May 17th

Dear all,

With a little push and nudge and a (small) dose of inspiration, here I am again! A lot has happened since I last made an appearance, good things and slightly less good things, but all in all I'm doing very well! Classes are going well, I'm enjoying (most of) them, and I'm still doing the english teaching job. In fact, I now teach three times a week. There's the usua 10 year old on wednesdays, and now I also teach a 12 and 15 year old, which alternates every week, and there are also 2 mature ladies who come in basically just for an hour's conversation/discussion. They are all very different, with a different background, different level of English etc., it's really fun! The 12 year old actually understands what I say when I speak english, the 15 year old has a little trouble with the more difficult words, the ladies speak fluent English (well - it's all relative; for Japanese standards I mean) and the 10 year old doesn't have a clue. He's a typical 10 year old, easily distracted, and finds everything extremely めんどくさい (" troublesome"). Especially the simple task of COPYING sentences haha. Anyway, it's a nice little extra, allowing me to by a new mp3 player because my old one was broken. It's a Sony NW-A806 for those interested, and it's pink! :D

As Sebastian already announced, I did something to my hair. Here it is:

Haha, just kidding. Last friday I went to the hairdresser with my friend Haru (she's a really nice girl/woman (she's 28) that I seem to be hanging out with more and more lately. She's Japanese, speaks a little english, but really we just alternate between Japanese and English, all the more fun). She took me to her regular salon, "Vanilla". I had been wanting to cut my hair for a while, it got really long, and really boring. I mean, I loved my long hair, but I just got tired of it in the end, I never knew what to do with it anymore, and it just refused to co-operate with anything I tried, so I decided it was time for a change!




The long hair picture looks a little funny, which is a long story, which I shall tell if anyone should request for me to do so!! (it's not really that funny but yeah...) Fine I'll just tell you anyway! My friend Haru just bought a new digital camera. She just doesn't have a computer, so she can't send me the pictures she took of me at the hairdresser. But she wanted to anyway, so she managed to connect her camera to the television, took pictures with her phone of the tv, and then sent those to me :D

On sunday I took my new hair-do to a concert. 2 friends of mine were playing, Masa and Kento. Here they are:











Masa = left, and Kento = right. I've been to one of Kento's performances before, and I saw Masa play somewhere in the fall when I went to a band-thing at the university, a long time ago ;) I didn't really know him then though. Nor do I really know him now, but it's still cool to say haha. Anyway, they were both very good, it was a lot of fun. All the bands played covers and some original songs in the punk/rock genre mainly. There was one band that really stood out, the "Insiders". They were a little ska-punk, really getting the crowd jumping and involved, and well, really fun! After Kento played (his band was last) Haru and I headed to a local cafe for a bite to eat, and ended up chatting all night, when I should have been doing homework haha.

So far really what I've been up to. This week has been more of the usual, going to class, work, fitness... plans for the weekend are going back to the island for a fun day at the beach, this time with a whole group of people, should be fun! No other major plans....

Oh, I probably should have mentioned this somewhere earlier I guess. I'm going to be praeses of Tanuki next year!! I'm so excited!! I've got an all-male board so far, exciting huh! I'm trying to get to know them all via email at the moment, and am looking forward to meeting them all when I get back. I'm really happy that I got the position (even though I think I was the only candidate -- but that aside) because now I really have something to look forward to when I get back. Because I don't really want to. I've gotten used to my life here, I like it, I'm making new friends especially now for some odd reason. I even had a bad dream last night where it was time to go home and I had to be dragged onto the airplane. Not good huh!?

So, next up: why should I come back? :P

loottts of love,

Jenn!