwave food (they do that for you too if you want), but it’s a heck of a lot better than heading to an American gas station convenience store and picking up some Slim Jims and a pack of corn nuts.

The third trip to 7-Eleven today was to pay my electric bills from October. You can pay most of your bills here by taking them to a conbini and paying cash. They get stamped and you get a receipt. No having to write checks, no having to mail anything in. Of course you have to pay with cash, but since Japan is pretty much a cash society, that’s not a big deal. And that also leads in very well to some of the other services that conbinis here provide. Almost all of them have ATMs that support almost every (Japanese) bank, so you can get money pretty much anytime. You can also buy stuff like magazines, DVDs, concert tickets, stationary/paper, light bulbs, get digital photos printed, and even reserve video games and movies. It’s a lot more than what you could expect from the VP back in Bloomington.

Anyways, I’ve noticed that I am enjoying and looking forward to my free time much more nowadays, since it isn’t quite as abundant as it was last year when I was in college and spending maybe 10 hours a day sitting in my apartment with nothing I really had to do. I miss being able to sit around, surf the net, watch TV whenever I want, play video games, and in general being a complete bump on a log except for IUSTV work or the whole concept of “finding a job.” This summer was even worse at fueling my laziness, because I really had no job for most of it, and thus there was nothing wrong with waking up in the late afternoon, then sitting on the web or lounging on my sofa for hours on end until I deemed it was time to shower and leave my apartment, usually for the first time around 7PM. Nowadays, I wake up everyday, shower, get dressed, and go to work. I sit at my job and do stuff like teach classes, then come home at 9:30ish exhausted and just wanting to watch TV or play some DS before falling asleep to do it all over again. The job is not bad, my coworkers are all cool, and I don’t usually have to be at work until around 1PM, but still, these constraints on my relaxation time are not cool. I enjoy my days off more than any college student will ever know.

I am far too lazy to write much more tonight, although I seriously should try and update everyone more on stuff I’ve been doing. I’ll do it sometime, maybe this weekend when I spend most of the day sitting in my apartment doing nothing but relaxing. I also should upload some pictures of Japan and Goi specifically. I can’t explain how much nicer things are having internet at home. I don’t have to worry about finding (and paying for) and internet cafe, and I don’t need to feel like the world is going on without me. I installed Skype, and figured out a way to make free calls to any number in the US, so if you want me to give you a ring sometime, let me know. I am about to go to sleep, so that I can wake up tomorrow around 11 and get ready for another fun day of being a foreign English teacher who wishes all day that it was the weekend.

Hello America (and maybe some other countries). It is a rainy Monday night in Chiba city, and I am enjoying the last few hours of my weekend. Not having internet hasn’t been as painfully rough as I would have thought, although I do miss having Outlook tell me exactly when I have a new e-mail, reading pointless news sites about gizmos, video games, and gadgets, and of course AIM and Facebook. But I have been coping. However, now that I am almost used to life without a regular internet connection, I have the NTT guys coming to my apartment this Thursday morning to prepare my apartment for a fiber-optic internet connection. Hopefully this will go off quickly and without a hitch. If things go according to plan, I will have not only an internet connection in my apartment, but a super amazing fast one. 100MBps. Yes, that would mean heaven (and major BitTorrent time) for the currently internet-deprived me.

Oh but stories, you want to hear stores about the mystical land of Japan, right? OK here are a few. Nothing spectacular, because in actuality my life here is pretty boring (as opposed to the super exciting life I led in America). Since I haven’t blogged in a while, these also aren’t in any real order let alone chronologically. But if you are sitting at your computer bored enough to navigate to TheLeong.com in the first place, then you may find these mildly amusing.

Ikea
I visited the Swedish furniture and home supply store Ikea, which has a location in Minami Funabashi, about 30 minutes by train away from me. For some reason, I was under the impression that Ikea was supposed to be a cheap place to get somewhat trendy furniture. Brian Blanchard, whom you might know from such films as The IES Train Orientation Video, also came along and was under the same impression. Boy, were we mistaken. The store was huge, colorful, and crowded with hot Japanese chicks. The prices, however, on this European furniture was absolutely ridiculous. I don’t even really know what I was going there to buy in the first place. Maybe a small couch for my apartment, maybe a cheap plastic dresser to store my clothing in. I ended up buying none of these things, because the average price for a sofa I saw there was around 600 bucks US. And no, not a nice comfy couch like you would see on the popular Indiana University Student Television show Hoosier Date?, but a really small weird Japanese-Swedish couch hybrid which would only seat two average stature midgets. You know how Japanese people sit on the floor traditionally? I have come to the conclusion that this is not because of a cultural difference, but rather because it is far too expensive to buy a damn couch at Ikea. The only thing I bought at Ikea ended up being a hot dog for 1 or 200 yen, which was delicious but still not delicious enough to make me not bitter about Ikea.

