I’ve been kind of busy at work lately, so I
haven’t been writing as much as I used to. This past weekend was good though.
My junior high school had a school festival on Saturday. It was nice to hear
their music and see a little bit of a dramatic performance. The best part of
the day was cleaning up, when I could interact with the students in a friendly
and natural manner.
That evening we had a drinking party to
celebrate the end of the school festival. I had high hopes of being able to
make friends from this party, but I would say it was mostly disappointing. I
put a lot of effort into it in the first party, but in the second party I was
tired and didn’t do much. I should have just gone home, but I wanted to make
sure that I paid my fair share of the tab.
In the end I had a decent conversation with
four people, one of whom was a former faculty member now working at another
school. I talked with him the most—too bad he isn’t at my school this year. I
was looking forward to talking with three people who didn’t come at all, and
the person I most needed to talk to was falling asleep most of the time. He’s also
really difficult to approach, and I discovered that a casual setting doesn’t
really dispel that aura. So in the end, I didn’t talk to him, and that was my
biggest regret from the night.
The next day was Sunday, and I cooked and
then went to a game night at my co-worker’s apartment. We played a fun game
called Machikoro, which is kind of like a much faster paced Monopoly with cards
instead of a board and a lot more variation in the purchases you can make. This
night I also had a fantastic bottle of wine—a semi-dry Niagara from Alps Wine.
On Monday Davide and I cycled to Suwa and
back. We left about 12:15 and got back about 6:30. Less than half of that time
was actually spent cycling, so we went at a more leisurely pace than I would
have preferred, but overall it was nice. When we got back we went to the
Nepalese restaurant near my apartment, which I’ve been wanting to visit for a
long time. The portions were large, and the curry was quite nice at first, though by
the end it seemed excessively salty. The garlic cheese naan, however, was
fantastic. I had dreams about it for the next couple of nights. I’m definitely
going back sometime, even if it is by myself.
I haven’t wasted much time lately, but
neither have I studied a lot of Japanese. I’m not really sure where my free
time has gone, but I guess I really only have some of Sunday and Tuesday
evening to account for. The former was spent shopping, cooking, and climbing,
and the latter was spent cooking and catching up on a mediocre (but improving) Harry
Potter fanfiction. I still haven’t heard back from the graduate school about
whether they will accept me as a US citizen, but they did change my degree
program, which is good. I kind of suspect that I would have been better off
completely re-applying, but then I’m not sure that I could have kept my email
address, which is easy to remember and therefore preferable to being assigned a
new one.
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