Busy buzzy Bumble bee (Part 1)

That's me!

For the first time in a long time it's been crazy mad here with things going on and things to do. Fuzzy Peach, new ALT orientation, weekends away, so much has been going on that I forgot to update my weblog for over a week. Oops. Still, I'm going to try and keep it short and keep the yawn factor down (I usually fail, so don't get your hopes up...)

Last week was fairly quiet, revolving sushi with Tara on wednesday and then making chirashi sushi at school were the basic highlights (thanks to the school secretary and the caretaker lady for their expertise!). Evenings were spent planning and preparing the new edition of the Fuzzy Peach as well as my presentations for the upcoming new ALT's orientation. Well, I decided with all this hard work I needed a break, so I headed to Okayama city on Saturday to meet with Besty and some of the new ALTs from her building, Ping, WhyVon and her boyfriend Alex. We headed to Korakuen for an evening of Jazz at their summer music festival (which consisted of a week of concerts in the evening). It was lovely too- the weather was great, the conversation was flowing, but the Jazz was strangely absent. There was a group of old men playing music, and they were very proficient at what they were doing, but it really, really, wasn't Jazz. It felt like we were at a 1920s garden party at one point, but without the refined manners and polite conversation. We ended the night with a meal at Lux:G, a restaurant and bar in the city, and prepared for the next day's trip to Onomichi. When I say prepared, we just decided what train to catch...

Onomichi was good. It was about 34 degrees, as it was Obon weekend (Japanese festival where people go home to see their families) everyone was out, so the ramen restaurant that was recommended to us had queues that were longer than a child's face on an empty Christmas morning. We ended up heading to different restaurant (which closely resembled someone's front room stuffed with chairs and tables) and we each ate a soma-inducing pound of rice. Not the way to start a long walk. So we took the cable car up the mountain (big hill really, but that's not so impressive-sounding) and walked round Senso-Ji and various other temples and shrine complexes and then decided it was too hot and that we should go home. Oops... But we did go out to eat again at the best Italian restaurant in the city (I feel like I've been to most of them by now...) And it was super-smashing-marvellous. They had a salad bar (!?! The first I've seen in Japan) and it was packed to the brim with lovely iems such as garlic fried string-beans (French beans, whatever the long thin green ones are called) and pasta salad, and garlic mushrooms and mmm. So we gorged ourselves for less than ten English pounds each for the meal which included two (yes,2! Not one, but 2!!) deserts before leaving.

I returned to Katsuyama on Monday to continue preparations, although I ended up demonstrating an aversion to the task in hand and spent much time cleaning and sorting. My excuse is that I needed this time to mull it all over. Fortunately for me and the new ALTs, on Tuesday and Wednesday I managed to get down to it (as opposed to "get down on it" which would have meant I was dancing around the apartment to Kool and the Gang, something which I'm sure none of the other ALTs would comprehend, let alone the locals) and finish the Fuzzy Peach. And on Wednesday afternoon I headed back to the city to stay at Betsy's and prepare for the orientation. But that's a story for the next post. Which I'll probably do later as it's quite quiet at school today, and I'm quite bored...

So things are back to normal then.