Gorging
It is actually quite cheap and easy to find good-tasting food in Japan, of both Japanese style and more foreign fare. However, portions here tend to be small, so it is the responsibility for every foreigner here to, on occasion, find a 食べ放題 (all-you-can-eat) and absolutely destroy the place’s profits for that day. One such place I visited was Shakey’s Pizza, which I think was at one point an American chain that went under. All you can eat pizza, pasta, and salad for like 900 yen (about 8 bucks). There is a line to get in, but once you get in you can enjoy a wide variety of pizzas like mushroom, pepperoni, and sausage. Of course, this is still Japan, so there is also a Tuna and Corn pizza, mayonnaise pizza, and a pineapple custard dessert pizza that was actually pretty good.

Tabehoudai find number two is an old favorite. Top Run Super Yakiniku Viking in Makuhari, a dietary staple of the A-Team, has since been renamed Hanamasa Yakiniku Viking. Don’t panic! The place is still mostly the same, although it has been stripped of its sweet name and the Super title. Actually, I think the place is even better now. There are the same favorites as before, like the all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ, consisting mainly of a variety of raw meats that you cook at your table. The make-your-own waffles, ice cream, gyoza, and rice and curry are still all there. But to increase the value of this place, they now also have kara-age fried chicken, fries, takoyaki, about 4 different jelly desserts, and now lamb meat. This place is awesome. Long live the Super Yakiniku Viking. It will always be Top Run to me. 1500 yen for dinner. Is this cheaper than before?

AEON Bootcamp, Parts 2 and 3
Week and a half ago, I had two days of AEON related workshops and training to do, which made my week pretty much short, but also very long. That doesn’t make sense, I know, but it was a weird week. For the first day, I had to take a 2 hour train ride back up to Omiya to have AEON Kids Step-Up Training, which was training just for kids classes. Although I only teach two kids classes, one for 5th graders and one for Junior High kids, the training was still necessary and it covered ALL kids classes, from preschool up. It was fun in a way because I got to see about 10 people that I had Initial Training with, but other than that it was a bit painful because of the repetitive kids training we had all day, including an hour of singing and practicing these kids songs that I don’t even use in my classes. I am pretty sure the AEON Hello Song and dance are secretly a way to summon the devil. Oh well. The day after that, I had an hour and a half journey to the AEON East Japan head office in Shinjuku, where I had a four hour workshop on Self-Study materials that we are preparing to sell to our students. Oh, and I shouldn’t say sell, I mean “providing our students with materials to meet their English dreams.” Yeah, whatever. Anyway, I got to see a few more people from training, but overall I don’t feel like the workshop was that helpful. Then I had to high-tail it back to Goi in time to teach my two evening classes. Nothing like enjoying this busy schedule.

Staff BBQ
Last weekend I went with a bunch of my co-workers to the Yorou Valley, which is about a 45 minute drive from Goi. The weather was a little Fall-chilly-ish, but the BBQ was awesome. We got to the camping ground, set up a BBQ, and ate about 80 bucks worth of grilled meat, vegetables, and yakisoba. One of our students also came along, and she also brought with her a ton of food. We ate a lot and hanged out at the camping ground, then headed back to town. Japanese cookouts or BBQs are a lot different from back in the US, especially among college students (which would mainly just be burgers and hotdogs). It was a really fun time, and again I had to gorge myself on tons of food.

Death Breath
Ah, the headlining story of this blog entry. So I was on the train a week or so ago, minding my business and listening to my iPod. I was standing near the doors, because as usual on the late night trains, all the seats were taken, save for having to uncomfortably cram next to someone, which you just don’t do here. So about 2 or 3 stops before Goi, this girl is waiting at the station with her boyfriend, and they’re being all lovey dovey and stuff saying goodbye, before she gets on the train. She gets on, stands on the other side of the door to the left of me, and she sadly waves her boyfriend goodnight. Boohoo, right. I didn’t pay much attention to it. But once we are away from her station, she slowly turns her head to the right, so that she is no longer facing the car doors, but pointing in my general direction.

I am still minding my own biznass, looking at the passing evening scenery, and I suddenly feel my stomach chur
n and my gag reflex half-kick in. I am smelling something absolutely foul, like what you would imagine Abraham Lincoln’s corpse to smell after a rainy day at the cemetery. What in the world is that smell?? I scream to myself. I spin around, looking for a homeless guy or a huge moldy pile of dog poop, and all of a sudden I realize that the girl who said goodbye to her boyfriend just moments ago was leaning with her head on the train door, facing me, and from her mouth was coming the most revolting breath I have ever smelled in my entire life. I kid you not. Pure toxic wind. If it were not for my self control, I would have vomited all over the train. Her breath was THAT bad. Bad beyond what I would have thought was humanly possible. You could brush your teeth with human feces for a month, then chew on a rotten guinea pig, and your breath would still not compare.

After freaking out internally and realizing that I should probably run to the other end of the train car, my deep rage instead turned quickly into internal laughter, and I almost busted up on the train thinking to myself how bad this girls breath was, and at the thought that her boyfriend was probably back at the other station puking his guts out after making out with his ugly girlfriend with the breath that could cremate old people. Luckily, my stop was soon after, and with it, the opening of the doors and the glory that is fresh air.