We are currently in a very exciting and sad month. At the end of July lots of our friends are finishing their contracts and leaving Japan, while in early August we get a bunch of newbies.
Although we have theoretically been through this last year, most of the people we are friends with started at the same time as Jeff and therefore weren't leaving yet (two or three years seems to be the most popular length of stay). We didn't even go to the general leaving party last year. This year, however, there have been lots of leaving dinners and drinks and it's all very sad. I'm so busy sweating and sourcing ice-cream in this crazy summer heat that it keeps slipping my mind that those friends are actually LEAVING, but Jeff keeps reminding me how different the next year will be without the same network of friends we are used to here in Japan. Personally it's better to just not think about it!
The positive side (well, the two positive sides) is that because there are so many people leaving, there are so many parties! (That sounded Japanese... that wasn't good grammar, was it?) Last night we had dinner at a beer garden with Gabby, Danny and Maia (their wee one. Who has grown HEAPS over her time in Japan and is super shy around non-Japanese, even though Jeff and I look way more like her parents than anyone else in Hiroshima!). The deal is you pay a flat rate (about $50), then eat and drink as much as you like. Retrospectively maybe 'beer garden' and 'Wednesday night' shouldn't be combined... It was our first time drinking on a work night and what happened? Our gas alarm went off at 5:55am! Cue the two of us stumbling round in our underwear trying to find the source of the noise and shut it up. To cut a long story short, the building supervisor spent an hour playing round with the fuse box, gas taps outside, phoning the company etc, and finally got it to shut up. He told me he would get back to me to let me know if it is 'safety'. Anyway, that was totally off track, sorry - too tired to focus today after our horrific morning!
My point was that it was great seeing Gabby and Danny (especially when I didn't think about not seeing them again in AGES) and that we have not one, but two more all-you-can-drink experiences coming up this week! Yikes, lol. It will be a fun weekend though. Tomorrow after school I will jump on a train and race down to Hiroshima, where Jeff is spending the day planning the August Orientation meeting. I will dump my stuff at our hotel and head into town with Jeff. The next day we have a free day on Saturday (read sleeping in and city shopping!), before another party Saturday night.
On Sunday we will fight the alcohol-induced nausea and head back up to my apartment in Fukuyama. There we will dump our Hiroshima bags and pick up our Shikoku bags, jump in the car and drive to Shikoku island for three days of summer road trip! Ye-ah! I think we are finally learning about our travel style - I hate the heat and Jeff gets really cranky in summer crowds, so I think we have got it right with this trip. It's mid-week so no crowds, it's Shikoku so no crowds, and we're in the car where we can crank the air con and stop for ice-cream as needed. It sounds like a great three days!
Anyway, I have totally distracted myself from my second good point coming up, which is the new people coming in (apologies for the incredibly rambling nature of this blog. I'm not even going to reread for grammar mistakes because I'm horrified how all over the place this whole thing is!). We have three newbies coming in to our local area (that is, within a half hour of our place in the mountains). I feel a little responsible for them, which is silly, but I think it's because I know what a tough time I had when I first moved here. The woman who will be the other Jinseki ALT with Jeff I'm particularly keen to meet and help. This is SUCH a rural place to be and she won't even have a hubby to keep her sane! Don't get me wrong, I LOVE our village and I wouldn't trade it for the world, but it can be tough when you have to drive so far to get foreign company, or when you miss most of the parties because they are in Hiroshima which is expensive and distant.
Anyway, that's enough rambling for today. I tried to do an entry to tell you about the fun stuff we have coming up because I'm trying to make a real effort to stop doing such negative blogs, well at least, not all the time. But this has ended up a complete rambling mess. See what happens when I don't have something to complain about??
It's now 3:56pm and I finish work at 4:05pm (because that's not a strange time to finish...). Then I am out of here SO fast. I will stop at a konbini to treat my lethargy with chocolate (maybe the KitKat Salt & Puff bar... I'm a fan!), then home to my little apartment, where I can nap, sprawl on the floor or read my book without any pressure to work. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone would say anything if I did those things at work, but I'd feel weird about it!
Hope you're all doing well and have similarly fun weekends lined up.
Charly
xo
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